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INFOGRAPHIC The Nature of Medium

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pstarzynska_at_gazeta.pl. April 2nd, 2003. Ways of reading - first tetrad. ENH. Interdependencies ... Our visual experience is now a mosaic of items assembled ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: INFOGRAPHIC The Nature of Medium


1
INFOGRAPHICThe Nature of Medium
  • Mind, Media and Society II
  • (Applied McLuhanistics)
  • Paulina Starzynska
  • pstarzynska_at_gazeta.pl
  • April 2nd, 2003

2
Ways of reading - first tetrad
  • ENH
  • Interdependencies
  • Diverse reading path
  • Multiplicity of access points
  • Direct access to information needed
  • Salience, Interest
  • RET
  • Leonardo da Vinci
  • Galileo
  • REV
  • Chaos
  • Internet
  • Noise, diffusion of interest (information
    overload)
  • OBS
  • Linear narration

3
McLuhans context
  • Our visual experience is now a mosaic of items
    assembled from every part of the globe, moment by
    moment. Lineal perspective and pictorial
    organization cannot cope with this situation
  • Report on Project in Understanding Media, 1960
  • Speeding up the components of any visually
    ordered structure or continuous space pattern
    will lead to breaking its connections and
    destroying its boundaries. They explode into the
    resonant gaps or interfaces that characterize the
    discontinuous structure of acoustic space.
  • The Argument Causality in Electric World, 1973

4
Conclusion I
  • Infographic belongs to
  • acoustic (or electric) culture

5
But is it really something else?
  • These news magazines are preeminently mosaic in
    form, offering not windows on the world like the
    old picture magazines, but presenting corporate
    images of society in action. Whereas the
    spectator of a picture magazine is passive, the
    reader of a new magazine becomes much involved in
    the making of meaning for the corporate image.
  • Understanding Media, 1964
  • ...the newspaper in setting up a dozen book pages
    on one page was already a big step towards this
    sort of cultural simultaneity and non-lineality.
  • Counterblast, 1969

6
But is it really something else?
  • Time was perhaps the first magazine to apply the
    format of the telegraph press (i.e. the mosaic of
    items without connections) to the periodical,
    Just a dateline. The Time formula of mosaic in
    place of connected editorial features permits the
    juxtaposition of esoteric and trivial - the
    formula for creating environments, not just a
    point of view.
  • Culture is Our Business, 1970
  • Infographic can be seen as the next step in
    press mosaic structure

7
On the other hand...
  • Print enforces a certain kind of logic
    one-thing-at-the time, one-thing-leads-directly-to
    another logic, if/then, cause/effect the logic
    of us internalized
  • Stephen Mitchell,
  • The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, 1998
  • The oral is the world of the non-linear, of
    all-at-onceness and ESP. There are no lines or
    directions in acoustic space, but rather a
    simultaneous field. It is non-Euclidean.
  • Marshall McLuhan, Counterblast, 1969

8
Lets probe
  • Infographic Informational Graphic
  • Info-rational Graphic

9
Conclusion II
  • Infographic belongs to
  • visual culture
  • as it stresses its cause-effect logic

10
Attitude to reality - second tetrad
  • ENH
  • Objectivity
  • RET
  • Science in classical meaning (printed)
  • REV
  • Multiple subjectivity
  • OBS
  • Subjectivity
  • (authors opinion on the topic)

11
Conclusion III
  • Infographic belongs to
  • visual culture
  • as it stresses its fixed point of view

12
Content of infographic - third tetrad
  • ENH
  • (contents condensed to) slogan (in form of
    word/text or picture)
  • RET
  • REV
  • cliche
  • OBS
  • sentence
  • paragraph

13
How it creates a metaphor?
  • World in infographic is simplified and
    discretized. Objects are purified to notions or
    concepts.
  • Figure key relations between concepts
  • Ground
  • diversity of objects
  • complexity of the world
  • infinite relations between objects

14
Derrick said...
  • They think that our brains are not fast enough.
    And of course, that is true, at least in
    comparison with digital computers. But our brains
    do not need to be fast, it is enough that they be
    clever, that is, extremely well-wired and
    connected. In reality our natural information
    processing capacities are much larger than we
    acknowledge. As McLuhan observed,
  • Information overload leads to
    pattern-recognition.
  • Derrick de Kerckhove, Skin of Culture

15
Conclusion IV
  • Infographic belongs to
  • acoustic (or electric) culture
  • as it represents a pattern
  • (Mark Federmans comment
  • this is not pattern recognition but pattern
    imposition)

16
What does infographic to usin the context of
culture models?
  • McLuhan prompts
  • Russia now needs the press (as we formerly did
    the book) to translate a tribal and oral
    community into some degree of visual, uniform
    culture able to sustain a market system.
  • (Understanding Media, 1964)
  • Infographic translates traditional visual logic
    into new personalized and easy-to-access-and-nav
    igate acoustic structure

17
Propaganda - conclusion
  • This may be a very effective propaganda as it
    lets people think that they construct their
    meaning themselves but in fact gives them ready
    propaganda message
  • (Thanks to Gianluca Baccanico for this comment)

18
And now... Weather Forecast...
  • infographic is composed of simplified and
    contextual elements
  • infographic is composed of images and printed
    text
  • reader has to choose his path of reading himself
  • most of readers are not used to read infographic
  • effort
  • INFOGRAPHIC IS COOL

19
McLuhans explanation
  • Intensity or high definition engenders specialism
    and fragmentation in living as in entertainment,
    which explains why any intense experience must be
    forgotten, censored, and reduced to a very
    cool state before it can be learned or
    assimilated. (...) The censor protects our
    central system of values, as it does our physical
    nervous system by simply cooling off the onset of
    experience a great deal. For many people, this
    cooling system brings a lifelong state of psychic
    rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly
    observable in periods of new technology.
  • (Understanding Media, 1964)

20
One week of SeptemberThe Globe and Mail, Sep
13th , 2001
21
One week of SeptemberNational Post, Sep 12th ,
2001
  • During the week September 12th-18th all
    newspapers published number of quarter- to
    full-page infographics explaining 9-11 Attack

22
Use of infographic in emotionally involving issues
  • Infographic is often used to cool down the
    audience when topic is very emotionally
    involving.
  • Number of big (e.g. half-page) infographics have
    been published not only after 9-11, but also
  • after Columbia crash
  • now, during the war with Iraq
  • Press uses combination of infographic and photos
    (hot) to manipulate peoples fear of SARS
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