Week 11 - Information Graphics

Information graphics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. Graphs include bar charts, line graphs and pie graphs which are generated from raw data and are made straightforward and stimulation with easy to read information prior to background knowledge of it. Lester (1995, 194) describes graphs as info-graphics that 'combine the individual satisfaction of words with the emotional power of visual'.

Above are examples of good info-graphics which are both stimulating and require less time to understand. A good communication professional must have the ability to construct raw information into something that is visually simple yet presents all the important information for easy understanding. Edward Tufte (1983, p. 51) states "graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time, with the least amount of ink in the smallest amount of space".

However, sometimes the media uses information graphics to trick audience into seeing what they want them to believe. Statistics are often presented in a form of graphs which, by itself, serves as a powerful weapon of persuasion because graphs are seen indisputable and 'true' by the public.

Alex Fisher has mentioned in his book 'Critical Thinking' that "statistics are evidence expressed in numbers. Such evidences can seem quite impressive because of the numbers make evidence appear to be very scientific, often do, lie. They do not necessarily prove what they appear to prove" (Fisher, 2001).

Here are examples of deceiving information graphics:

25.5% is bigger than 74.5%? In what world?!

How can there be 353%?! 256%?! This is obviously a way to create illusions of 'greater' numbers.

Lester has written his book "Visual Communication: Images with messages" that infographics with high quality should have a significant message to communicate, must present information in a clear, accurate and efficient manner. They also should not offend the intelligence of readers and always tell the truth (Lester, 1995). These are the basic guidelines for an ethical infograph. Truth in the infographics are very important since 'images generally have a greater emotional impact than words, the potential to mislead with visual message is higher' (Lester, 1995, 208).

Therefore, the second graph in the tutorial question was unethical because it presents the wrong numbers in the x-axis thus interfering with the graphics (bar chart) which made it look there are more than what it really is.



References:

Lester, P.M. (1995). Information Graphics. Visual communication: Images with messages (pp. 187-211). California: Wadsworth Publishing.

Pettersson, R. (2002). Information Design. An Introduction. United States of America: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Week 10 - Are we human or are we dancers?

Please do not take my title seriously, it is an inside joke my friend and I made when we did this topic. 'Are we human or are we dancers?' is a song title by The Killers which asks us if we really are humans, or dancers who follow only 'choreographs' and cannot think for ourselves.

Completely different from what I am about to talk about. The real question should be; are we cyborgs?

I know I am.

I bet you're wearing clothes right now (at least I hope so). Is your smartphone anywhere near you? Are you using your laptop now?

We are living in the modern age where technology has become more than a commodity, rather it is  a necessity to our ways of life. we need cellphones to call people far away from us. We need television for entertainment, to watch the news, to be up to date with the Walking Dead. We need cameras to capture meaningful moments. I need this laptop to create this post for my Analyzing Visual Communication blog assignment.

How far can we go with technology?

Technology has become our constant companion since the birth of it. No doubt it has made our lives much more easier especially with the endless gadgets and the more advanced it will become, the more dependent we will be on it. We are humans but our unbeatable bond with technology makes us machine as well. We are therefore half-human and half-machine; cyborgs. The term 'cyborg' was coined in 1960. "A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of friction" (Haraway, 2000).

 By being cyborgs, we are able to explore with ourselves especially in cyberspace where our identities are not fixed, but created according to our desires and vision. Cyberspace is claimed to be, according to  guruesque William Gibson, a 'consensual hallucination'. Sherman and Judkins tell it as "truly technology of miracles and dreams". Virtual reality enables us to play God (Robin, 2000).

Users can bring life to identities that fulfull their 'ideal ego'. Thus people love to immerse themselves in this illusion of 'reality' because according to Krueger in Artificial Reality II:

"In the ultimate artificial reality, physical appearance will be completely composoble- It would be intrusive to see how changed physical attributes altered your interactions with other people. Not only might people treat you differently, but you might find yourself treating them differently as well."

Virtual allows you to release the 'real you'. We can see this in Maxis's famous game The Sims which was released in 2000. This life-stimulation game is highly addictive because users are able to control one or more virtual persons (Sims) through their daily lives. Other games include Skyrim (PS3), Second Life (Internet) and World of Warcraft (WoW by Blizzard) which have real-time settings to create that real-life feel for users and, as an addition, allows us to interact with other players. Through these games, communication is easy because we are communication with out 'ideal ego/self'.

 
So apart from phone calls, text-messagings, IMs and video-chats through social networks like Facebook, Skype and Messenger, we are able to communicate with each other through technology. Think about it, we can dial someone's number on the other side of the world and in a matter of seconds, he will pick up and say 'Hello'.
 
With the advances of technology, it could be possible to communicate without body. Like in the famous quote by Morpheus from  The Matrix; "the body cannot live without the mind". Meaning to say the body is just a medium or a vessel.

References:

Robins, K. (2000). Cyberspace and the world we live in. In Bell, D. and Kennedy, B.M. (eds.), The cybercultures reader (pp.77095). London: Routledge.

Fung, A. (2006). Bridging cyberlife and real life: A study of online communities in Hong Kong. In Silver, D.M. and Adrienne Steve, J. (eds.), Critical cyberculture studies (pp. 129-139). New York: New York University Press.

Week 9 - Cinema and Television

In this modern era, cinema and television have become amongst the most common forms of media. We are bombarded with continuous types information which is what Hartley describes as a 'socio-culturally meaningful phenomenon' (1999). He explains that it is a history of the discourses and practices which enclosed, filled, shaped, disciplined, enabled and obstructed its development. What is shown through cinema and television is an access to 'reality' (Stadler, 1990). However, we need cultural literacy to understand and analyze and judge what is 'real' because we don't want to end up like this:

Cultural literacy is described as both an understanding of meaning systems and an ability to work through those systems within different cultural contexts. It is virtually impracticable to describe and analyse what is happening in any communication conditions or practice without using the concept of cultural literacy (Shirato and Yell, 2000, p.1).


 According to Harley, textual tradition is important to understand how we acquire cultural literacy. The word 'traditional' can be said as our habits that we have adapted to thus we have unconsciously manipulated this mechanism of adaptation to allow us to gain cultural literacy (Harley, 1999, p.60). Cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman (1990: 273) stated:

"The individual human intellect does not have a monopoly in the work of thinking. Semiotics systems, both separately and together in the integrated unity of the semiosphere, both synchronically and in all the depth of historical memory, carry out intellectual operations, preserve, rework and increase the store of information."

As so being said, cultural literacy is the foundation of our understanding. It contains rules and customs that form our  understanding of language. It is a shared knowledge that allows us to comprehend a context of a discourse better. Cinema and television e therefore are mediums from which we can obtain knowledge and better our cultural literacy.

Thus the more cultural literacy we have, the easier for us to understand text without much cognitive problem. However, Harley (1990) argues that information broadcasted in cinema and television are under formal education institutions, government instituitions and critical instituitions. Information provided is controlled to ensure viewers have an uniform ideology. Hence, viewer must be more critical and gain critical literacy to understand and be able to question the represented information.

I have selected a movie trailer called Precious (2009). This movie is set in Harley in 1987. It is the story of Claireece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), a 16 year old African-American girl. She is pregnant with her second child by her nonexistent father. At home, she is tormented by her mother (Mo'Nique), an angry woman who abuses her emotionally and physically. School is not a safe place either and Precious has reached the ninth grade with good marks, however she is illiterate.(Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx-3jYJkUWQ)

The critique I have for this trailer is the representation of African-American women in America in the given condition. Are they always seen dressed like that? The language is also something to touch on because given the living condition and the lack of educational support, Precious and her mother communicate differently. However, the portrayal of the given language used is very stereotypical to African-American people from the ghetto.

What about the abuse? Emotional, physical and sexual abuse are all represented here. Are they represented in biased to American context? Is that how all abuse look like, are they no other ways of representing them? 

These stereotypical representations of 'reality' is in fact ways for producers to follow the 'norm' however, this causes problems because it makes viewers/public agree unconsciously that THAT is the 'norm' itself especially for us Bruneians who have never been to America.

If my mother, who I would personally say has a narrow cultural literacy, were to watch Precious then go to America (whatever the year may be), she would totally avoid visiting Harlem. Yikes!

References: 

Hartley, J. (1999). Knowledge, television and the "textual tradition". Uses of Television (pp. 55-70). London and New York: Routledge.

Schirato, T. and Yell, S. (2000). Communication and Culture. Communication and Cultural Literacy: An Introduction (2nd ed.). (pp. 1-3). Victoria; BPA Print Group.

Week 8 - Photography and Culture

The dawn of photography began in 1827 when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the first successful photographer took a shot of his courtyard using an asphalt that solidifies when in contact with sunlight and then placed onto a glass plate. He called his product Heliographs, after the Greek "of the sun" (Leggat, 1999). 

People became obsessed with "prosthetically" embedding memory into pictures because it last longer than our biological memory. According to Wells (1997), photography verifies our experience of 'being there', which is not merely one of visiting an unfamiliar place, but of capturing the authentic experience of a strange place. Photographs are records and documents which pin down the changing world of appearance". When we take a photograph, it immortalize the scene and memory. We capture nostalgic moments and produce them forever in the form of pictures. 

So if we say photography capture moments, then does it show the truth?

  

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 1 is a combination of a before and after edit of a woman. Which woman is real? How would viewer distinguish between the two? Because with the brilliance of technology, we can now manipulate pictures.

Is there such an animal as Picture 2? Again, technology is so advanced that photo-manipulation can create 'real pictures'. In this era, more than half of us have never seen a saber tooth tiger, but in fact we know the picture below represents a saber tooth tiger.

Hence, the public should be more skeptical about every image that is presented to them because the power of the photograph lies on the hands of the creator of the photographer. Susan Sontag stated that the photographer is relatively powerful thus may be seen as predator. She also mentioned that photographers are not necessarily sentimental, or candid, they may be used for policing or incrimination.

However to answer the issue of whether photography is a culture analysis, we must look into what is being captured (person, place and circumtance) and who captures it. 

Celia Lury argues in her book 'Prosthetic Culture' (1998) that we live in a world where it is no longer possible to survive without technological prosthetics. Hence photographs are apart of culture because it captures the past and present and with digital photography, it may be even manipulated to create a futuristic representation of the upcoming culture.

"It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world, we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled" (Berger, 1972: 7).

The photograph above indicates the clothing, scene and relationship between the two boys hence showing us a culture

This advert demonstrates our culture in the sense of us living in the "fast lane"

This is a recent photo taken of me and my friends which shows the Bruneian culture in terms of physical features, clothing, facial and body gestures. It shows the Bruneian youth culture

The picture above shows the American society of driving big cars hence shows their culture.

Even the Picture 1 is cultural critique because it shows our digital-age where we manipulate pictures to suit what we describe 'attractive' in our culture. Picture 2 shows our advances in technology and photo-manipulation skills that connotes our Information Age culture.

References:

Batchen. G, (2004). Forget me not: Photography and rememberance (pp. 6-16). New York: Princeton architectural press.

Wells, L. (1997). Thinking about photography. Photography: a critical introduction (pp. 24-54) London: Routledge.