us-tube
I’m just going to come out and say it: i don’t think i could ever really grip youtube as my online community, despite doing just this for a number of other internet groups (world of warcraft and livejournal are my main ones). and the main reason why i couldn’t do that, i think, is based the one thing that youtube has, that LJ and WoW both don’t have.
face to face communication.
now the funny thing about youtube is that you’re really not communicating with someone. you’re talking to your camera. when i type a comment on livejournal, i’m talking to someone specific, even if my comment can be overheard by everyone else. if i’m on WoW, i’m talking to another WoW player (or a group of WoW players). Like it was talked about, both LJ and WoW have audiences I understand, at least, in some way. I know that the people on LJ I comment on have some interest with me (or something I’m disagreeing with), and that people who I play WoW with will understand what I’m talking about if I say, “LF DPS MAGE for H ICC25.” Chances are, no one who reads this blog does.
But perhaps that’s why people are drawn to the youtube community. Perhaps that they’re talking to EVERYONE – and everyone who does or doesn’t do everything – is the comfort. Perhaps that they don’t have to worry about their audience is what actually draws people to youtube. As someone who is constantly worrying about the image I project to others, this sort of thing would be naturally repellent to me (I like to modify my shown identity based on my audience), but perhaps someone who isn’t interested in modifying – or actively against it – would prefer the youtube community.
me? i’ve got livejournal. 
wingdings BC
So, text. Everyone loves text, right? It’s how we mainly communicate, with a good strong helping of images and that sort of thing. And it’s been this way for a really, really long time.
But not always! That’s what gets me about this new piece. It seems like we put all this value and credibility and power into text, and that’s really just – well, that’s just now. It wasn’t always like this! bam! To this end, I present to you an infographic from New Scentist:
What i love abut this graph is that the table of contents is the entire graph. What I love about this graph is that the information isn’t represented by numbers or letters, but the symbols represent themselves. There’s something to be said about the clear, lovely simplicity of this graph: lot of symbols means lots of symbols! Where the symbols are, means where the symbols are! The worst thing you could have about a graph is having arbitrary or strange connections between the image and the information, or the graph and the idea behind it, but this one? this one has no problem with all of that. The other interesting things about this is that, though there is color, it’s earthy – writing on the wall, after all. While strange color choices can help and stand out (giant pink shark, anyone?), the easy connectivity of “writing on the wall = brown = earth tones” is also pretty nice, especially because there’s no reason to make something stand out by using all that crazy pink. In this graph, there’s not as much comparing, and all the information is basically of equal importance.
what interests me about this graph is the way the light illuminates part of the planet, but not all of it. I’m wondering why they used the light. if they just wanted to emphasize part of it, why didn’t they just use a line? Are they trying to “shine light” on the situation? Because I think that makes me want to headdesk.
Anyway. The end of this is: symbols are cool! and they came before written text. although really, it’s the same thing.
mindblowing, eh?
SET: Not Just Obesity and Mountain Dew
YOU CAN FIND MY PHOTOESSAY HERE!!!
I did it for my Visual Rhetoric Class… which is the reason I’m doing this blog to begin with. Yay!
The related pictory is HERE.
ANALYSIS: Not Just Obesity and Mountain Dew.
For my photoessay, I chose something that’s become a huge part of my life lately: dungeons and dragons. Generally this evokes a number of amused, embarrassed or confused responses, and plenty of strange looks. Knowing those strange looks, I sought to shed a little light on the game itself and the people I play with, in an effort to say that most people who play D&D are NOT fat, and living in their parents’ basement. As a matter of fact, most of the people I play with, while perhaps interested in the maths and sciences, do plenty of un-nerd things, including being part of the Armed Forces or the Church.
For all of the pictures, I wanted to write captions that mixed the game world with the real world, and use language from both the game (such as a strength score) and the real world (such as a stethoscope) to try to keep people thinking of the game and reality in the same vein, and not having that moment of weird-out in between. I also used first person because I wanted the views to be very close to the people in question, because when you have a smaller narrative distance, it’s easier for the view to connect with the character in question.
I wanted these pictures to be somewhat candid, because I felt the idea of watching people play is better than planning something out, so in a lot of ways, I didn’t have as many rhetorical choices as I would have liked. Even so, quite a few things went my way, and I did what I could, taking images from a number of angles and picking out the best ones which included all the good parts of a tabletop game: dice, maps, character sheets, people, and so forth.
metametameta
Going Meta is one of those things you should try to avoid. It’s when, in the subject of your discussion, you talk about the discussion itself.
The lovely wikipedia helps with this: “In epistemology, the prefix meta is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata are data about data (who has produced them, when, what format the data are in and so on). Similarly, metamemory in psychology means an individual’s knowledge about whether or not they would remember something if they concentrated on recalling it. Furthermore, metaemotion in psychology means an individual’s emotion about his/her own basic emotion, “or somebody else’s basic emotion.”
Mostly, meta stuff can get a bit lame. Writing about writing, for example, almost never works. And poems about writing poetry? I’m sure there are about five people in the whole world who can do it, otherwise it just looks like you’re being obnoxious about it. At least, that’s what college-age poets look like when they do it. Then again, maybe college poets aren’t the best sample to judge something on. Heh.
Anyway, this is important because our graph is about graphs!
[click for larger image]
My professor, Dr. Teston, linked this one on my twitter – she found it on Swiss Miss. I though it was humorous. Although it’s not really an infographic, I liked it enough to make an exception. We can analyze it, though, even if it isn’t an infographic!
See, the thing is, most of the graphics I’ve shown here use color to an enormous extent, and I think that’s a really good way to go about doing things. After all, it takes people MUCH less time to figure out colors than text, and even if someone only glances over things, they’ll definitely get the color patterns, if not understand them, have their interest piqued, and then actually read the graphic. [The pink shark attracted me in Death from the Skies, which my first entry is on.]
What gets me about this is that there’s no color, not even the overuse of black. In fact, it sincerely looks, to me, like some boring businessman used this chart in his meeting, when people tried to figure out what exactly graph they needed to use. I sincerely wished I knew the original audience of this piece. Without color, the artist falls back on text size and posistion, instead. Like a bubble, the center starts in the middle and extends outward, and even if we start in the top, right-hand corner like we’ve been taught, we can easily figure out that’s not where the graph starts. The biggest text, curiously enough, is not the middle question, but the four answers. Why? Is it another trick to pull our eyes to the center of the graph? Is it because that’s actually the most important part, and not the graphs themselves? While I think these two might be the case, I think it’s because it’s also the only question the examiner of the graph comes in knowing. They already know what they want to show: the graph, in small type, provides them with what kind of graph they need. In some way, I think it’s necessary – after all, when you need to fit text next to graphs, it’s got to be small. But in another way, I think it’s because it’s not nearly as important. We do and have things without knowing what they’re called all the time. Don’t believe me? Listen to yourself talk and try to name the proper name of the parts of each one of your sentences: things like subjective complements and that kind of thing.
So, in the end, I think this graph needs and uses as much rhetorical power as infographics do – and after all, if you need to know what graph you need, how to find your credit score using toilet pipes is not going to help at all.
CAPTION POWAAAAR.
On an unrelated note, why isn’t there a “log in” button on my blog somewhere? I think I might have accidentally taken it off, because WordPress is not as cool as LiveJournal (for all you people out there, I love Livejournal).
This has nothing to do with this post. What this post is about the legitimacy of captions and something I said in class last week that I wish wasn’t as true as I felt saying it. It goes something like this.
We trust captions because it feels like, even if it isn’t true, there’s less interpretation in words. When we have words, which seem always less open to manipulation, we can use it to figure out what we’re supposed to do with photo, which are generally easier to see what we want to see and not otherwise. That being said, how and why does this even work? Of course there’s room for interpretation in text; that’s why sarcasm doesn’t work on the internet! How did it start that words can not be misunderstood and misinterpreted and misrepresented?
Well, if I can make a hypothetical history lesson here, I bet this comes from before the printing press, when only the higher classes were taught how to write. I doubt the upper classes were any less conniving, then, but they didn’t have photographs, first of all, but second of all, I imagine that the poor people didn’t know any better. After all, they were too busy farming crops and paying indulgences or something like that. Anyway, I’m having a hunch that text, as an older form of communication, is probably seen as more reliable. After all, we think of older cars as more reliable! And we think of older books as better; when something “withstands the test of time,” it must be pretty strong, right?
But there’s the problem. Lots of nasty things have withstood the test of time. Like the age-old process of murdering each other for land, religious reasons, over each other’s wives, what king is the best, you know. And general corruption. Sadly, that also hasn’t died out. But I’ve noticed that generally technology, when it lives, tends to be good and eventually innovated into something better: the quill into the ball-point pen, the pen into the computer, and so on.
So, what does this say about the reliability of text? Does its age truly make it stronger than photography? I don’t think so. I think if we were the same people as we were three hundred years ago, maybe it would work, but with our evolved views of each other, the world, and information ….. i’m not really sure what the answer is. They’re both pretty neat, though.
oh god, that bird just turned into popcorn!
If you think you’ve heard the title before on a Conan O’Brien sketch on the Tonight Show, you are absolutely right! He did a great segment called Twitter Tracker which is possible the most hysterical thing ever, assuming you’re into twitter.
I am personally into twitter, although, admittedly, I use twitter primarily for personal communication and/or griping than spreading important news and telling people about revolts and that sort of thing. Apparently that’s the “right” way to use twitter, according ot some news I read a while ago. Oh well, who knows? There’s a right and a wrong way to do everything, according to the internet.
Anyway, if you couldn’t guess, today’s infographic features our lovely microblogging service. It’s big, so I’d REALLY suggest downloading it or opening it in a new window, so you can think about all the cool things I’m about to say.
[for the love of god PLEASE click it. it's so insignificant. ;-;]
[additional interesting note: I found this a couple weeks ago, and according to Mashable, twitter is far closer to 10 billion tweets than 7, now.]
First note: printed in the same blue that the twitter bird is, referred to in the graphic as “twitter blue.” I also noted that while the background is blue, some of the text is black, especially the articles, prepositions, conjunctions – the parts of a sentence that should be relatively invisible compared to things like subjects, verbs, and direct objects. Even further, the numbers are ALWAYS in blue, and always written out, unless it sounds more threatening to use ‘million.’ We think million is big. But 60,763 (the amount of miles 7 billion printed tweets would cover) is pretty big too. So is $24,500,00 (the amount it would cost to print all 7 billion tweets in black ink). Another thing I notice is that, despite the pictures that clearly make this piece and infographic, there is really no extraneous flourishing going on here. Each picture is relevant to a saying very near it: the piggy bank near the cash, the buses near talking about buses. The congress near the congress. And so forth.
What also surprises me about this is that it’s so big. I mean, we’re accustomed to large .jpgs, especially on our 17″ monitors. Mine is a measly 13″, so everything looks big to me. But this one? IT’S HUGE. And long! If you’re not actually going to read the text, you might be blow away by just how much text and art there IS. Not only that, but each piece is a little repetition of the same thing, and nothing gets a point across like saying it over and over again, and in some pretty big ways.
PS: The House Healthcare bill was 1,990 pages. That’s one bill. Imagine how many bills they’ve made since 1955?
Crazy to think we can do that in 140 character increments. The power of the many, eh?
ADDENDUM: According to Mashable, twitter has just reached ten billion tweets.
no one likes tetanus death.
so, let’s talk about credit scores. I am a college kid, a group that is not precisely known for their incredible financial responsibility. luckily, I seem to have drawn the long straw and got parents that taught me that I need to pay my goddamn bills and not buy things i can’t actually afford. while i don’t have a sweet plasma tv and seventeen xboxes, i DO have a moderately decent credit score. pretty sure this is one of those magical things that govern our life, and we’re not sure how or why. sort of like congress. however, for congress, there’s school of rock.
(if only law-making actually went like this.)
And now, for credit scores, we have incredible infographics, this time coming from Spend On Life, via my twitter feed.
(click for larger image).
What I’ve noticed about most infographics is that they are often dominated by one particular concept, idea, theme or motif. For the DEATH FROM THE SKIES infographic, the big thing was the dominate use of color (especially pink) and size (not just of the shark) to shoe emphasis. For Gravity Wells, I felt that the format of the scale – actually creating “gravity wells,” really was a good choice. for the GOOD infographic, it was dominated by empty black space.
For this one, the big one is the pipes rusting as your credit score goes to crap. Is there anyone who like rusty pipes? Are rusty pipes better than clean pipes for anything, besides giving people tetanus and rust-related illnesses? Even if this is toilet waste and not rust, you’re having a serious build-up. The toilet itself is white porcelain, perhaps representing the credit card as it was just taken out of its envelope.
The interesting thing about this is that there are multiple pipes leaving to each one of the little number, like there are different ways to screw up your credit score. I mean, you could not pay your car payments, or not pay your credit cards bills, or go straight to declaring bankruptcy! The other amusing thing is that the numbers don’t go straight down in a line – rather, it almost seems like you could get to one number while skipping another number. I suppose that seems sort of like if you didn’t check your credit score between December and two years after, you might ditch. Otherwise, that’s my only complaint with this graphic.
But toilets have such strong imagery, I’m pretty sure it works regardless. Everyone knows what the toilets mean! And pipes!
analyzation.
So, we’re looking at the marriage of heaven and hell by William Blake. There are drawings all over the place! There are drawings in between words, on the sides, top and bottom of pages, everywhere the eye can see. Suffice to say, there are many, many drawings, and we spent a pretty long amount of time talking about three of those drawings. the big question:
what does this mean.
this is one of those big questions that haunt a lot of academic disciplines. That haunt all disciplines! What does something mean? It’s everything! Everything has to have a meaning, especially in a super-famous work like a Blake piece. We spent a huge amount of time debating about what stuff means and why Blake put it there and what significance it has to the text and all sorts of things within this realm of information. And I certainly made my share of educated guesses regarding what the pyramid meant and what the skull meant and all this sort of nonsense. But, as a writer myself, making all these educated guesses is boggling. Becuase you know what? Sometimes, I bet it just looked good there.
That’s right. Blake put that guy there because he looks pretty.
I say this because I have a first draft of a novel on my desktop. It has serious point-of-view issues, but aside that, it’s about three lesser species who fight against each other, and they have partially human blood and half animal. And the story ends when they gather together as united minorities, and reach peace with people. You know what I was writing about? Vampires, lizardmen, and cat-people. As I look over it, years later, I realize the whole thing STINKS of minority undertones. There’s something so Marxist about all of it. When I wrote it, I didn’t have any intentions to add in any of this. I wrote about lizardmen and vampires because I thought (and still think) they are cool to pit against, and I can’t imagine them getting along with humanity as it stands. But if I were in a lit class, and we were doing interpretations, the students would totally be like MINORITY UNITY!! MARXISM!! OVERTHROW THE BOURGEOISIE!!
admittedly, i’m not William Blake, and he probably thinks way harder than I do about these kinds of things. But, the point of the matter is, I feel like even Blake probably put stuff in because they were cool. If they were important, they would be consistent in each plate, wouldn’t they? But the only thing in those plates of the same image that was the same was the guy. Does this mean he was just in a pyramid kind of mood one day? Maybe. Maybe he had a pyramid phase.
Of course, maybe it represents the grandiose vision humans have of human mortality. I guess we’ll never know!
My next draft is going to involve pyramids and lizardmen. You know why? Here’s my literary answer:
Lizardmen and pyramids are fucking cool.
proverbs
After reading, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” I immediately had to go use my wikipedia power to check out both LaVeyan Satanism and Theistic Satanism. Amusingly, I actually thought these two were the same thing, but then I learned better. The power of wikipedia! There’s a whole book in there about the power of wikipedia for knowledge, but that has nothing to do with semiotics or William Blake, so we’ll hold off on that for now. As best as I could, I felt like attaching these two things on one particular point would have looked awkward and a little ridiculous. Sort of like an undergrad comp class essay, really. Blogs aren’t for that.
So, the thing I thought really interesting about the Marriage of Heaven and Hell was that reading it on the tablets was very disconcerting. As much as I tried, I felt that the images (awesome) were connected only vaguely to the the story on the tablet, in many cases. There are exceptions, yeah, but this goes double for the Proverbs sections (my favorite parts, really). What makes me wonder even more is the general color given to the tablets without images – why blues and greens and yellows? Because they’re gentler colors in general? A side note: the tone seemed casual, but the fancy writing contradicted that, to me. I mean, I think everyone wrote like that, back then?
And semiotics. What I do love about this book is the growth of complexity of the topics: first, we talk about color and shape. Then, we talk about context. Definitely a way to go. Also, it’s really interesting to watch commercials and read this book, because you find yourself applying ideas like tone to Visa commercials, and ideas like cultural context to the different one that I see.
