so i’ve been thinking about all things ‘communication’.

I’ve been a bit bad - i haven’t blogged the thoughts i’ve had over the last week or so, but i have written them down. there’s sort of snip-its and big thoughts too, so some may be lines, some may be paragraphs. some of the thoughts are in reference to some of the further reading. All are digitized here now. anyway- on with the show.

as time goes by and technology advances, does type’s value drop?

when the printing press first came out, type was rare and precious, tangible and distinct…

the next advancement in type design post press is the screen: where type does not exist in itself-there is no physical interaction; it must be done vicariously through a computer…

now the internet has made type almost as equal value to handwriting. its as easy to write if not quicker than writing by hand. and arguably some people write more on a computer than by hand. (has the value of type come full circle?) as more type is around, and the cost of the production of type on the internet is free, surely its value on this platform is much lower? type has become extremely disposable on the internet - not only easy to erase with the click of a button, but type has a shorter life span. take twitter for example. tweets don’t last more than a day or so. the niche nature of blogs is how up-to-date they are (contrary to the ‘timeless’ nature of books)

the role of type in communication:

words and objective descriptions are limited by a finite vocabulary and therefore distort records of reality…can reality be recorded in an unbiased way?

phonocentrism - if everything boils down to language, should there be more education surrounding it? should there be an education surrounding the fact that a cultures language reflects its values/beliefs/identity? eg some languages dont have a word for ‘goodbye’ only ‘see you next time’.

how technology has changed - types significance and disposability fluctuates? its tangibility being affected by the format it exists in. does the nature of type’s contemporary value reflect our society and our society’s impact on the world?

on the other hand, a sign of a functioning system is that it is producing waste - is typography a waste product of information transfer? does that mean that our current culture of disposable type mean that society is ‘functioning’ at our strongest rate to date (in terms of connectivity and information transfer)?

Integrating type further with image:

two very separate ways to communicate, yet operate symbiotically in many contexts of graphic design - two sides of the same coin (the coin being communication)?

magazines are a very common example of ‘synergising’ type and image, but can it be done to a more effective extent than this? images can communicate extremely fast, but type can communicate very accurate. can more be done than merely ‘balancing’ the two separate elements? can a type/image ‘compound’ be formed? where do typefaces come into this?

political cartoons (analogies) and diagrams both use words and graphics to ‘map out’ concepts.

topology is a very efficient form of communication - an example is the map of the london underground. purely showing the crossovers of stations: visually summarizing the network of the underground accurately.

GLOBALISATION AND LANGUAGE

referring back to a previous lecture: assuming society will continue to develop, we could find ourselves at the point where everything happens at the speed of a thought. if society continues to evolve and globalise, at what point will international languages unify? and why haven’t they yet?

to what extent can we communicate across the language barrier? is it possible for two people who speak completely separate languages to relate? how much? could they fall in love?

what role do images play? they are a universal language, however interpreted differently in different cultures. example: the HSBC adverts at english airports show the same image twice with different single words over each one - then a repetition with the words swapped over - cultural differences.

cultural values and beliefs are tied into the language. eg the german word ‘schadenfreude’ (to laugh at the misfortune of others) is not in the english language. some languages such as hebrew have heavy ties to religion (eg the torah is written in hebrew)

international paradigms - the chinese pay their doctors throughout the time they are well. when they are sick, they do not pay their doctors - it is the doctors job to make them better so they can get paid again. such a different way of thinking from a different culture is surely another barrier that needs to be broken before language can be unified. if phonocentrism is a key truth, then all things need to be unified before the underpinning language can be.

english is one of the most complicated languages - so many words for the same thing and so many ways of saying the same thing, but that has its benefits as well as being a heavy weight language…

…in orwell’s 1984, the language is reduced annually to gain further control over the ‘proles’.

swahili words have different meanings in different tones. phonetics play a big part in their language. how can this possibly begin to be synchronized with other languages?