Essay proposal

NB: for the sake of the essay – the word ‘society’ refers to mostly westernised societies.

I aim to produce an inquiry investigating the relationship between type’s tangibility and it’s value and/or significance in our society. This involves the role type plays in controlling, identifying, integrating into and communicating within a human domain.

On the one hand, its arguable that in the fast paced society we live in, type vis-à-vis communication has never been so important. Paradoxically, types essential value has declined as communication has advanced. With so much type being manufactured, type as a commodity is cheap, disposable and more accessible than ever to the masses.

How can type’s value be measured? Is type being of high quantity and low cost a bad thing? What can the type we encounter tell us about the world we live in? Where does language come into this?

The Internet plays perhaps the biggest and fastest growing role in communication transfer at the moment. In the current day, the Internet has made type almost as intangible as handwriting. Type must be accessed vicariously through a screen, mouse and keyboard. Has the tangibility and therefore value of type come full circle?

Digital type dominates. It is as easier to write on a keyboard- if not quicker than writing by hand soft copies of information are more malleable. Arguably, some people write more on a computer than by hand. Can we as people integrate into a virtual environment of type any more than we already are? Or is the next step to make Internet type tangible again? Is this the next step for typography in technology?

The conclusion will identify the technological, physical and metaphysical role which type plays in society and why it’s state fluctuates on the state of society.

Bibliography

(Re)reading the landscape, Duncan and Duncan (essay)

Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong (book)

Who on earth invented the alphabet?, John Sassoon (essay)

Zombie Modernism, Mr Keedy (essay)