Images as text: Driving.

The readings/subject this week was a little harder for me to grasp.. probably one of the reasons why I'm writing it on sunday night (totally regretting it now). 
The example I have come up with is street signs. They are everywhere, and without them driving would be a lot more dangerous. Yea, there are a lot of signs that do have words on them.. like these:

But there are also not so obvious looking street signs that only show images to get the point across. The interesting part is, a lot of times these signs that only show images are a little bit different in every country. 

these ones below were actually done by artists, and were placed all over Europe. How long they were able to stay there is unknown but the point is, the artists decided to design a collection of "street signs" to put out certain messages. 

The one directly above, I don't really understand but the tunnel one is clever in my opinion. Anyway, to show some signs we are more familiar with here in the U.S.. 

A lot of these signs I have seen before but a lot of them I haven't at all. But just looking at them you can figure them out. Putting them in the right location makes them speak for themselves with no words needed. "These systems of graphic presentation are operational, not merely passive schematic structures. They are active agents for creating meaning, instructions for reading, viewing, comprehending information." (Drucker & Mcgann) 

With street signs they are obviously there to convey information in a way that is super easy to comprehend. We don't want people driving and suddenly having to turn their heads and take their eyes off the road to try and figure out what that sign said. Therefore they have to be cleverly designed to be easily processed by the average human being. Basically, street signs are supposed to be incredibly obvious. However if you're in another country and you see a street sign like those artists have made, you will definitely start to think about what the heck that means. They are pictographs to convey information, that we see every day and don't always think too much about. 

Writing Brightens Consciousness

After reading this article the example that really got me thinking right away was simply the switch of language from sound to vision.

"Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong thought print helped further reorient language from sound to vision, paving the way for our screen-fixated present."

As simple as it is, language switching from people talking to each other, to people reading and writing is huge. For example, without writing people could have never learned different languages from what they were taught while growing up. Because without seeing the words, it's pretty dang hard to learn a different language just through sound. In short, texts and the "reading revolution" have everything to do with communication. Through texts people are able to learn new things from outside of where they come from. They can learn other languages so they can communicate with others outside of where they live, people are able to imagine what the text is talking about rather than focusing on listening. 

In relation to Ong and what he has written about, you can't communicate solely through sound. Your brain needs a different type of medium to bring out ideas. With speech there are so many other processes going on in the brain forcing you to think about what you are going to say, and make the sounds to say it however with writing you don't need to speak, so there are all kinds of completely different processes going on, processes that happen in the right (creative) side of the brain rather than the left (logical) side. As Ong says, speaking comes naturally to every human, but writing doesn't. Writing and reading is something that must be learned, and practiced. Therefore the switch from only communicating through sound to communicating through sound AND vision was immensely important in human consciousness, and still is. There is more room for interpretation through writing/texts, and more room for the mind to think. Also as Ong said, writing is rebellious! things written down to read are not always the best or most appropriate things to say out loud, and in turn once again have the ability to leave the reader open to interpretation. 

Orality of Literacy

The point in time I chose along Ong's 'Orality of Literacy' timeline was the point when Alexander Pope decides that all poets are expected to be original, and the readers had to react to the poem in a way where it could not be expressed any better. Even further if you were a romantic poet, you were expected to ideally be like god himself, creating phrases "out of nothing," or as it was expressed in latin, Ex nihilo. There were no cliches, no humor, no nothing. 

This is kind of interesting because it sounds like if you were a poet during this time, you were under a ton of pressure to produce great work. Today, poets have just about all the freedom in the world. They can write about whatever they want, use as many cliches as they want, be as unoriginal as they want, even put words in whatever format, or word order they want. I don't think we can say poetry was remediated from this exact point in time but there was a large evolutionary change in the way people continued to write poetry from this point on. 

No one writes their poetry as if they were god himself. No one writes their poetry in constant worry that they are saying the wrong thing. People today write poetry simply to get an idea or group of ideas out there, or on paper. Back in Pope's time people weren't so free to express their ideas on paper. As the reading explains, "In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost; fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration." (pg. 23) 

In other words, people had to just walk around repeating and passing off bits of information to people or else it would be lost. However in Plato's day, everything changed. The passing on of knowledge was remediated into text, and the new way to store knowledge started to be through writing, and not speech. This "freed the mind for more original or abstract thought," which was evolutionary because it started this break from everything having to be perfect and original. People didn't have to write as if they are god, they could write as if they were themselves with their own ideas, and their own feelings of how to write a romantic poem. Which basically as time went on led to what we are doing right now....writing whatever the heck we want, and putting it on the internet for the whole world to see! 

Remediation/Post #1

With our fast-paced growth in technology today, it is easy to point out a lot of the different remediations that have happened even in just the past 5-10 years. The pace at which the world is inventing, updating, and creating has gotten faster and faster as time has gone on. The remediation that comes to mind for me, considering I'm a photographer, is the remediation of cameras/photos.

When cameras first came about you had to put a huge dark cloth over your head to even be able to take the photo because absolutely no light could get on the film. Soon journalism required photographers to move around with the camera so they had to find a way to make the film covered and light resistant while inside the camera. Extra light was needed, so giant flashes were invented. The kind you've probably seen in movies where the big giant light bulb on top of the giant camera explodes and breaks all over the floor.

As time went on cameras became smaller and smaller, and more and more computerized. Now, no one hardly even uses film anymore (which is super sad in my opinion). Everything used to capture video, sound, or pictures is digitalized, and much easier to use than back in the "old" days when everything was manual, and you actually had to create the photo yourself step by step. Now cameras have at least 8-10 different settings on them depending on where you are and what you're taking a picture of. In fact if you are just taking a basic picture you don't even really have to think when you take pictures anymore since you can just put it on the "portrait" setting, or close up/ far away setting and instantly view the photo after it is taken. No film wasted, no time wasted, no effort needed.

The real remediation of photography however is the use of photoshop.
Anyone, anywhere, who can buy a camera can be a photographer. And if you find you don't like the photo, you can take it into iphoto, photoshop, and whatever simpleton PC editing programs there are out there..(mac all the way) to tweak it to your own liking. In fact, when you see photos in magazines, newspapers, and even reality TV shows, how is anyone supposed to know that photo is real and not manipulated? no one can settle for anything that is not manipulated much anymore, and the way our society has reformed to that is basically if someone sees a photo that isn't manipulated, next to one that is with super cool graphics, and effects, and everything they will definitely more often than not pick the manipulated one. To some people manipulating photos on a computer is art. To me, making photos with chemicals, and your hands in a dark room for hours is art.

However, the point is, society likes to see photos that are out of the ordinary. Things they don't normally see, colors that don't always occur in real nature, people and animals that look freaky, and people and things that are much more glamoured up and glorified looking. That catches peoples eye. However if the photo shows colors they are used to, and the way people actually look in real life, its a boring photo.

Hi.

HEY DTC 375 people! I'm Lauren, from the Eastside of Seattle. Not going to lie, I was a little disappointed at first that it was going to be online. BUT I did take DTC 475 online, and it really wasn't bad. Debating with people through writing blogs can be kind of fun.
good luck and see ya in December!