This Week's Assignments

Read:
Being Analog, Don Norman: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/being_analog.html
Research:
The Shannon-Weaver Model

Assignment:

Blog about the Shannon-Weaver model and how it may apply to communications today

or

Blog about the reading. Perhaps answer one of these questions:

• Why is it important for designers to understand the Shannon-Weaver model?
• How are you an analog being? How are you a digital being?

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a term that can be used in almost all fields such as design, architecture, even writing. The way in which someone portrays postmodernism is based on their own feelings and experiences on the topic. Postmodernism is very individualistic and can be the exact opposite of what someone else believes.

The movie The Fountainhead, is a good example that i have learned from about postmodernism. An architect was creating gorgeous designs in a city that were very futuristic looking at the time that looked like a giant leap in architecture. The companies that wanted his buildings wanted him to change them to look more like the buildings that already exist in the city but he wouldn't allow anyone to change his designs because they were his. He wanted change and his designs were revolutionary, the world just wasn't ready for them yet. The public wanted the same designs to be done over and over but the architect, Howard Roark, wanted completely new ones. His designs were the exact opposite of the previous, a characteristic of postmodernism.

Postmodernism

The thing that strikes me the most about postmodernism, are the many different ways in which it is used, or in which it describes something. Due to these many meanings of the word I would have to agree with Dick Hebdige and his writings in 'Hiding in the Light,' that state that the term is merely a buzzword. To me, the fact the word has well over fifteen meanings, means it is in fact a buzzword and has no truthful meaning, except for maybe categorizing an art/style movement. Also, most of the meanings of the word are often contradictions of it's other meanings, which in a way, further prove Hebdige's writings.

Due to this, the only light in which I can see the word being used effectively, would be in aesthetic categories. Architecture, music, and literature are a few mentions in the wikipedia article we were told to read. According to the article, postmodern design involved seamlessly blending form and function together, and removed useless ornament. Personally I enjoy designs that employ these techniques, especially Philip Johnson's work, which was featured in the article.

Postmodernism

Many think of things differently today then that of 30 years ago. People choose to believe something as their truth because it works for them. As a result reason, logic and science has been pushed aside. It is difficult to define postmodernism because philosophers and individual’s alike want to believe what they want to believe, no questions asked.

French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard defined postmodernism as incredulity (disbelief) to all metanarratives. He had a skeptical attitude towards all claims of absolute truths. These big stories he spoke of are open to interpretation resulting in a never-ending cycle of suspicions to truth claims.

Many say that postmodernists create their own truths. They are stuck in this mindset and end up creating their own reality. All that matters to them is their perspective on things and believe they know the meaning to life. Regardless of what you believe, we must all agree to disagree because this is a topic that as strong-minded individuals will never agree upon one truth.

Postmodenism

Postmodernism could relate to design in a few ways. The sort of premise behind postmodernism is that in a way there is no limits to something, truths to something, and no true boundaries exist. Possibly this could be related to design because nothing is really set in stone about design, it’s a forever changing thing with endless possibilities. A person could try to limit your thinking and say something is wrong but that cant be right because is anything wrong with this way of thinking? It might be not right for something but I don’t think they could say its wrong. However with this way of thinking it can lead you to paradox’s in your own logic and you might get all over the place but everyone uses these techniques when thinking about things whether they realize it or not.

The Medium is the Message

Marshall McLuhan had said the phrase "The Medium is the Message" in the book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Which was meant to mean that medium influences how the message is perceived.
When it is compared to the book and movies. A part of a book could be reread at whatever time you would like to but now movies are also able to be viewed over again without watching the whole thing in its entirety. I understand what he means about all of this but some other explanations were more over the top.
For example in part of his explanation I got a little confused. When he began to explain how a light bulb would be a good example of this saying. I understand how a light bulb can change a space because of its presence since it can change the whole atmosphere when it is illuminated, but the relationship between that and how it compares to receiving a message is what confuses me.
I don't agree entirely with this because not all people see the medium as the entire message some people actually look at the message that they are given not just how it is given.

Postmodernism and Marshall McLuhan

Postmodernism is a rejection of modernism. From what I've learned, most ages were just rejections of each other. Modernism was a rejection of spiritual values in exchange for scientific facts and rationalizations. Modernism placed a large amount of restrictions on the way people lived and created things. Postmodernism looked to free itself from all of the restrictions that had been set by Modernism. These changes were felt in all kinds of mediums, including design. This would, in a way, explain how it relates to this class.

"The Medium is in the Massage" by Marshall McLuhan argues that the ways we communicate dictate our experiences in the world. The title plays on the word "Massage" because these days, people find these means of communication (television, apps, the internet) to be relaxing. He argues that these mediums are creating anxiety because of the ways they affect our thoughts and minds. It's interesting to think about how reliant people are in today's society on these means of communication.

I am missing a hidden message?

The last time I discussed Postmodernism or even heard the term was in Art History II. The only thing it meant to me at the time was simply a time period... and of course I could relate which art and architecture was relevant to the time period.
So, "The medium is the message." The quote was coined by postmodernist Marshal McLuhan meaning that you should focus on how the end result comes about and not the content it displays. Its a great theory and all, but I think its bologna. Yes the medium is always a great factor in whether your painting is oil or acrylic. Or whether your website is flash vs. html. Or a comic book vs. a movie. Sure, I get it, but I would not take it to the grave. Or maybe McLuhan was a bit too deep for me with his light bulb "creating an environment by its mere presence." Its not creating anything. The environment is still there. It did not go on vacation. The article further explains "...the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into the home to watch over dinner." Well my dear, why are we watching tv while eating dinner anyway? We all know this leads to eating more than we are suppose to and less human interaction with the people surrounding us. Stop looking and listening to the box and focus more on how your family or friends day was and what is on your plate.
Maybe I am missing the point, but I disagree with his philosophy. I think you should put thought into how the message is portrayed, it makes a bigger impact on the effect of the message, but sometimes less is more and a comic can do the trick if you know how to illustrate the ideas properly. I read Tracy's response and I think this ties to it perfectly. Everyone would have understood the comic better if the artist had thought out his message a bit clearer.

Post-Modernism

Modernism is about the belief in science, rationality, and optimism; however, post-modernism is about becoming a global society, declining in the belief of God as a force of good and becoming interested in peoples’ personal concerns.

Post-modern ideas are how society becomes more aware of pop cultures and the media, and they influence our lives than ever before. The reality is that the media shaped and determined the way we live. Our individual identity, reality, and purpose for life are referential from the media. More and more people take interest in others’ personal life such as those popular reality shows “Jersey Shore” and “The Kardashian” is a dramatic and humorous aim for generation-x crowd and not so much for older viewers. Therefore, the media create the mindset of post-modernist in ways that shape our lives to what we see in television, music, and advertisements.

The medium is the message

Postmodernism separates from modernist approaches to create its own perspective. While modernism is simple and sharp, postmodernism is more unique and steps away from the monotony.

Marshall McLuhan coins the phrase The Medium is the Message in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. What he really means by this phrase is the way information is presented to people will determine how they understand it. When reading a book that is later made into a film, you may find the raw information to generally be the same, but the message is completely different. One allows you to create visuals and see dialogue while the other gives visuals and allows you to interpret the dialogue the way it's presented. This is why people get frustrated when their favorite book becomes a movie. They have already stored the information and understood it from the book and then seeing it in a whole new media, visualized by someone else's understanding of the book, completely sets them off.

How I would connect this to Post Modernism and Modernism would mean that they are simply two different medias. Generally they both apply to the same things: art, music, decor, fashion, architecture etc. But they are two different ways of presenting something. How the person understands it depends on how the information is given to them.

The Medium is the Mass age

Canadian Philosopher Marshall McLuhan said that "the medium is the message." By this he means that it is the medium itself rather than the content exchanged within it that has a profound effect on society. I find what McLuhan says to be true as we can see evidence of it all around us.

Everyday we are connected through various mediums such as printed material, radio, television, the internet, smart phones, as well as many others. For every different medium that we communicate through there is an inherently different feel and effect that we experience. Non visual mediums such as books and radio leave an element of imagination up to the user. With visually stimulating mediums like television and movies we are all given the same images to interpret the content as apposed to books and radio where we are left to fill in the blanks.

The internet is a whole different experience than any other media the world has ever been exposed to. It is user controlled individual experience, that knows no boundaries.

Many people fail to realize the big picture of what is going on. We tend to focus on what the content of our mediums are and not the effect they have on the way we communicate.

Gaining Information

I agree with Marshall McLuhan when he says “The Medium is the Message”. When diving further into his thoughts on this topic, one such thought really stuck with me. He said that movies require little work on a person’s part to understand what is being conveyed but in comparison to a simple comic, one must really concentrate and put forth a conscious effort to get the information. The engagement factor for a movie compared to a comic is little and people walk away from the movie with the “information”.

I remember one time in my office, someone brought in a comic from one of those daily calendars. After having many people look at this comic, no one could figure out the meaning of this comic and we all walked away from this lacking the information the designer intended us to gain.

The comic designer failed to portray the information to the consumer. This exemplifies McLuhan’s theories that the medium is indeed the message. As designers, we need to be ultra aware of how we portray our information to the consumer. With so much technology and means of broadcast, we must be extremely conscious of our actions and take the time to research and develop the best medium to portray our message. McLuhan once said “When a thing is current, it creates currency.” Making ideas current and relative is part of our jobs as designers that is sometimes overlooked. If a consumer interacts with our work, whether it be a website, printed piece or a short film, if they walk away gaining no new information and knowledge, then we fail as a designer.

Post Modernism

When Jean-Francois Lyotard talked about Postmodernism he said "it is stripped of its humanistic and spiritual associations, its connection with education, teaching and human development, being simply rendered as 'data.'" Years later, this Postmodern "data" is all over the internet, consuming hours and hours of people's lives. The web as we know it today is a very postmodern place for everyone in the world to hang out. Anyone with any information is accepted on the web, much as they were in a Postmodern society when it first begun.

Postmodernism is a topic in this class because digital media today is something that people often hide behind in their life. The use of social media makes human connection obsolete because the user can hide behind a persona they create. The information they are posting cannot be guaranteed as accurate and is rarely relevant to bigger issues in the world. People consume themselves with reading and updating Facebook and Twitter. These applications don't have a humanistic quality and connection to them. You can have full conversations and get to know someone without ever really meeting them. The thought of perhaps having a best friend or boyfriend in the digital world that you've never met could fall under the thoughts behind postmodernism.

Social media also gives users an alternate way to get world news and thoughts then the standard newspaper or broadcast. Just by someone's personal update on Twitter, thousands of people could know the news that the person is experiencing. Social media, like postmodernism, gives people an alternate way of life, which right now is very popular.

Postmodernism & Design : A Brief Discussion

Postmodern thinking rejects the idea of accepting truths about our lives. This doesn’t mean that everything that you’ve known to be true is a lie. It just means that these so-called truths could be a lie, or they could be the truth, or they could be both the truth and a lie, or they could be some other alternative that I haven’t thought of yet. Who knows? This plurality is the essence of postmodernism.

Performance poet Taylor Mali jokes about the uncertainty of our generation in this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTSKU0FgZts. What Mali discusses, this indirect way of communicating, is a by-product of our postmodern society. Instead of sharing impassioned beliefs we share a collection of “possibilities”.

As a designer, I use and reject postmodern thinking. I feel so "postmodern" admitting that. While brainstorming, I allow myself to be open to all possibilities. Even the silliest ideas could work. However, when it is time to produce more serious drafts, I weed out the weaker concepts based on the truths of my target market. Good research produces smart (and effective) design.

The Medium is the Message

Coming from a marketing background, I agree with McLuhan's theory of consumer engagement. From that angle, the challenge is to understand how consumers might respond to the different elements being presented to them. With that said, I'm a bit confused what the medium itself can tell us about ourselves or the consumers we're trying to engage.

"...This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time."

I get that as designers we need to reach our audience using the appropriate channels, but what I'm not clear on from a consumer angle is the benefit we get by focusing on how we're being reached? As consumers nowadays, we want instant gratification - get what what we need and move on. From a business perspective, I would assume we would want the consumer to focus on the content.

I don't know if it's because it's Sunday night and I'm exhausted, but something isn't clicking for me here. Am I missing or misinterpreting something that anyone can shed some light on? :)

Postmodernism

As I understand postmodernism, it is an attempted to move away from the modernism movement which focuses on facts and science for inspiration in art and religion. Postmodernism describes a time when people began to realize they need something more than scientific facts to live their life by. The realization then came that even though we are able to prove certain things through science that may disprove certain religious beliefs, it is those religious beliefs(in some cases) that give a person reason for living. Postmodernism is the movement that created a push toward a more spiritual and throughout provoking ideal that contrasted with the modernism movement of certainty and scientific fact.

This push toward a postmodernism was felt through in many different walks of life such as architectures, painting, home living, religion, science, and many other ways. I feel as though postmodernism is a topic in this class because we may be theorizing about what type of movement we are in currently or will be experiencing in future as technology and the age of mass media becomes ever bigger in society. And the profession we are currently looking to become part of may not exist in a few years.

Post-Modernism

Many articles online start out by saying that postmodernism cannot be defined but only described. This holds truth to many postmodernists because they believe that their are no limits or boundaries when speaking of postmodernism.

Postmodernism was created to reject the ideals of the modernist movement. This new movement wanted to fully reject the existence of any ultimate theory or guideline to adhere to. Ultimately, many might think that this would consist of rejecting modernism in its entirety. However, postmodernists simply referenced the past movements of modernism as if it was embarrassing to remember, in order to create a new response in its rejection. By doing so, the postmodernist was able to use the past in order to make something new and different, showing an absolute change in its comparison to the past movement of modernism. Through change, the rejection of the past was fully shown by reactions to the new.

One example of comparing modernism and postmodernism was shown in the film The Fountainhead. In this film, the people of New York believed that the city buildings (or any new buildings being built) should consist of the ideals that modernists used in the past. Many believed that a buildings architectural design should be strongly based off of past design principles, and its views of rationality. They felt that each building in the city should have cohesiveness with one another rather than being different. The people running the city mostly didn't care about change. Howard Roark (the lead character and architect in the film) wanted to stray away from old traditions, focusing on the experimentation of new ideas. Roark was unwilling to compromise and change his designs because he felt strongly about his own ideals. Roark rejected modernist ideas of the past in order to create something new. Having the idea of change and the will to reject past principles and beliefs defined Roark as a postmodernist.

The full Wikipedia document about postmodernism talks about religion, literature, architecture and so on. After reading the wikipedia article you can only follow the consistencies and or the commonalities of postmodernism as it relates to each topic.

"The Medium is the Message"

Marshall McLuhan is considered by many to be the first father and leading prophet of the electronic age. He was known for his understanding of technology and how it relates to society and culture. In his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man McLuhan introduces the phrase "The Medium is the Message". McLuhan meant this phrase to mean that the information that is inside is not as important as the medium itself.

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness? (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man p.61)

I found the paragraph above to be rather interesting, he talks about the globe as a single consciousness which could arguably be called the internet today. A blending of everyone together, sharing information and interacting with one another.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a rebellion of the modernist era and modernist thinking. Its primary values are placed in the existence of truth on an individual level. Thereby making the argument that the truth of something, whatever that be, is perceived differently by each person according to his/her experiences, and that no universal truths exist, but that we define our own truths but they are only relevant to ourselves.

Therefore, every truth is (according to the Postmodernist) defined by experiences. A story that is read in a book creates a different experience for a person than the same story seen as a movie. This leads into what McLuhan was discussing in "The Medium is the Message" when he argues that the way in which a message is presented is more important that the message itself.

I can see how this applies to us as designers. Often we are not the ones who choose the content of our work, but instead we must place that message into a container of our design that produces within others the experience of our choosing. Hence why for us the medium truly is the message.

Welcome to the Blog: Assignment 1

Read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

Write:

1. Send Instructor your email address. Register on the blog site.
2. Research: “The Medium is the Message” – who said it? Why? What does it mean? Be prepared to discuss in class, do you agree with this person or not?

Blog about the reading OR find your own web-based article on postmodernism, post it and comment on that.  If you want a specific topic, theorize about why postmodernism is a topic in this class.