INFOGRAPHIC The Nature of Medium

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INFOGRAPHICThe Nature of Medium

• Mind, Media and Society II
• (Applied McLuhanistics)
• Paulina Starzynska
• pstarzynska_at_gazeta.pl
• April 2nd, 2003

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Ways of reading - first tetrad

• ENH
• Interdependencies
• Diverse reading path
• Multiplicity of access points
• Direct access to information needed
• Salience, Interest
• RET
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Galileo

• REV
• Chaos
• Internet
• Noise, diffusion of interest (information
  overload)
• OBS
• Linear narration

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McLuhans context

• Our visual experience is now a mosaic of items
  assembled from every part of the globe, moment by
  moment. Lineal perspective and pictorial
  organization cannot cope with this situation
• Report on Project in Understanding Media, 1960
• Speeding up the components of any visually
  ordered structure or continuous space pattern
  will lead to breaking its connections and
  destroying its boundaries. They explode into the
  resonant gaps or interfaces that characterize the
  discontinuous structure of acoustic space.
• The Argument Causality in Electric World, 1973

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Conclusion I

• Infographic belongs to
• acoustic (or electric) culture

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But is it really something else?

• These news magazines are preeminently mosaic in
  form, offering not windows on the world like the
  old picture magazines, but presenting corporate
  images of society in action. Whereas the
  spectator of a picture magazine is passive, the
  reader of a new magazine becomes much involved in
  the making of meaning for the corporate image.
• Understanding Media, 1964
• ...the newspaper in setting up a dozen book pages
  on one page was already a big step towards this
  sort of cultural simultaneity and non-lineality.
• Counterblast, 1969

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But is it really something else?

• Time was perhaps the first magazine to apply the
  format of the telegraph press (i.e. the mosaic of
  items without connections) to the periodical,
  Just a dateline. The Time formula of mosaic in
  place of connected editorial features permits the
  juxtaposition of esoteric and trivial - the
  formula for creating environments, not just a
  point of view.
• Culture is Our Business, 1970
• Infographic can be seen as the next step in
  press mosaic structure

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On the other hand...

• Print enforces a certain kind of logic
  one-thing-at-the time, one-thing-leads-directly-to
  another logic, if/then, cause/effect the logic
  of us internalized
• Stephen Mitchell,
• The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, 1998
• The oral is the world of the non-linear, of
  all-at-onceness and ESP. There are no lines or
  directions in acoustic space, but rather a
  simultaneous field. It is non-Euclidean.
• Marshall McLuhan, Counterblast, 1969

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Lets probe

• Infographic Informational Graphic
• Info-rational Graphic

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Conclusion II

• Infographic belongs to
• visual culture
• as it stresses its cause-effect logic

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Attitude to reality - second tetrad

• ENH
• Objectivity
• RET
• Science in classical meaning (printed)

• REV
• Multiple subjectivity
• OBS
• Subjectivity
• (authors opinion on the topic)

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Conclusion III

• Infographic belongs to
• visual culture
• as it stresses its fixed point of view

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Content of infographic - third tetrad

• ENH
• (contents condensed to) slogan (in form of
  word/text or picture)
• RET

• REV
• cliche
• OBS
• sentence
• paragraph

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How it creates a metaphor?

• World in infographic is simplified and
  discretized. Objects are purified to notions or
  concepts.
• Figure key relations between concepts
• Ground
• diversity of objects
• complexity of the world
• infinite relations between objects

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Derrick said...

• They think that our brains are not fast enough.
  And of course, that is true, at least in
  comparison with digital computers. But our brains
  do not need to be fast, it is enough that they be
  clever, that is, extremely well-wired and
  connected. In reality our natural information
  processing capacities are much larger than we
  acknowledge. As McLuhan observed,
• Information overload leads to
  pattern-recognition.
• Derrick de Kerckhove, Skin of Culture

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Conclusion IV

• Infographic belongs to
• acoustic (or electric) culture
• as it represents a pattern
• (Mark Federmans comment
• this is not pattern recognition but pattern
  imposition)

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What does infographic to usin the context of
culture models?

• McLuhan prompts
• Russia now needs the press (as we formerly did
  the book) to translate a tribal and oral
  community into some degree of visual, uniform
  culture able to sustain a market system.
• (Understanding Media, 1964)
• Infographic translates traditional visual logic
  into new personalized and easy-to-access-and-nav
  igate acoustic structure

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Propaganda - conclusion

• This may be a very effective propaganda as it
  lets people think that they construct their
  meaning themselves but in fact gives them ready
  propaganda message
• (Thanks to Gianluca Baccanico for this comment)

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And now... Weather Forecast...

• infographic is composed of simplified and
  contextual elements
• infographic is composed of images and printed
  text
• reader has to choose his path of reading himself
• most of readers are not used to read infographic
• effort
• INFOGRAPHIC IS COOL

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McLuhans explanation

• Intensity or high definition engenders specialism
  and fragmentation in living as in entertainment,
  which explains why any intense experience must be
  forgotten, censored, and reduced to a very
  cool state before it can be learned or
  assimilated. (...) The censor protects our
  central system of values, as it does our physical
  nervous system by simply cooling off the onset of
  experience a great deal. For many people, this
  cooling system brings a lifelong state of psychic
  rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly
  observable in periods of new technology.
• (Understanding Media, 1964)

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One week of SeptemberThe Globe and Mail, Sep
13th , 2001
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One week of SeptemberNational Post, Sep 12th ,
2001

• During the week September 12th-18th all
  newspapers published number of quarter- to
  full-page infographics explaining 9-11 Attack

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Use of infographic in emotionally involving issues

• Infographic is often used to cool down the
  audience when topic is very emotionally
  involving.
• Number of big (e.g. half-page) infographics have
  been published not only after 9-11, but also
• after Columbia crash
• now, during the war with Iraq
• Press uses combination of infographic and photos
  (hot) to manipulate peoples fear of SARS