Posts Tagged ‘images’

Week 3 Lifestream commentary

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Much of my lifestream this week contains twitter comments about the reading we have been doing.  I am still getting used to using Twitter and often find it dififcult to find a thread – but I am not the only one!

“the chronological order does not necessarily guarantee a linear reading sequence*. There is no way to thread sub-discussions within a particular #hashtag discussion and if you post 3-4 tweets within a short period of time and someone replies, you can’t always be sure to which tweet s/he is referring.” Bill Babouris via Twitter 7th October

Too true Bill!

I found Kress to be quite frustrating this week with his insistance on the power of image over the word and that the future has to be graphical:

“Kress – true that language develops over time but so do images – is why it is hard to read hieroglyphs cos the meaning has been lost. ” Sarah Payne via Twitter 5th October

However I have already blogged about that this week and will not go into it further here.

I have been collecting some links on using image instead of words to support Kress and my digital artifact. This included a tweet:

“sarahp @andym3112 #ededc Kress. ‘depiction shows the world’- but open to different cultural interpretation that language avoids http://bit.ly/DusEQ [sezpayne2].”

This tweet link goes to an article called Ad Analysis – The HSBC campaign which discusses the dangers of using non-verbal communication instead of words. Something that Kress does not seem to consider!

Another topic of Twitter conversation has been how we will create our digital artifact. I have the germ of an idea in my head and I will have to go away and play with it – but I plan to tie it in with Kress and his thoughts that the image has the power. Lets see how well it goes without the words to go with it!

Kress and the passage of time

Monday, October 5th, 2009

The basic concept of this piece is that words are ordered and therefore restrictive imposing an inequality of power between the author and the reader. The example he used to demonstrate this was the Institute of Education website and the Boy Electrician novel. He laments the fact that the boy electrician is textual and therefore linear, whereas the new IoE has a series of graphics and links allowing the user to choose the information they want to see.

The novel forces the user to follow the tale in the order determined by the author, and not in any other order of their choosing. This seems to be a very simplified view because I cant help thinking that a novel is linear because time is linear! One event leads on to another event and then another - a tale has a beginning, a middle and an end. Taking any of these events out of order renders the tale nonsensical and therefore pointless! However a website that is a disparate collection of facts can be grouped together in some sort of order but these groups do not need to be linear.

They require different treatments because they are different mediums. He could be considered to be comparing apples and oranges!