1. Instructor's Introduction
2. Student Presentation: Diana Solomon
3. A hypertext of materials that may be useful for class discussion

• Supplementary Resources for Class
• Other Works That May Be Mentioned in Class ( = especially recommended)
  
  • General Works:
    • Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996-97), especially vol. I: 40-47, 60-65, 246-47
    • William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone, The Virtual Corporation: Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century (New York: HarperCollins, 1992)
    • Gene I. Rochlin, Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1997)
  • Development of the Computer:
    • Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York: BasicBooks / HarperCollins, 1996)
    • Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998)
    • Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993)
    • Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)
    • Ken Polsson, Chronology of Events in the History of Microcomputers
    • Robert H'obbes' Zakon, Hobbes Internet Timeline 4.2
    • Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (New York: TV Books, 1998)
  • Graphic Design History
    • Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design, 2d ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983)
    • Paul Rand, A Designer's Art (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985)

We "looked" at the world picture of information in the mainframe age last time. Today we pick up where we left off. A gigantic change altered the landscape of information in the 1980s and 1990s when the convergence of the personal computer and networking created a new kind of computing and, with it, an experientially new paradigm of "information" that subsumed the previous paradigms of communication, media, and mainframe computing. That new paradigm may be simply called for short, "interfacing," the kind of combined communicating, mediating, and computing that now occurs when we work in networked information envirionments (personal computers, client/server networks, the Internet) within the new organizational structures that Manuel Castells calls "network enterprise."

The goal of this class is to correlate the historical transition from mainframes to networks with the emergence of the graphical user interfaces (GUI's) that resulted in our present windowed, hyperlinked "interface culture" (as Steven Johnson calls it). What does information in the networked age "look" like (what are its phenomenological, psychological, social, aesthetic implications)? What is the relation of this look to the past look of information as it descended from the time of the early 20th-century avant-garde through Bauhaus to the International Style that dominated corporate imagery in the mass media and mainframe ages (e.g., Paul Rand's designs for IBM)? And, meanwhile, whither textuality?

(1) A Short History of Information Technology in the 20th Century (Part II) (See also Part I on the Mainframe Era)

• Foundational technologies of the 1960's-70's: the microprocessor, digital telecom switch, optical fiber, the GUI interface (Douglas Engelbart in 1968; Alan Kay and Xerox PARC in 1972)
• 1975-Present: Invention of the Personal Computer
  • 1975: Altair 8800 (first microprocessor computer); Bill Gates and Paul Allen decide to develop a BASIC programming system for the machine; Microsoft formed in 1975; contracts with IBM in 1980 to create MS-DOS operating system
  • 1975: Creation of the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, CA (near Palo Alto and Stanford U.); Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak attend the Club meetings, create the first crude "Apple" in a few weeks; Apple II in 1976-77; Jobs visits Xerox Parc in 1979 and sees the future of the GUI interface; Apple's Macintosh computer in 1984
  • 1978-80: Creation of the early "killer apps" (applications) for the personal computer that would soon make it de rigeur in the business world: the spreadsheet (VisiCalc), word-processing (WordStar)
  • 1981: IBM's PC Personal Computer introduces personal computing to the workplace (by 1984, 35% of the business information technology market is captured by PCs)
  • 1981-Present: increasing power and speed of personal computers; dominance of GUI (Graphical User Interface) operating systems such as Windows (Windows 1 appears in 1985, Windows 3 in 1990)
• 1970-Present: Invention of the Network
  • Key developments of the 1970's:
    • Upgrading of telecom networks with electronic switches/routers and broadband transmission capabilities
    • 1970: Creation of the ARPAnet or ancestral Internet (one of the original four nodes of the net is UCSB)
    • 1973: Invention of Ethernet
    • 1974: Invention of TCP/IP protocol
    • Appearance of the modem
  • Key developments of the 1980's
    • Dominance of "client/server" paradigm in the office (as opposed to "dumb terminal/mainframe"); rise of LANs (Local Area Networks)
    • Rapid extension of WANs (Wide Area Networks), especially the Internet
    • Increase in modem speeds
• 1990s: The Decade of Convergence (convergence of personal computing and WAN/telecom networking)
  • 1991: Commercial use of the Internet (previously a military and educational domain); privatization of the Internet "backbone" by 1995
  • 1992: Invention of World Wide Web
  • 1993-94: Mosaic and Netscape Web browsers
  • Five million Internet hosts (servers) by 1995
  • TCP/IP used for the Internet now used in the LAN context to create "intranets"
    

(3) Definition of TCP/IP (the Internet protocol for "packet-switched" information transmission) from Microsoft Press Computer Dictionary, 3rd. ed. (Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press, 1997):

• TCP: "The protocol within TCP/IP that governs the breakup of data messages into packets to be sent via IP, and the reassembly and verification of the complete messages from packets received by IP"
• IP: "The protocol within TCP/IP that governs the breakup of data messages into packets, the routing of the packets from sender to destination network and station, and the reassembly of the packets into the original data messages at the destination."
• Packet-Switching: "A message-delivery technique in which small units of information (packets) are relayed through stations in a computer network along the best route available between the source and the destination. A packet-switching network handles information in small units, breaking long messages into multiple packets before routing. Although each packet may travel along a different path, and the packets composing a message may arrive at different times or out of sequence, the receiving computer reassembles the original message correctly [ . . . ]. The Internet is an example of a packet-switching network."
• Packet: "In packet-switching networks, a transmission unit of fixed maximum size that consists of binary digits representing both data and a header containing an identification number, source and destination addresses, and sometimes error-control data."

(4) Alan Liu, from Ultrabasic Guide to the Internet for Humanities Users at UCSB (Santa Barbara, CA: UCSB Bookstore, 1994), "Capsule History" of the Internet, pp. 47-48:)

The Internet is the global "network of networks" or meta-network that currently links over 2,217,000 host or server computers around the world via hardwire, satellite, and other communication channels. Most of these nodes serve multiple, local computers.

Initiated in 1969 with just four nodes (at UCLA, Stanford, University of Utah, and UCSB), the Internet—then known as ARPAnet—was originally developed under Pentagon sponsorship in part to sustain U. S. computer connectivity in the event of a nuclear strike. The design specifications called for it to connect point A to Z over just about any mismatched assortment of intervening hardware and software routes; and to do so flexibly such that the destruction of some routes would not block data getting through by other means. In the beginning, that is, the Internet was what contemporary cinema calls "post-apocalypse." It was the information highway for the road warrior.

How to ensure connectivity amid the hypothetical rubble? The elegant savagery of the solution parallels "a thousand plateaus," "lines of flight," "multiplicities," "schizophrenia," "packs," "many wolves," "bodies without organs," and all the rest of the screaming, postmodern philosophical horde. The solution lay in "packet-switching." In packet-switched data transmission (later standardized in the TCP/IP protocol that is the circulatory system of the present Internet), messages are broken up into discrete "packets" each prefaced by a header identifying its origin, destination, and sequential position in the overall message. Then the packets are released like a flock of carrier pigeons to find their own way across a patchwork of nodes each of which assigns routing directions "on the fly." (As it were: "Weather advisory: heavy network traffic in the north; fly south." Or again: "nuclear strike in Chicago; go through Dallas.") To stay with the metaphor: some packets fly north, some south; some make a beeline, some get tired and rest for a while. But in the end (usually), all arrive at the destination and are reassembled in their original order.

As evidenced by the logarithmic increase in nodes, users, and uses during the '70's and '80's, the Internet concept was highly successful—so successful, indeed, that it rapidly outgrew its original military framework (a separate military MILnet split off in 1983). In 1989, the National Science Foundation (NSF) took over sponsorship of the Internet and initiated a series of bandwidth and speed upgrades to the national linkway or "backbone." Participation by educational, government, and other such institutions was subsidized on the understanding (formalized in an AUP or Accepted Use Policy) that the Internet could not be used for commercial purposes.

By the 1990's, however, the business world wanted in as well. Much of the current story of the Internet, therefore, has to do not only with its outreach to such previously underconnected portions of the research-and-education community as humanities departments and undergraduates but with the creation of CIX, CommerceNet, MecklerWeb, and other commercial extensions of the Net. These "net profit" universes, as it were, are hard at work trying to adapt the decentralized, "many to many" pragmatics of the Net to the traditional "one to many" structures of mass-marketing (and vice versa). Such mainstreaming has been paralleled by a frenzy of Internet coverage in newspapers, TV, and other conventional one-to-many broadcast media. As witnessed in the salacious opportunism of the 1994 Los Angeles Times "scoop" on pornographic graphics files secreted in a publicly-funded research computer, or again—with a different kind of lust—in the recent, wall-to-wall press coverage of telecommunication and cable company mergers promising the proverbial "500 channels of on-demand entertainment," the one-to-many media does not yet know quite what to make of the legitimacy of many-to-many networking. Either the Net is all pornography or it is the corporate promised land. As of 1994, the NSF is officially ceding Internet sponsorship to the private sector and retiring its no-commercial-use rule. Concommitantly, therefore, the Internet has suddenly begun to worry about such prerequisites for doing business online as "authentication," "encryption," and "pricing structure."

The question before us in this class may be put as follows:

Albert Borgmann has written of the "blackboxing" of information technology. Contemporary enlightenment, he observes, "rests on a substratum of machinery that is becoming concealed from the understanding of those who operate on its surface. The blackboxing that is the consequence of progress in information technology encloses ever larger spaces of hardware and software. It is an unavoidable development (p. 176)."

The mainframe was one, big black box (like the invisible General Observer's tower in the Panopticon).

Now there is a different kind of black box—the Network—whose opaqueness is not an interior phenomenon but instead a pure exteriority (the "infinity" of the network that Steven Johnson describes). (The question about what is happening in one's personal computer, in other words, pales by comparison with the question about what is happening "out there" on the network with its galaxies of routers, switches, nodes, servers, and clients.)

Yet, following up on the phenomenology of "vision" that attended the mainframe era (documented by Zuboff), the irony is that our entire understanding of the black box of contemporary information rests upon the idea of transparent vision. When we picked up a telephone in the 1950s, we "communicated." When we watched TV in the same era, we "mediated" (consumed media). When we sat down at a dumb terminal to input data in the mainframe age, we "computed." What is it we now do when we sit down at our computer in the networking age? We do all of the above within the horizon of a new kind of action (complete with its own verb): we "interface." And above all, "interfacing" occurs under the sanction of an ideology of vision (and not, for example, of the "reading" that in actuality still occupies us so much while online). The universe of the interface arises at the complex intersection of whole new machineries of display with the entire graphic-design history of the 20th century. At that intersection is the "look and feel" of information. (Corollary: the great "author" of our times is the "designer." Once there was art; now there is design.)

So to reask the question: What does information in the networked age "look" like (what are its phenomenological, psychological, social, aesthetic implications)? What is the relation of this look to the past look of information as it descended from the time of the early 20th-century avant-garde through Bauhaus to the International Style that dominated corporate imagery in the mass media and mainframe ages (e.g., Paul Rand's designs for IBM)? And, meanwhile, whither [wither] poor textuality?

Excerpt from the presentation:

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Question or challenge posed during the presentation:

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• Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (1987)
• Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word (1994)
• Jan Tschichold, The New Typography (1928)
• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "A White Paper on Information" (1998)

Instructor's Preliminary Questions

Viewpoint 1: There is the Author in me that instinctively rejects the visual in writing (does anyone else share this purism?). This Author believes that what counts are ideas, and that the best "mark" of those ideas is language–whose talent is "re-vision" (ways to make us see or hear double: devices of emphasis, quotation and allusion, metaphors, puns, play with prefixes, etc.)

Viewpoint 2: There is a closet Designer in me that instinctively craves well-designed furniture, pens, clothes, cars, and media (magazines, film, CD jackets, etc.). Good Design is something I have learned subliminally from the whole tradition of design history that treats text as part of a total graphical or "typo-photo" composition, that poses a dialectic between asymmetry and unity, that equates starkness and modularity (e.g., sans serif) with "clarity," and that frames all of the above within the close universe of the "grid" system of design. Here the "marks" are graphical, and what they mark is a realm of "ideas" that is not the same as the ideas in the text.

How are the Author and the Designer in us reconciled? Are they reconciled? Should they be reconciled?

Is Design a way of life? Is there anything "outside" design?

Now look at the movement of Design into the information interface:

• Jan Tschichold, poster and book cover, 1924-25 (from Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design, 2nd ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), p. 298
• Paul Rand, title pages, 1948-49 (from Paul Rand, A Designer's Art (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), p. 178
• Paul Rand, package designs for IBM, 1973-84 (ibid., pp. 220-21)
• Paul's a Computer Geek Home Page
• Flaunt Page
• Celebrities Page

What does networked information look like? (Or, what is wrong with the design of Rob and Katie's page?

Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (1987) (excerpts selected and titled by instructor of this course)

The Early Modern Web Page: Graphic Design and Text Before the Dominance of Literacy

At least in the cities, then, there existed a relationship to printed matter somewhere between the individual's reading of a book, an activity that takes place privately, within the reader's forum internum, and the simple hearing of a written text, which occurs, for example, when listening to a sermon. In the workshop, in the dissident churches, in the festive confraternities, writing in typographic form was close at hand, even for those unable to read. Manipulated in common, by some taught, by others deciphered, printed matter was profoundly integrated into the life of the community, and it made its mark on the culture of the mass of city dwellers.

Always printed on large format sheets, the confraternity images combined picture and text. In some of them, the focus is on the engraved design; in others, for example the placards of pardons and indulgences or the listing of confraternity membership, the printed text is more important. But a vignette usually accompanies the text of such pieces; in turn, the large pictures left space in increasing amounts to writing[ . . . ].

These images provided prayers and pious formulas, they gave the names of the confraternity's masters and churchwardens, and they offered tangible or figurative form to the object of common devotion (the Holy Sacrament, the Rosary, the patron saint). They fed the piety of both those who could and those who could not read. One can imagine that their familiar presence at the center of daily life was an introduction to written culture for those to whom the schoolhouses of the city had failed to teach their ABCs.

In the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, then, the printing profession gave wide diffusion to an abundance of typographic materials designed to be posted on or pasted to the walls of houses and churches, bedrooms and workshops. These materials appeared in a variety of forms that almost always permitted a double reading – of text and image. Thus it is beyond doubt that printing profoundly transformed a culture that, until then, had been deprived of contact with the written word. A change of this importance, which made the printed word familiar and necessary to a full comprehension of the images offered to view, was quite probably decisive for the introduction of literacy in urban areas, a literacy that was both significant and precocious and that in due time created a "popular" market for the book.

Not surprisingly, many typical features of early avant-garde practices are manifest in these [early twentieth-century avant-garde] printed works: a strongly referential investigation of the formal properties of the medium; a blurring of the line between the forms and sites of so-called high art and the forms and situations of mass media; a muddying of distinctions between image and language and a subversive attack on their fundamental properties as representation and an even more systematic attack on the conventions of literary and visual symbolic form. (pp. 91-92)

It could be argued and demonstrated, however, that the development of poster design for artistic and commercial purposes in the late nineteenth century created a graphic presence in the urban environment which contributed to the cross-disciplinary sensibility in which the avant-garde attitude toward the materiality of visual forms of written language developed. (p. 92)

But the most important context for typographic experimentation, the realm in which these printed artifacts gain their specificity, is in their relation to mainstream publications, including advertising graphics. The graphic arts witnessed the development of typographic forms to accommodate the burgeoning needs of the advertising industry. (p. 93)

The advertising realm had burgeoned in response to the demands of the mass market strategies of industrial production. The result was an increased interest in graphics as an interface between producer and consumer to maximize the potential of a medium which had undergone, by contrast, comparatively little change in the three centuries since its invention. (p. 94)

The distinctive feature of this typographic enunciation is a distinction between marked and unmarked texts, with the additional possibility of distinguishing between public and private, personal language through their typographic treatment. in general, the split between marked and unmarked texts corresponds to the split between commercial and literary uses of typography, reflecting the distinction in linguistic modes of enunciation by which these domains are frequently distinguished from each other. (p. 94)

        That the tradition of the unmarked text was established with the printing of bibles is not incidental to the ways in which its mode of transcendent seeming authority comes to operate within the literary field which models itself upon that original presentation. Literary works, while they adopted certain modifications such as running heads and elaborate title pages, essentially adopted the unmarked mode of Gutenberg's biblical setting as their norm. The literary text is the single grey block of undisturbed text, seeming, in the graphic sense, to have appeared whole and complete. The literary text wants no visual interference or manipulation to disturb the linguistic enunciation of the verbal matter. All interference, resistance, must be minimized in order to allow the reader a smooth reading of the unfolding linear sequence. The aspirations of typographers serving the literary muse are to make the text as uniform, as neutral, as accessible and seamless as possible, and it remains the dominant model for works of literature, authoritative scholarly prose, and any other printed form in which seriousness of purpose collapses with the authority of the writer, effacing both behind the implicit truth value of the words themselves.
        The marked text had its most vibrant spurt of development in the domain of advertising, where manipulation, practically for its own sake, motivated the development of a wide range of typefaces, styles, and conventions governing their use. (p. 95)

By the end of the nineteenth century, the features of marked typography included: the use of a wide range of type faces, styles, and sizes with mixtures and juxtapositions of these proliferating within a single sheet; the breakup of the page into various zones of activity which received very distinct graphic treatments; the use of circular, shaped, or diagonal elements across the normal horizontal page; die use of vertical elements; and finally, the use of paragonnage—the incorporation of several different typefaces and/or sizes within a single line or word. Even without the incorporation of distinctly pictorial elements, the marked text became decidedly more visual, acting on the seductive methods and shock effects that could be generated by graphic variety. In addition, the site of these works was public—the posted handbills, theater announcements, government notices, publicity circulars, and a myriad of other printed sheets came to be a feature of the urban landscape in the late nineteenth century. (pp. 96-97)

The avant-garde poets of the 1910s became the graphic designers, teachers, and systematic theorists of the 1920s and 1930s while another generation emerged to follow their directives in the codification of design. There is perhaps no more perverse (and successful) transformation of the formal radicality of early modernism into the seamless instrument of corporate capitalist enterprise than this progression from radical graphic aesthetics into Swiss-style modem design. The process by which the very elements which marked the radicality of the early work and its utopian agenda of intervention through the means of mass production print media become ordered and codified into a system which enunciated an insidiously complicit and instrumentally enabling corporate style is duplicated by no other aspect of the early avant-garde. Nowhere else in the history of modernism, except, perhaps, in the applied arts of architecture and industrial design, does this peculiar transformation occur. (pp. 238-39)

What had begun, in the 1910s, as a vivid and exuberant exploration of the materiality of signification, became, by the end of the 1920s, in the hands of Herbert Bayer and Jan Tschichold, an ordering of visual graphics which caused that very materiality to efface itself, to disappear, under the style of a graphics whose very adjectival character—elegant, clean, streamlined, balanced, correct-betray its repressive force. (p. 239)

The use of graphics as the means to make and perpetuate the image of the corporation, and through it, the virtuous projection of themes of progress, industry, and capitalist consumption, was essential to the development of the public fantasmatic notion of modern life. In that culture, images and signs circulate without relation to their mode of production, and they sign the existence of a spectacle designed expressly for consumption, not productive necessity, but its surplus. Graphic design is not only the sign par excellence of this surplus, but is the very site in which it comes into being and is itself consumed as spectacle through the formal mechanics of display.
        The invention of graphic design as both a professional discipline and a curricular category within academic institutions which had formerly considered visual arts only in their beaux arts forms occurred within the institutional framework of schools in the Soviet Union and Germany to which the leading figures of Bauhaus and Constructivism (and, even more so, Productivism) gave initiative. (pp. 241-42)

        Tschichold was particularly articulate with respect to the political and social components of design aesthetics. His youthful book, Die Neue Typographie (published in 1928) had established both tenets and legitimacy for the clean lines of what became classic Swiss design. In that work he asserted the basis of a "modern" typography, countering the chaotic disorder which he saw as rampant in commercial practices. The typographic manuals and the printed evidence of commercial printing in the early twentieth century—which has all of the shortcomings and none of the virtues of the more artistic forms of typographic experiment—bear him out on this point. The particular habit of centering type on the page, hanging all the miscellaneous fragments of ad copy, or title page, or editorial offerings on a central axis (sometimes several on a single sheet) without any regard for the overall design and shape of the page came under particular attack.
        Tschichold effectively changed this approach through his work, publications, and lecturing on the topic of asymmetrical typography The premise of this approach was that a document, page, section were a whole and should have the balances and counterbalances of the textual blocks worked out rather than left to the hazards of space and the chance combinations of display faces. Opting for simpler, less decorative faces, for fewer faces in a more selective range of sizes, Tschichold streamlined the look of the pieces he designed.
        By 1933, however, Tschichold found himself accused of being antiGerman and degenerate by the emerging forces of the Social Democrats. At that point he left Germany for Basle and gradually began to consider the rigidity and orthodoxy of his "New Typography" as unconscionable, complicit with the attitudes of National Socialism. He renounced the "efficiency" he had touted so enthusiastically in his earlier work and took a strong stand against the rhetoric of a techno-efficiency which was seeming increasingly antibumanistic and totalitarian. He became convinced that the "unity" of style could be used to mask, shield, and conceal many contradictions in texts, images, and communication more generally.
        Tschichold's justifiable horror at the ways in which a technics of efficiency articulated as an aesthetic could be deformed in the service of a Nazi regime of an all-too-smoothly functioning apparatus of destruction had caused him to rethink the orthodoxy of his youthful statements in Die Neue Typographie. But the link between the militarism of the National Socialists and the rigidity of rules of order laid out in his original plan for typographic reform would not hold as the defining characteristic of strict typographic practice in the post-war period. The forms of repression according to which the structuring of power began to reformulate in the period following World War 11 would not have the conspicuous appearance or readily identifiable hallmarks of a military regime. Rather, the face of power, the image by which it would work its force in the world, would become the international corporate image of seamlessness and synthetic, technologically perfect, production. The daring diagonals, graphic manipulations, and experimental attention to the material features of visual language which had been given such slapdash nurturing in the experiments of Dada, Futurism, and Cubism had become well-behaved elements of the corporate machine, and the advertising profession became a most efficient partner in the business of promoting consumption as an effect of seamless images and a smoothly functioning ideological apparatus. The devices so conspicuously laid bare in the experimental work of the (albeit politically disparate) early twentieth-century artists became, within two decades, the most efficient means of concealing not only the marks of artistic and literary enunciation, but of the structures of economic power in corporate, state, and military production as well. (pp. 244-45)

Jan Tschichold, The New Typography (1928) (excerpts selected by instructor of this course)

Modern man has to absorb every day a mass of printed matter which, whether he has asked for it or not, is delivered through his letter-box or confronts him everywhere out of doors. At first, today's printing differed from that of previous times less in form than in quantity. But as the quantity increased, the "form" also began to change: the speed with which the modern consumer of printing has to absorb it means that the form of printing also must adapt itself to the conditions of modern life. As a rule we no longer read quietly line by line, but glance quickly over the whole, and only if our interest is awakened do we study it in detail. (p. 64)

It was left to our age to achieve a lively focus on the problem of "form" or design. While up to now form was considered as something external, a product of the "artistic imagination" (Haeckel even imputed such "artistic intentions" to nature in his Art Forms in Nature), today we have moved considerably closer to the recognition of its essence through the renewed study of nature and more especially to technology (which is only a kind of second nature). Both nature and technology teach us that "form" is not independent, but grows out of f unction (purpose), out of the materials used (organic or technical), and out of how they are used. This was how the marvellous forms of nature and the equally marvellous forms of technology originated. (p. 65)

The essence of the New Typography is clarity. This puts it into deliberate opposition to the old typography whose aim was "beauty" and whose clarity did not attain the high level we require today. This utmost clarity is necessary today because of the manifold claims for our attention made by the extraordinary amount of print, which demands the greatest economy of expression. (p. 66)

The New Typography is distinguished from the old by the fact that its first objective is to develop its visible form out of the functions of the text. It is essential to give pure and direct expression to the contents of whatever is printed: just as in the works of technology and nature, "form" must be created out of function. Only then can we achieve a typography which expresses the spirit of modern man. The function of printed text is communication, emphasis (word value), and the logical sequence of the contents. (pp. 66-67)

        Working through a text according to these principles will usually result in a rhythm different from that of former symmetrical typography. Asymmetry is the rhythmic expression of functional design. In addition to being more logical, asymmetry has the advantage that its complete appearance is far more optically effective than symmetry.
        Hence the predominance of asymmetry in the New Typography. Not least, the liveliness of asymmetry is also an expression of our own movement and that of modern life; it is a symbol of the changing forms of life in general when asymmetrical movement in typography takes the place of symmetrical repose. This movement must not however degenerate into unrest or chaos. A striving for order can, and must, also be expressed in asymmetrical form. It is the only way to make a better, more natural order possible, as opposed to symmetrical from which does not draw its laws from within itself but from outside. (p. 68)

The New Typography, on the other hand, emphasizes contrasts and uses them to create a new unity. [ . . . ] The real meaning of form is made clearer by its opposite. We would not recognize day as day if night did not exist. The ways to achieve contrast are endless: the simplest are large/small, light/dark, horizontal/vertical, square/round, smooth/rough, closed/open, coloured/plain; all offer many possibilities of effective design. (p. 70)

        Like everyone else, we too must took for a typeface expressive of our own age. Our age is characterized by an all-out search for clarity and truth, for purity of appearance. So the problem of what typeface to use is necessarily different from what it was in previous times. We require from type plainness, clarity, the rejection of everything that is superfluous. [ . . . ] A good letter is one that expresses itself, or rather "speaks," with the utmost distinctiveness and clarity. And a good typeface has no purpose beyond being of the highest clarity.
        Sanserif, looked at in detail, is admittedly capable of improvement, but there is no doubt that it is the basic form from which the typeface of the future will grow.
         Other individual expressive possibilities of type have nothing to do with typography. They are in contradiction to its very nature. They hinder direct and totally clear communication, which must always be the first purpose of typography. (p. 78)

         We today have recognized photography as an essential typographic tool of the present. We find its addition to the means of typographic expression an enrichment, and see in photography exactly the factor that distinguishes our typography from everything that went before. Purely flat typography belongs to the past. The introduction of the photographic block has enabled us to use the dynamics of three dimensions. It is precisely the contrast between the apparent three dimensions of photography and the plane form of type that gives our typography its strength.
        The question, which type should be used with photographs, used to be answered in the most obvious way by choosing type that looked grey or was even printed in grey; also by using very thin or very individualistic types, and other methods. As in other kinds of work, the solution was superficial, reducing everything to one level: everything became a uniform grey, which hardly concealed the compromise.
        Uninhibited and so contemporary, the New Typography found the solution at once. Since its aim was to create artistic unity out of contemporary and fundamental forms, the problem of type never actually existed: it had to be sanserif. And since it regarded the photographic block as an equally fun damental means of expression, a synthesis was achieved: photography + sanserif!
        At first sight it seems as if the hard black forms of this typeface could not harmonize with the often soft greys of photos. The two together do not have the same weight of colour: their harmony lies in the contrast of form and colour. But both have two things in common: their objectivity and their impersonal form, which mark them as suiting our age. This harmony is not superficial, as was mistakenly thought previously, nor is it arbitrary: there is only one objective type form—sanserif—and only one objective representation of our times: photography. Hence typo-photo, as the collective form of graphic art, has today taken over from the individualistic form handwriting-drawing.
        By typo-photo we mean any synthesis between typography and photography. Today we can express ourselves better and more quickly with the help of photography than by the laborious means of speech or writing. (p. 92)

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "A White Paper on Information" (1998) (excerpts selected by instructor of this course)

Information’s presence in the Sprint commercial has been aestheticized, and aestheticized in a radically visual manner. The computer-generated imagery is compelling and it is cool—"eye candy," in the contemporary vernacular. Nor is this an isolated phenomenon; aestheticized representations of information are ubiquitous in the contemporary media culture. From this I want to suggest that no full understanding of information in the present moment is possible absent recourse to the disciplinary methodologies that have given us our most sophisticated analytical tools for understanding visual structures of representation—art history, film studies, graphic design, iconology, and visual semiotics, to name the most important.

From this I will contend that the consequence of much of the computer science done in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and more specifically of the so-called "Information Age"—an appellation introduced in H. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and which gained common currency in the early 1980s—is not only that we have more information, and not only that we can relay it more quickly and more efficiently and more economically between geographical locales that are more spatially disparate, but also that information itself has undergone a basic ontological shift. If the pronoun "itself" seems odd or out of place when subordinated to "information" in the preceding sentence, it is only because we are not used to thinking of information as possessed of any inherent qualities—a compelling but none the less historically specific view that was first introduced by Shannon at Bell Labs in 1949 when information was explicitly defined as a function of accurately transmitting messages independently of "meaning." That particular formulation is still relevant to the extent that electrical engineers and computer scientists rely on it as a basic tenet of systems architecture. But it seems to me to do little to capture the rich information-based imagery of the Sprint commercial, and still less to explain what a visualization textbook might mean when its authors characterize information as a unique way of seeing. Though it is true, as we know from Edward Tufte’s expansive studies, that we have always possessed heuristics for "envisioning information," in recent years this phrase has been literalized by rapid technical advances in computer science: both the widespread proliferation of graphical user interfaces, and more specifically the tremendous growth in such fields as computer modeling, simulation, and visualization.

"Hard data" of the sort I have been describing—either models, renderings, and visualizations, or the aestheticized constructions in the Sprint commercial—may soon be the only forms in which "information" is meaningful or even recognizable. [ . . . ] Yet, at precisely the moment data becomes invested with visual form as information, so too does it assume a cloak of representational artifice, thus taking its place in the multifaceted media array that has defined the popular contexts of the Information Age.

Here I want to argue that graphic design is actually possessed of a deeper and much more specific import for critical observers of the new media: that it is in fact the single most important arena in which the public learns to recognize the look and feel of information qua information.

As much or more than any of the scores of better-known prophets and pundits of the Information Age, it seems to me that Hofstadter has succeeded in putting his finger on one of the central dynamics of our times: that "information," which was once explicitly defined by computer scientists as a quality independent or indeed exempt from meaning has now, as a direct consequence of advances in computing technology, become meaningful in and of itself. By this I mean not that data is useful or intelligible without context and structure, but rather that the continuum involved in the creation of meaning through the process of interpreting data now encompasses degrees of abstraction and representational artifice which would have heretofore been considered "meaningful" only after the prior imposition of some second-order procedure or analysis.

An additional point of interest emerges from the visual glyph that is the histogram itself. Its spikes and valleys can be usefully understood not just as an abstract projection of the image, but also as an alternative and equally authoritative rendering of its underlying data structure. This is how the image "looks" to the computational algorithm that produced the histogram, and though the histogram might make make little sense to an untrained human eye, it makes a great deal of sense to the machine. The histogram suggests that we would be well advised to evaluate digital images and objects in a number of different informational states, any one of which can be said to be the image at a given moment and only one of which is the normative view. I say this not to be perverse, but because such an observation seems to me the unavoidable conseuqeunce of following the logic of what Nicholas Negroponte calls "being digital" to its inevitable conclusion. That is to say, just as electronic artifacts are capable of endless permutations by virtue of their underlying homogeneity as binary code—a fact often celebrated by boosters of the medium like Negroponte—so too are they capable of manifesting themselves in a variety of different representational configurations, only some of which may be said to corrrespond to those representational configurations (say a facsimile reproduction) which we have found to be valuable—or let us say "informative"—in our encounters with analog phenomena. If, as Baudrillard states, "A possible definition of the real is: that for which it is possible to provide an equivalent representation," we might also say that "a possible definition of the real is: that for which it is possible to provide an equally real altnernative presentation."

Computer-generated imagery will constitute an ever-expanding field of our vision—as the data visualizations I have been discussing above amply demonstrate, for they subordinate information "itself" to the various conventions of representational artifice. Because of this I am convinced that aesthetics and visual form will be the most vital site for information and media studies in the coming years; no media, by definition, can exist without mediation, and the willful suppression of mediation cannot be achieved without a simultaneous surrender of knowledge concerning the relationships among various material technologies, their implementation, and ourselves.

Thought Experiments in the "Vision" of Information

• Jan Tschichold, poster and book cover, 1924-25 (from Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design, 2nd ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), p. 298
• Paul Rand, title pages, 1948-49 (from Paul Rand, A Designer's Art (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), p. 178
• Paul Rand, package designs for IBM, 1973-84 (ibid., pp. 220-21)
• Paul's a Computer Geek Home Page
• Flaunt Page
• Celebrities Page

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• Geological Images (cf., Borgman, p. 173): DOE Petroleum Reservoir Characterization Project, Geological Images from U. Montana Computer Science Dept.
• Medscape (http://www.medscape.com/), Medical Images (http://www.medscape.com/Home/Search/formImages.html)
• Visualization of 3D MRI Human Head Data (Clint Potter, National Center for Supercomputing Applications)
• Mystery Picture A
• Identity of Mystery Picture
• Mystery Picture B
• Mystery Picture C
• Shoshana Zuboff, Interview 6

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• from Alan Liu, Ultrabasic Guide to the Internet for Humanities Users at UCSB (Santa Barbara, CA: UCSB Bookstore, 1994) (p. 52: visualization of the Internet
• Stuart Moulthrop, "Map" of Shadow of an Informand

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• Matt Kirschenbaum, "A White Paper on Information" (1998): "Here I want to argue that graphic design is actually possessed of a deeper and much more specific import for critical observers of the new media: that it is in fact the single most important arena in which the public learns to recognize the look and feel of information qua information. . . . So electronic media, I am arguing, assume material form through the models and renderings and visualizations that we create to interact with it in various information states. This interaction occurs at the immediate phenomenological level of the user interface, and it is here that the visual materiality of information has the potential to become aestheticized–even radically aestheticized. . . ."