= one of the main points of the lecture

• Preliminary Class Business
• Media Literacy
• The Case of Graphic Design
• A Short History of Graphic Design
• References

Preliminary Class Business

• Reading Quizz this Friday
• 2 copies of Califia (the hypertext work assigned for next week) are in the library reserve room | How to read Califia

Media Literacy

Paradigm	Signature Technologies	Logical Architecture	Peak Epoch (Period of Monopolistic or Cartel Dominance)
Information as Communication	Telecom, Radio, Cryptography	Transmission Model	1940s-70s (ATT breakup in 1984)
Information as Mass Media	Radio, TV, Magazines	Broadcast Model	1950s-1970s
Information as Mainframe Computing	Mainframes and Minicomputers, Databases	Centralized information services
Information as Networking	PC's, Networks, Hypertext, Graphical User Interface (GUI)	Client/Server Architecture	1980s-2000s

• Last week we focused on the paradigm of information as communication. This week we concentrate on the other paradigm that became dominant after WW II: information as "media", a term that Webster's Ninth Collegiate Dictionary speculates first appeared in this sense "in the field of advertising [c. 1940]" (and that as of 1971 had not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary)
  
  What is "media" as a concept? Why did the concept emerge in the mid-20th century? What did it mean, in other words, that a general concept of media was suddenly needed at this time? (After all, as attested by Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," many modern media were already in existence even if the idea of "media" was not).
  
  This is not a media history or media theory course that can give a detailed answer to the question. But we can at least begin on an answer by noticing two underlying premises of modern "media"—the premises, it can be argued, that allowed "media" to emerge as a concept requiring a different kind of literacy from print-literacy.
  
  "Media" emerged conceptually when it was recognized that media-literacy was not print-literacy for two reasons:
  
  

  ---

  
  
  • 1. Media Meaning
    
    Here it is useful to view "Media" as a conceptual twin of "Communication." The paradigms of Communication and Media together consolidated our modern notion of "Information" in the years after WW II by creating a split in the notion of human knowledge.
    
    Remember that C.P. Snow had described in 1959 the divide of the "two cultures" of science and the humanities. (The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 1959). In the post-war era, information culture manifested its version of the "two cultures":
    
    

    Claude Shannon            INFORMATION      MEANING                                            Communication "semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem" Marshall McLuhan            INFORMATION     MEANING                                                    Media "the medium is the message" "For the 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. . . . 'the medium is the message' because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action."

    
    Thus was established the divorce of "data"/"media" from "knowledge" that created our contemporary, deeply split notion of "information"
    
    

    ---

    
    
  • 2. Media = Multimedia
    
    It would be possible to include in the chart above of "20th-Century Paradigms of Information" another row for "Information as Multimedia," since "multimedia" is as often equated today with information as communication, media, computing, or networking. But this would be redundant because the equation of "media" with multimedia was already there in the concept of media.
    
    We note that "media" is famously problematic syntactically because it is a plural noun often used in a singular sense. This is a symptom of the fact that the very idea of "media" involves awarenesss of a contest or negotiation among different media. Media was/were from the first aware of multimedia.
    
    

    The historical precedent: early literacy and visuality (see Roger Chartier on the interaction of print and graphics in early print culture). The contemporary precedent: the "end of print" or "post-literacy," meaning the re-negotiation for dominance between print and both oral and visual media: Examples of what Walter Ong calls "secondary orality": radio, records, TV Examples of contemporary visuality: film, TV, graphic design.

The Case of Graphic Design
("Graphic Design" = Graphics + Typography + Layout)

• Let's begin with an example of contemporary advertising:
  
  

  Chanel ad from Wired 7.09, Sept. 1999 (9 x 10.75")

  
  Is this an effective ad? Why or why not?
  
  How does the design of the ad work? What features of the design can you pick out?
  
  

  ---

• The dialectic of "hypermediacy" vs. "immediacy" (see Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 1999) Cf., "medium" vs. "message."
  
  
• How did this carefully designed or hypermediated style of immediacy evolve?

A Short History of Graphic Design

Avant-Garde Typographic Experimentation (see Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word) "Marked" vs. "unmarked" typography Revisionary adaptation of the graphic design energy of advertising. A new typographical pallette, including such features as: Variation in type font and size Assymmetrical layout Use of diagonals in layout Designed use of white space Emphasis on contrasting elements Goals: Intended to shock the bourgeois (and its concept of art as "high culture"); mimetic of the WW I-era sense of culture F.T. Marinetti, from Zang Tumb Tuuum (Milan, 1914) F.T. Marinetti, Bataille à neuf étages: Mont Altissimo (Rome, 1916) I. Zdanevich, Soirée du Coeur à Barbe (Paris, 1923) T. Tzara, Bulletin (Zurich, 1918)

From Avant-Garde to Corporate Style: The rise of the "design profession" (Bauhaus, Swiss style, International style) Johanna Drucker: "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) Technical advances: full integration of type and visual elements in "Typo-photo" layout: El Lissitzky, Photogram advertisement, 1924 (reproduced in Tschichold) Later "typo-photo" layout Otto Storch layout for McCall's Magazine, 1961 The Rock-n-Roll Gallery Collection of Richard E. Aaron (Web site) The rigidification of avant-garde graphic design principles (see Jan Tschichold, The New Typography, 1928; excerpts): Assymmetrical layout Use of diagonals in layout Designed use of white space Emphasis on contrasting elements Variation in type size but standardization of type font: rejection of serif fonts and the adoption of sans serif serif font:    sans serif font:   gG yY               gG yY The "grid system" (Bauhaus school, Desau | grid system as explained by Paul Rand El Lissitzky, Two pages (poem titles) from Mayakovsky, Diya golossa (1922-23) (reproduced in Tschichold) Piet Zwart, from advertising leaflet (original in Dutch) (reproduced in Tschichold) Jan Tschichold, display poster for publisher, 1924 (l.), and cover for "elementaire typographie, 1925 (r.) Willi Baumeister, invitation card (example of "reading order" reproduced in Tschichold) Jan Tschichold, examples of bad and good layout from The New Typography Jan Tschichold, brochure for The New Typography Goals: Informational "clarity" (quote 1 | 2) (contrast goals of the earlier avant-garde designers) A corporate style: Swiss Style, International Style (migration of European designers after WW II; the Container Corporation of America) Thus was born the "look and feel" of contemporary corporate graphic design: a "designed" form of immediacy: Chanel ad from Wired 7.09, Sept. 1999 (9 x 10.75") Paradox: in using media to get across the "message" with clarity and immediacy, but without any care for what the message (commercial product) actually is, designers give the strong sense of a divorce between the medium and the message. "Media" becomes a hypermediated form unto itself. A parody of International Style design— the VW ad campaigns (Continued in next lecture)

References

• Jay David Bolter, and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999)
• 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)
• Darrell Sano, Designing Large-Scale Web Sites: A Visual Design Methodology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996)
  
  
• Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton UP, 1987)
• C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1959)
  
  
• Richard E Aaron, The Rock-n-Roll Gallery Connection of Richard E. Aaron, retrieved 22 Aug. 1999 <http://www.rockpix.com/> (now apparently offline)

Supplementary links for this class on Study Materials page