Design publishing future — print or pixel?

Another interesting article I found on the 'design assembly' blog, tackling the issue of the publishing future. Click here to read the article.

iPad

I found this article today and I thought that maybe someone is going to write about new Media or the iPad, which can be useful.

Pau Dalmau

The Guardian

Learning to think in a digital world... continued..

Just a further thought on Maryanne Wolf's article 'Learning to think in a digital world'...

It is a given that technology is changing and is subsequently affecting language in the way that we read and write, but this is nothing new. Language has been evolving ever since it began.

'Text speak' is one example of the effect that technology is having on our language. (What I'm referring to when I say 'text speak' is the abbreviated language of mobile phones and instant messaging on the internet).

An article discussing the use of 'text speak' can be found at this link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3354233/Text-speak-U-2-can-communic8.html

This is an interesting article because it not only talks about the background of text speak and the way that it encourages a more inventive reader/writer, but also considers the future. It brings to light concerns about the way that digital media will affect out ability to recall the past, as so much of the communication that we do is via mobile phone/email/messaging online which is often instantly deleted leaving no trace behind.

The link below is another (brief) article favouring the use of 'text speak' among children and the way that it could almost be deemed as 'a little brain workout', encouraging the use of concentration and attention:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6221875/Text-message-speak-not-harmful-to-childrens-spelling-says-research.html

I believe it is true that technology is effecting the way that we read and write, but this is the nature of language. It is constantly evolving. Just as we use 'text speak' now to communicate in a more efficient manner, shorthand was a form of efficient communication in the past, with the earliest dating back as far as Xenophon's shorthand to write the memoirs of Socrates.

Andrew Robinson describes the best known form of shorthand invented by Isaac Pitman in the 19th century...

'Some 65 letters are used, consisting of 25 single consonants, 24 double consonants and 16 vowel sounds. However, most vowels are omitted.'

This to me has the same principle as 'text speak' that we use today, omitting vowels for efficiency in communicating a message. So it would seem that yes, language is evolving, and technology is having an effect, but perhaps what we should be concerned about is not so much how it is evolving but how we preserve this in order to look back and learn from this in the future.

The Internet is nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

This is not a joke.. really!

http://beta.thehindu.com/sci-tech/internet/article231607.ece

Graphic Design, overrated?

Here you will two different articles that share a very different point of view.

The first one is a diffamatory article written by Emily Godsen for the Times online where she claims that graphic design is overrated and that "Nowadays, modern graphic design packages surely allow anyone with an average brain to design something as good as, or better than, what we see in front of us here."

The second text is an answer to Emily Godsen's article from "designassembly.org", an interactive discussion forum managed by a select group of individuals working at renowned global agencies from a cross-section of creative disciplines.

Andrew Keen: The Cult of the Amateur

Our question make me think about how internet inflence our culture. I'm reading this book by Andrew Keen talks about how today's internet is killing our culture. He reveals how an avalanche of amateur content is threatening our values, economy, and ultimately innovation and creativity itself. For example, the Google's search engine reflects the "wisdom"of the crowd. The more people click on the a link that results from a search, the more likely that link will come up in subsequent searches. That is to say, it just tells us what we already know. Another example, some sites such as Digg and Reddit "is a mirror of our banal interests". They just tell us what we interested in but not the truth. Andrew also asserted that on today's self-publishing Internet, nobody cares the dependability of the articles and nobody knows if the audience is a dog, a monkey, or the Easter Bunny. "That's because everyone else is too busy ego-casting, too immersed in the Darwinian struggle for mind-share, to listen to anyone else". The amateur audience is now controlling today's internet.

Expectations

According to Ellen Lupton's article "The Birth of the User", we could technically read long lengthy things on the web without a problem, but our outlook is psychologically different. It's just that we expect different things from printed books than we do web reading. When you sit down with a book, we go into it ready to sit and read for a certain period of time. When you go onto the web it has a lot more to look at and distract, you can get information faster making people a little more impatient to read for a long amount of time. I think that this article shows some importance to how the culture of reading and text on screen is changing us.

http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/the-birth-of-the-user?searchtext=web%20reading

Dangers of the Desktop

This article I found brings up the topic of making tools available to the masses. Are we as graphic designers, journalists and other professionals really going to be needed as the web mediums of information push forward in the future? I know that this is a fear that everyone in our field and many others has or maybe are still thinking about.

http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/danger-of-the-desktop?searchtext=marshall%20mcluhen

Ken Robinson: Author/Educator

While I was reading the Article "Learning to think in a digital world" by Maryanne Wolf, I could not stop thinking about Ken Robinson talk in TED Ideas Worth Spreading (link below) that I had listened a few years ago. Maryanne Wolf is worried about how new technologies are transforming children brain's capacity of learning and thinking. But she is only focusing on finding a way of teaching children how to read before they get in the digital world. Sir Robinson talks about education and creativity, but he believes that creativity is important in education as literacy. He looks in deep on educational system. He thinks ES fails on educating children in a way that is making children less creative. He also believes that children have a great capacity for innovation, they are not afraid of being wrong, but if ES do not prepare them to be wrong they would loss their originality.

What is my point on posting that video? Maybe I am moving one step further from our blog topic, but instead of thinking that Google is making us stupid we should think before if ES is making us stupid?

LINK: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Thank you!

Pau Dalmau

On the lighter side.. Letterpress Print by Joe Newton

"Learning to think in a digital world" by Maryanne Wolf

"Learning to think in a digital world" is an essay written by Maryanne Wolf for the Boston Globe in 2007. This essay is based on her book "Proust & the squid: The story & Science of the reading brain". Her piont of view tries to be rather scientifical than cultural or historical.

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In this article she expresses her grave concern that the development of knowledge in children who are heavy users of the Internet could produce mere "decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes", and cautioned that the web's "immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge."

Click here to read the article.

Five Ways the iPad Will Change Magazine Design

Sorry, here's the link again..

http://pentagram.com/en/new/2010/01/five-ways-the-ipad-will-cha-1.php#more

Five Ways the iPad Will Change Magazine Design

This link is perhaps tangential to our topic.. nevertheless..

http://pentagram.com/en/new/2010/01/five-ways-the-ipad-will-cha-1.php#more

We have decided to discuss about Google's article, then let's get on.

Hi everyone! I am glad to be the first.

20 years over Internet's invention we can start talking about some changes in our habits and communication, most of them caused by Internet revolution.

At the beginning when everything was so confusing and everyday we used to experiment new things, Internet was thought like the maximum expression of democracy: a virtual place, where everyone would be capable to express what they want. Now it is proven that customers move in same directions as when they choose a newspaper, everything is about ideology, economic situation and politics. So they will choose websites that responds to their own and build opinion.

But in just about 10 years Internet is not anymore what we used to think. Mr. Carr says: ‘Google and the net is changing our way of reading’. But as he says it is not the first time our brain changed. He has given goods examples of how many others objects like typewriter or books had done the same in the past.

I am slightly agree with how Google has changed our brain, this could be an interesting case of study – that I am sure someone has started it. But I am not agree on the sentence that we are loosing concentration or in case we loose it, it would not be Google's fault.

I think readers have become strongly selective on what they read, so if they have a quick view on a book and it is not about their interest they won't read it. What I mean is that the net is offering a huge range of possibilities, tastes, opinions, authors... Everyone can go online and find that book, movie or paint and read it or watch it. And I am sure if you give the right book to the right person he won’t be distracted. And that's what is Google doing nowadays.

Google is not the new demon (this is one thought I had after reading the article), they have done one thing really good: How to organize data in the virtual world and give it in a quick and more accurate way.

Maybe they are not the best Co. in the world, maybe they are not accurated enough, but we don’t have to forgett one thing: Google is a company and what they want like everyone else at the end of the month is money. If they get money throw Google Ads or promotional Ads I think we can not judge them for that.

Is Google making us stupid?