Please view Emily's blog before continuing. It's at http://ligonrcid805.blogspot.com/2010/09/visuality-language-and-time.html. Don't read below without first experiencing her blog or you will spoil the experience. Try to figure it out on your own. If you can't, then come back here.
Stop reading now . . .
[begin Emily's voice]
To begin, I really wanted to transform this blog post into binary because of this discussion of changing literacies in the reading, but I am going to provide a “rosetta stone” at the end, and if you understand what I’m saying, you can either read binary or you have found the “rosetta stone.” Anyway, let’s call my motive cognitive dissonance here.
On to the readings. Both Design to Thrive and A History of Graphic Design were walks down memory lane for me. There were new ideas in Design to Thrive that I had not experienced before, but the history of written language and the way it has [been] influenced [by] society, culture, and religion is an area that I have studied before. In undergrad, I was a history major, and my first area of concentration was Asian history, in particular China and Japan, and I wrote my undergrad thesis on Helena Augusta (Constantine’s mother). After undergrad, I spent a year taking English classes before my MA program, and I was lucky enough to take a history of the English language class. So, I’ve been exposed to both the Eastern and Western language/writing histories. Why do I mention this? Because Meggs took a different angle on his history. He focused on the visuality of the languages. It makes sense from a graphic design point of view. And, it makes sense in the context of this class. We are theorizing about visuality in a digital age (among other things).
So, to ask a VV question. Why did we read this? Well, I think there are a few reasons. One is pretty clear from reading the last chapter of Design to Thrive. As technology evolves, the literacy evolves too. We can see that so clearly in both Megg’s history as well as Howard’s comparison example with the printing press. And, as Howard says, it is important to know and understand that technology doesn’t stop and literacies will continue to evolve. I’ll come back to this later.
Another reason, and I hinted at this earlier. It’s the visuality of language. Seeing how we go from a pictoral system to an alphabet in the Western world, and Eastern traditions are still largely a pictoral system. I was not familiar with the Korean history, and Meggs doesn’t really say much about this, but perhaps Taerhim will comment and tell us a little bit more. Especially because it sounds like Korean language, while evolved from the Chinese pictogram, uses an “alphabetic,” “scientific” system that is very different from both Japanese and Chinese.
In addition to the visuality, Meggs talked extensively about the materials used to do the writing. Throughout the history, we see not only what form the language takes, but also the materials in which it is written. When we thing about writing in a digital age, we need to take our medium into consideration as well. For instance, with the fixedness of the Egyptian and Illuminated Manuscipts, the scribe and the illustrator might be at odds of space. If we think about Laurel and the theatre metaphor, we are the producer/director or Sullivan’s article about taking control of the page. We are both the scribe and the illustrator in a digital age. We need to know and understand both the medium and the content.
Now, to move the conversation out of the past into the future to digital literacies. There are so many directions to go here, but one literacy issue I am interested in is IM language and leet speak. I am interested in exploring the rules of these languages. I wonder if they have dialect differences. For instance, does IM speak change between users in the South and the Midwest? And let’s go farther, what about across countries? We have differences in language, but do certain abbreviations stay the same? I don’t know the answer to this, but I’m interested in finding out.
I don’t think this is necessarily related to looking at digital literacies in social networks though. I find the RIBS t/fla useful, and I think the cautionary tale at the end is relevant. And, I think that digital literacies involve so many more issues than just these two. We have different mediums, multimodal texts, changing languages, visuality, aurality, etc. But, we must know the digital to think about its literacies. So, here is your Rosetta Stone: http://www.digitalcoding.com/tools/text-to-binary-conversion.html;
[end of Emily's voice]
