(an illustrated non-fictional fiction, 2016)
An Observation
Open up a mobile device and swipe through your timeline on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or any of your favorite social networking platforms. Don’t all of them essentially some graphics plus text?
At the bare bone, the timeline is a series of images juxtaposed (means they were put side-by-side to mingle with each other) with texts. Then, there are scholars such as Wilde who describes comic as a medium with “the characteristic combination of words and pictures […] as well as the arrangement of framed pictures into sequences of panels within page layouts of varying regularity, flexibility, and density [1,2].” … If we stick to this definition, we can see that everything we do on the social network is turning into some of a comic strip.
Our timeline is a comic.
Timeline
The so-called timeline became a popular design feature of these social network platforms in the 2000s (Fig 1). It is a linear (arranged into a line) interface tool to display a sequence of boxed contents.
Timeline serves not only as a front page to greet us and but also as a hidden guide to direct how we act on the platform. One of its key goals is to guide the platform’s user to navigate through the jungle of sub-timelines (timelines attached to higher level timelines) and their contents.
On the timeline, who gets to be shown at the top and who comes next are assigned by algorithms (a process that computer follows to achieve something). Most of the feeds were sorted by their timestamp in the earlier days (very natural). However, now many of the sorting methods are replaced with a non-time-based “rank” system.
A timeline detached from time.
After this replacement, contents on the timeline are now existing separate in relation to the temporal order, “when” they actually happened. More importantly, now it became impossible for us to guess the relationship between the neighboring contents on the timeline. Now the relationship between the two back-to-back contents feels completely random (not really though).
Whether or not everyone shares the same sentiment, we will all agree that we are repeatedly and daily exposed to design and internal rules of the social network. Everyone knows how to act on the timeline, what to expect out of it.
TLDR: a black box ranking algorithm sorts stuff on our timeline so random things show up next to each other
UI Design and Comics
It was the first day of our class in data visualization.
The lecture began by introducing two books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud [4].
In this book, McCloud talks about how comics invented ways to communicate easily and efficiently. In the technical terms, comics use strategies of abstraction and representation to smoothly deliver a visual-heavy narrative experience.
McCloud’s strategies for navigating a reader through information were closely related to the questions a user interface (UI) designer would face during their daily tasks. No wonder Understanding Comics had become required reading for HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) programs among large institutions from Stanford to Carnegie Mellon to UCSD to Brown.
Comics and long existed before a discipline such as HCI became a thing. How did comics and user interfaces come to share their forms and language?
TLDR: comic and UI design seem to have some connections. where is it from
a Comic as a Design Project
If we start to think comics as a cool case of graphic design, the link becomes clear. Both comics and user interface were facing a similar design question/challenge: how to guide the user through information. There were even cases where comic artists directly experimented and challenged their contemporary 2D graphic design conventions [5,6].
For example, contemporary comic artists Chris Ware pursued excessive explorations on spatio-temporal mapping of information and narratives elements on a 2D space (Fig 2) as we find in Building Stories [7].
Ware carefully selected what to be placed in the center the page (the main stage of the story), while additional actions and information were tetris-ed around it. There are multiple starting points for a reader to jump in. All the sections are divided clearly and it is easy to figure out what path to follow within a section to read the comic. The contrast between bright and dull colors are used to separate information from the background image.
TLDR: comic making, it is a design process
Timeline Comics?
Even though we said out loud: “our timeline is a comic,” it is a bit stretch to argue that all timelines can successfully tell a story, let alone be a “good” comics.
What makes a comic reads better is how much the comic maker skillfully used its collage-like format. Another scholar, Bartosch said: “materialisation [of media such as comics] appears as a dynamic process wherein objects, bodies, and subjectivities only emerge as relational effects, ‘as products of an ongoing materialisation — i.e. a reciprocal “intra-action” of agencies’. [8]” Basically, in order to make a good comic page, we have to think about which of the small parts of a page gets to be read first and what follows (dynamic) and how they are connecting with each other (relational).
If what’s on a timeline was selected and organized in the same way a comic artist would carefully weave a series of panels into a comic strip, whoever was making the timeline would have considered this delicate dynamic and relational effects between the content boxes.
On the contrast, a timeline is sorted by a ranking algorithm. As an author of the content, we do not own any tools to control how our content will be selected and organized in our followers’ timelines. It is impossible even to guess how our contents will be shown finally. The only affordance left for creators on social platforms is ____ (not to mention character cap, image/video upload restrictions, censorship, etc).
Our contents on timelines are blindly set to outrun each other. Since the relationship with our own content and the other surrounding contents became arbitrary and hidden from us, we design our panel as if it is on a white wall, or as if it is floating in a sensory deprivation tank.
This platform is for your content but you don’t get to control how they are shown. Maybe for someone, it made sense to have them separate from each other.
TLDR: current social network timeline is a bad comic duh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ nor it tries to be one. content creators don’t really have control over how their contents are shown
A Pleasant Read
Even the contents that get made and circulate within more traditional publishing methods (physical books, zines, limited edition objects, etc) are making a fast transition into social network space. No matter the original intention or origin, every content has to obey the same game rule if the goal is to reach a wider, non-selective audience.
Once comics were overlooked as children’s entertainment for their simplicity and accessibility. Efficiency and accessibility made a full comeback.
More recognizable contents, less cognitive load. It will either read smoothly or be ignored. Screw complicated messy things. SOrry and thank you for your 7 min, fuck all this.
References
- Thon, Jan-Noël, and Lukas RA Wilde. “Mediality and materiality of contemporary comics.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 7.3 (2016): 233–241.
- Wilde, Lukas RA. “Distinguishing mediality: The problem of identifying forms and features of digital comics.” Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 8.4 (2015).
- Lessin, Samuel, et al. “Displaying Social Networking System User Information Via a Timeline Interface.” U.S. Patent Application №13/239,347.
- McCloud, Scott. Understanding comics: The invisible art. Northampton, Mass (1993).
- Goodbrey, Daniel Merlin. “Digital comics–new tools and tropes.” Studies in Comics 4.1 (2013): 185–197.
- Goodbrey, Daniel. “From comic to hypercomic.” Cultural Excavation and Formal Expression in the Graphic Novel (2013): 291–302.
- Ware, Chris. “Building Stories: Part 3.” New York Times Magazine 2 (2005).
- Bartosch, Sebastian. “Understanding comics’ mediality as an actor-network: some elements of translation in the works of Brian Fies and Dylan Horrocks.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 7.3 (2016): 242–253.
