This course has definitely changed my perspective on communication and the ways in which we do it.
In my experience, writing assignments for most other classes have been so academic in nature that they haven’t done a good job being relevant outside the context of the course. I think the assignments we have done have not only been very relevant to all the things I do outside of class, but they have provided insights into the mechanics and modalities of communication as well.
At the very beginning of the course, I walked by an empty wall and had the idea to make a banner/cover photo for my blog. This wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have the freedom of creativity we did for this class.
Throughout the course, I have analyzed the mechanics of each of the modalities we have covered (visual, audio, video). For each project, I tried to think critically of what each modality uniquely offered.
For the first visual project, I designed a webpage that had elements of good UI design locally (i.e. individual components were well designed), but the combination and layout of everything put together was off. This was in relation to my argument that a webpage is by definition, a map, and that analyzing design frameworks that formalize spatial arrangements can lead to a better understanding of how these principles can be applied to the general concept of a map.
With this project, I built off my analysis of formalizing mapping, where I applied math and category theory to the readings we had in class on maps. This project got me to think a lot about how multiple theories and principles across disciplines can all relate to each other and complement the understanding of one another.
For my audio project, I created a soundscape that incorporated audio recordings from my recent trip to Mexico overlaid on a procedurally generated soundtrack. Here I really narrowed down on identifying what affordances the modality of audio provides. I intentionally did not include any visual components to this, despite how they could have painted a more accurate picture of what the environments of the recordings were like. I did that because I wanted to explicitly focus on just what audio can provide. I wanted to tackle the concept of Eye Culture [1] and create a mode of content sharing that provided a greater space for the consumer’s imagination. I played around with the idea that by giving them less, I’m letting them do more.
Again, the aim of my composition was to use just the modality of sound to share an experience that affects the listener by transporting them to the environment I was in, yet instead of presenting everything as it is and having the viewer live vicariously through my experience, it allows them to recreate their own sense of the atmosphere and derive their own meaning.
For my video project, I incorporated a lot of editing techniques to make an otherwise mundane activity more interesting. During the process of producing this, in addition to becoming more aware of the affordances this modality provides, I also became more aware of the limitations as well — in order to convey the message you are trying to send, you need the visual evidence [2] that occurred, and there’s only so much you can do to get around that.
I also analyzed how the modality of video provides the unique affordance to create meaning of non-chronological content. This notion is backed by the Kuleshov Effect, which states that “film can transcend space and time, and the viewer can construct the geography in their own heads as they’re watching the film.” [3]
I left off my analysis by pondering what the future of communication will look like. I mentioned that of all the previous modalities we covered, video is the one with the highest capacity of information density (most content/information per unit time). Continuing on this thought, I stated that in the future, I believe that the way we communicate will involve more of modalities like video and perhaps others that don’t even exist yet that support a higher bitrate of information density. Nowadays, people are getting better at absorbing information from all types of sources at a faster rate, and I expect this trend to rise.
Although I revisited the visual project about maps for my final project, I continued to build where I left off in my video project. At the end of my video project, I stated that as the ones doing the communicating, we need to expand our scope in the ways in which we do so, and be able to adapt and evolve to the new ways we will be expected to communicate in the future.
This is following the argument that the modality of video has a relatively high information density, and that I expect the modes in which we communicate in the future will have increasing amounts of information density. Since my website is interactive, it is almost in a way generating new information as a user uses it. The density can vary according to the user since the factor of time isn’t set to a certain tempo in this case.
In my analysis, I talk about how we can use websites as a modality itself. Rather than just using a website as an easily shareable and accessible platform to host other content on, by making it interactive, we can use it as a modality itself, using both the content and the interactions to communicate a message. This alludes to my outlook of the future of communication, and how we should expect a larger information density, and how we should also expect the scope of the modes of communication to expand.
Overall Theme
Throughout the course and my understanding of it, I have focused a lot on a couple topics:
- identifying and isolating each modality’s unique affordances
- how the advancement of technology has impacted the affordances our modes of communication provide us
I think as the course progressed, I started to see more and more about how each of the modalities contributed to the larger picture of communication, how they set the norms we follow today, and how they continue to transcend the existing limitations of how we communicate.
A large part of my analyses have been tied to the advancements in technology and how they provide new affordances to communicate in more novel ways. This is perhaps because I’m personally biased towards finding the technology aspect very relevant.
Your Future And Mine
Relating back to my argument of the future of communication and how we can and should expect the advancement of technology to expand the pool of affordances it provides us to communicate in more novel ways, I think I am involved in the advancement of pushing the technology forward. I will be working as a software engineer, particularly in area of Human Computer Interaction (HCI).
I could probably go on forever to talk about how everything we’ve done in this class relates to HCI, and how the future of HCI also ties back to the content of this course. But to keep it concise — Much of the affordances each modality provides is strongly correlated to the technology that it’s associated with. So much to the point that I will argue that it is the technology itself that dictates how we communicate, and that by changing the technology, we change how we communicate. In this course, we have analyzed how humans communicate through the existing modalities. The ways in which we did so has set a framework for how I can approach thinking about new modalities of the future.
The future of how we communicate is in the hands of what new affordances the technology of tomorrow can provide. So whether we start using websites as a modality itself, or make virtual reality a social modality, technology will always go hand in hand with communication. Despite the common misconception that technology is associated with antisocial nerds geeking out over numbers, I am a firm believer that technology is all about solving problems for people and connecting people, and I hope to contribute to the forefront of technology that connects us all together.
References
[1] Kendall Wrightson: An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology
[2] Barry Hampe: Visual Evidence
[3] Filmmaker IQ: The History of Cutting — The Soviet Theory of Montage
