‘The medium is the massage: An inventory of effects’. Marshall Mcluhan & Quentin Fiore. Touchstone Books. 1967
Predictive of the future.

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, physchological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible with out a knowledge of the way media works as environment.
Media as everything – telephone, radio (electronic communication)

Print
• Static (doesn’t move around)
• Fixed (once it’s printed, you cannot undo it)
• Linear (fixed process)
• Unidirectional communication (travels in one direction)

Gutenberg Bible 1454/5

‘The Electronic Word’. Richard A Lanham. University of Chicago Press: 1993
• The assumptions that come with a book (are that) it is authoritative and unchangeable, transparent.’ P.8
It’s all there for you, its physical, it’s evident.

Transitions
Early photography mimicked painting at the time.
There would be a backdrop and someone would paint your picture.
Surp – replace. Take one thing for another.
GRAVITAS – dignity
We don’t like complete change. It divorces us from continuity – what we already know.

Bruce Sterling ’60. Innovators shaping our creative future’ p279
• ‘Commonly our struggle is falsely frame as one single clean transition. There, Old Media, reeking of ink and celluloid (what is used to make film) – here, New Media, fast, clean, interactive.’
• Daniel Charny & abake The Incidental 2009.
http://www.britishcouncil.org/arts-milan-fair-the-incidental.htm
producing newspaper on the go and using tweet and digital technology to design the content

Digital
• Fluid (moving, changing, not static)
• Malleable (can be moved, changed, squeezed, formed)
• Simultaneous Media (variety operating at the same time)
• Accessable (accessed by multiple people at a range of multiple locations. Easy access)
• A conversation as apposed to a monologue (asks for interaction. Goes back and forward like a conversation)
• Remember Derrida? Something only exists in relation to another.
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p006j8n2 communication is a future world would be instantaneous. There would be no delay, there would be no gap. Time and distance will mean nothing. The nature of digital information is different to other information because it is manipulatable. Bonsai Cats sent to animal activitits that started a thread of conversation. Went around back and forth and got many responses. How one bit of information can go across the world.Where it goes it not pre-destined. It is not sent from A-B.

Fluid & Malleable
• Structure and meaning.
• Author + audience = Collaboration
They were made to be in that space.
Lev Manovich ‘The Language of New Media’ 1995 p36
• ‘a new media object is not something that is fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions.’ You put your work out there, someone picks it up and adds something to it. Its digital information so it will never get lost. It’s there forever. Its potential for your work to be consistently re-invented.
• Aaron Koblin & Chris Milk ‘The Wilderness Downtown’ – Connectivity to something personal
• The Martin Agency & Tool of North America http://www.cloudsoverscuba.com uses documentary vootage & sound. Visual info, textual info


‘Designing Our Own Graves’ Dmitri Siegel 2006
• ‘Prosumerism – simultaneous production and consumption.’
• ‘the templated mind’.. data entry and customization options are the way prosumers grip these new generation of products’
• ‘the template mentality emphasises work over style or even clarity.’ WE ARE JUST CONTENT PROVIDERS. STYLE IS LIMITED AND FIXED. ONLY CERTAIN CHANGES CAN BE MADE.
• ‘the prosumer model extracts the value of your work in real time, so that you are actually consuming your own labour.’ ILLUSION OF FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!! WE CAN ONLY DO CERTAIN THINGS, AND NOT OTHERS. DIGITAL TOOLS = WHAT I CAN DO AND WHAT I CANT DO IS WRITTEN INTO THEM. WHAT IS POSSIBLE IS WHAT IS LIMITED

THE RUMPUS ROOM
• www.trr.tv/talktalk templates for people to use to make the filmS
• Karsten Schmidt ‘Recode Decode’ 2009

‘PowerPoint is Evil’ Edward Tufte 2003
• Boring, dull and kills any sense of creativity

Simultaneous Media
• Focoult
• Lev Manovich 2008 – you can use sound, images, animation, all in the same space now when you couldn’t necessarily do that before.

Ryan Hughes – uses photography to put work together – done a series of photographs of people dancing – uses cameras to capture dance movements – only when photos combined did it become digital and a moving image

Accessability
Alenjandro Tappia ‘Graphic design in the digital era’ 2003 Design Issues

http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html

DEFINING THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT