Lecture Notes
Key Concepts: Media history; Gutenberg press; information; writing; clay tablets; literacy and democracy; handwriting versus typewriter; "medium is the message"; the "content" of a medium is the previous medium; the perils of New Media; liberatory/democratizing potential; design/critique
Links Visited: The Eye on Banff
Quotation: "While critique looks at the present through the means of past production, design shapes the future through the deliberate deployment of representation resources in the designer’s interest. Design is the textual principle for periods characterized by intense and far-reaching change." (Gunther Kress)
2. The Web and Classical Rhetoric
Key Concepts: Cold War consciousness; ARPANET; Tim Berners-Lee; grammars of words, sound, and vision; rhetoric of "cool"; invention; arrangement; style; memory; delivery; the question of argument in cyberspace
Links Visited: Wild Birds, Coke, Pepsi, CNN, Suck
Quotation: "We need a new language to describe the new medium of the interface, but that doesn't mean we can't borrow some of our terminology form the forms that have come before it." (Stephen Johnson)
Key Concepts: metaphor as a coherence principle; metaphor for argument, arrangement, and style; visual literacy; visual meaning as a function of the total composition; composition planes: representational; symbolic; abstract
Links Visited: Killer Web Sites, New York Times, Ford Focus, CNN
Quotation: " Abstraction. . . [is] the primary tool in the development of a visual plan. It is most useful in the process of uncommitted exploration of a problem and development of visible options and resolutions." (Donis Dondis)
Key Concepts: fragmentation/creation of community; plane of abstraction; contrast/harmony; balance/instability; unity/fragmentation; symmetry/asymmetry; simplicity/complexity; accuracy/distortion; predictability/spontaneity; stasis/change; classical and functional/expressionist and postmodern
Links Visited: "The Harvest", "Lane with Poplar Trees", Web Style Guide site, FEED, Hotwired
Quotation: "The window didn't create a new consciousness--it just let us apply our existing consciousness to the information space on the screen." (Stephen Johnson)
5. The Link and Hypertext
Links Visited: UW home page; Britannica; Suck; Loop; hypertext fiction; Quarry; Fox
6. Ideology and the Web
Links Visited: Victorian Web; The National Post; The Globe and Mail; The Creation of Eve; The Gulf Stream; LL Bean; Microsoft; HotWired; Corvette; Britannica
