Sunday, October 31, 2010

Visual Language: A Communications Primer Response




So, starting off the next project, we have started studying communication, and the process of broadcasting information. This video on laughingsquid.com is a 1953 instructional film for IBM, explaining this process and the noise that interfeers with this transmision.
http://laughingsquid.com/a-communications-primer-1953-by-ray-charles-eames/











In todays world  communication is sent in infinite ways, be it by computer, music, television, by mouth, by body language, by icons and symbols, or even the signals your brain intercepts and decodes when interacting with any of these communications. This video did a great job of bringing this complex process into a simple diagrammatic experience.









Using this diagram, explains the information transfer process in a nutshell.

  1. The Sender has information
  2. The Sender encodes the information
  3. The Sender transmits or sends the information
  4. Various noise, be it audio, visual, physical, mental interfere and alter the information
  5. The Receiver gets the information
  6. The Information is decoded
  7. The Receiver then attempts to understand the information
However, it leaves out a major aspect of the broadcasting process. The feedback.  In a game of telephone, it's crucial that the beginning sender gets feedback, or return information from their receiver. This allows for mutual understanding unless the noise is so great that the feedback is also distorted. With feedback, a person can attempt to fix the noise, or the connection, and can correct any mistakes made in the encoding process that may have become noise itself. 

The simplicity of this diagram also leaves out many aspects of our decoding and encoding process. All aspects of our lives such as politics, culture, social constructs, etc. effect how we send and receive information. In the film the narrator mentions if you speak chinese to him and he can't speak or understand chinese, then he can't understand the message. Well beyond that, there is a further level of understanding. Through the process of understanding the chinese, there is a barrier or translation that must be overcome. A word in one language might have other meanings or contextual information that comes with it that the receiver misses out on. If you watch a Japanese move that has English subtitles or has been swapped with English dialogue, there is information lost in that transition of Japanese culture and linguistics to the English dialect. This can be said of any communication of differing culture or mode of communication that hasn't reached a worldwide agreement of meaning. 

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