How does media design function in an era of electronic reproduction, especially in relation to print?
Before we dive into this question, maybe we should first define where and how does media design work in the world we live in. Did media design exist before the era of electronic reproduction? Is print design also a kind of media design? The term “Media Design” is actually a very abstract concept, even when we look at these words individually. So what is design and what is media? Here, I would like to give it a simple definition in order to support my writing.
Media = The method or material which carries knowledge to people.
Design = A better and more efficient method to communicate or convey thoughts to people.
So when these two words come together
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Media Design = A better use of materials or methods to bring thoughts together, and to share knowledge in a more dynamic way.
In Plato’s allegory of the cave, human struggle to adapt to the new world they’ve never seen before, which is also the process of learning, and the sunlight which shines through the tunnel and into the cave, would be their only guidance to the unknown world. However, when we map that story into the structure of the world we live in today, there is a slight difference.
Before the era of electronic reproduction, the only reproduction method we had was print, and before print, all we relied on was woodstocks or our own voice, which makes learning knowledge a very hard task to accomplish, it’s time consuming and requires a lot of effort, just like what the caveman will need to go through in terms of learning. On the other hand, the world we live in today, which is based on electronic reproduction, not only shorten the time of our learning, it’s also easier for us to access to different kind of knowledge, and let us storage the knowledge in many different way. And so each of us becomes a database of knowledge, and we no longer try so hard to crawl through the tunnel which leads us to new knowledge, instead, we stay in our own caves and connect to different people’s database, and process our learning in a much faster and efficient way.
The whole information structure, and the way information flows has changed dramatically after the presence of electronic reproduction, which lead us to the change of the role human plays in this whole new world, and also changed the way we on how we sense the world. One obvious thing is, we tend to use more visual and sound today, instead of the sense of touch and smell, this also brings up an interesting difference of being active and passive, we might assume that people today are much more active in learning because of the efficiency of electronics we have today, but it is also true that we become more passive when confronting the mass media today, because of technology, it is possible to broadcast information to almost every corner in this world, we no longer have dominant power to choose what we want to learn, and in some ways we might have become the passive receiver of knowledge.
So how exactly are we influenced by the change of our role in this new era? In the book “Understanding Media”, Mcluhan pointed out that cars has changed the human perspective of space and distance, and I think it is also fair to say that the same thing is happening again, our perspective of space has come even closer then before. Take myself as an example, I talk to my family online just as I talk to them everyday before I came to the states, I see them through webcams and I also read news of my country on websites or even TV channels. The physical distance between me and my country seems to disappear, and a virtual sense of “closeness” arise. This is where our perspective towards space changes, the world should no longer been seen as separate individual countries, but should be seen as knots all chained together within history, races, and media.
The way we see and react to the world today, has dramatically changed from the era of print reproduction, knowledge is now floating in every corner of the world you see, and sometimes force their own way into our lives. Medias such as wikipedia, youtube or google has become the creator of new media, and is reasonable to be seen as a growing web which only lives in the virtual world, but gathers and storage all the truth in the real world we live in today. The whole world is now closer then ever, the chain and bond of history becomes even tighter then the past, and it seems that the world is heading into a direction to create a world where everybody can communicate and share thoughts without concerns of language or races. Various standards has been set and unified, new media and technology has quietly streamed into our lives, changing the world in an different way, leading us to a different direction, and as a Media Designer, I think it is our work to create new technology and media, that are not created just for the purpose of efficiency and production, but also for the meaning it conveys, and for the benefit it brings to our life.