The world at once present and absent that the spectacle holds up to view is the world of the commodity dominating all living experience (Ch 2-p.19).

But the object that was prestigious in the spectacle becomes mundane as soon as it is taken home by its consumer and by all its other consumers (Ch 3-p.34).

The bourgeoisie came to power because it was the class of the developing economy (Ch 4-p.45).

The succession of generations within a natural, purely cyclical time begins to be replaced by a linear succession of powers and events (Ch 5-p.76).

With the development of capitalism, irreversible time has become globally unified (Ch p.85).

The time based on commodity production is itself a consumable commodity (Ch 6-p.88).

The capitalist need that is satisfied by urbanism’s conspicuous petrification of life can be described in Hegelian terms as a total predominance of a “peaceful coexistence within space” over “the restless becoming that takes place in the progression of time.”(Ch 7-p.95).

The end of the history of culture manifests itself in two opposing forms: the project of culture’s self transcendence within total history, and its preservation as a dead object for spectacular contemplation (Ch. 8-p.102).

This (reducing power to dealienating democracy) is possible only when individuals are “directly linked to universal history” and dialogue arms itself to impose its own conditions. (Ch 9-p.119)

Timeline of 20th Century Art

Tactical Media Activism

Tactical media activists have created politically progressive uses of infoviz. Spurred by Mark Lombardi’s elegant pencil drawings of networks of scandals in the late 1990s, they set out to reveal hidden power networks and critique in “counter-geographic” projects such as Bureau d’Etudes’ The World Government(2003) or Josh On’s They Rule (2004). Such works aim to unpack the complex weave of network power, nevertheless, if intriguing, such projects can be hampered by reducing network power to mere relationships. Agency and intentionality may remain unclear while the work remains an object of fascination.

Tactical media also engages in such fiction, for example, the Yes Men (one of whom, Igor Vamos, has also been involved with the Center for Land Use Interpretation) have produced fake Web sites and falsely posed as spokesmen for government entities and corporations to deliver their biting critiques. Examples include a parody Web site for the World Trade Organization (http://www.gatt.org/), a Web site on a fake Exxon product that would convert the bodies of billions of climate-change victims into oil (http://www.vivoleum.com, shut down by the ISP) and a fake printed issue of the New York Times (and accompanying Web Site, http://www.nytimes-se.com/) with the headline “Iraq War Ends.” Beyond delivering their messages in a subversive and humorous way, such work leads its audience to question how easily media can construct meanings for the purposes of dominant power.

Remix & Appropriation Art

Appropriation artists like Richard Prince, Sherri Levine, and (the early) Cindy Sherman critiqued how reality is constructed in media representation while questioning ideas of authorship and property. Simulationist artists like Allan McCollum and Peter Halley extended the idea of appropriation to create neutral works claiming to be void of emotion, originality or authorship, embracing instead the market and reproducibility in media.

Building on the artist as aggregator is artist as remixer. In the contemporary milieu of networked publics, the traditional relationship of consumer and producer is undone. Amateur-generated content — often based on remixing content from more traditional media sources — has proliferated on the Internet, particularly in the video sharing site YouTube and photo sharing sites like Flickr or deviantArt as well as on blogs. Such work is avidly consumed by other amateurs who, in turn may remix it to produce second-order remix projects.

If remix thrives on using appropriated work, unlike postmodernism, it takes appropriation as given. In postmodern appropriation art, reuse was ironic, undertaken with a high degree of Oedipal self-consciousness. As Sherri Levine reappropriated earlier photographs by Walker Evans or Richard Prince blew up magazine advertisements to display in museums, they hoped to critique the authorial status of past masters. But appropriation artists, most notably Duchamp, still worked within an established tradition of art, drawing on avant-garde models of appropriation and framing. In their method originality was still critical, both as an institution to critique and as a crutch — for Duchamp, after all, the urinal is nothing until it is signed. Thus, if Levine’s work questioned Enlightenment notions of the author and originality, those notions are long ago obsolete. For when pasting images from the Internet into PowerPoint or reblogging a favorite image on Tumblr is an everyday occurrence, appropriation becomes casual. Such postmodern works, then, were transitional. Relying on authorship and originality as departure points is no longer productive.

Nicolas Bourriaud suggests that this lack of regard for originality is precisely what makes art based on remix (his word for it is postproduction) appropriate to network culture. In contrast to postmodern artists, Bourriaud explains, artists like Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Gordon no longer question originality but rather instinctively understand artworks as objects constituted within networks, their meaning given by their position in relation to others and their use. Like the DJ or the programmer, such artists don’t so much create as reorganize. Crucially, remix takes place at a moment when globalization and the spread of historical information is pervasive due to the spread of the Net. “The artistic question is no longer,” Bourriaud concludes, “”what can we make that is new?” but “how can we make do with what we have?” In other words, how can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life?”

Mark Leckey, who operates in the gallery and the museum, but also has a MySpace page, is a veteran of remix, producing a seminal video in 1999 entitledFiorucci Made Me Hardcore out of found footage of British dancers in the 1970s and 1980s, in which he uncovered the ritualistic aspects of dance culture. More recently his performances have consisted of lectures on theories of networked culture (such as Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail) that traverse a litany of references from high art to pop culture. Leckey’s goal, as he proclaims in the statement he filmed for his Tate prize nomination, describes the poetics of network culture in a nutshell: “to transform my world and make it more so, make it more of what it is.” In Made in ‘Eaven (2004), Leckey reproduces Jeff Koons’ mirrored Rabbit sculpture; as the vantage point zooms in on the sculpture, Leckey’s own studio is revealed in a computer-rendered three-dimensional model.

Remix can take many forms, not only in audio or video. In Diary of a Star (2004-2007) Eduardo Navas sampled The Andy Warhol Diaries on a blog as a means of reflecting on the role of celebrity and privacy on the Web. Concluding that in projects like The Last Supper, where Warhol’s brilliance shone as he mimicked the mimickers, Warhol would have made the “the perfect Web flâneur.” Navas links to the sites that Andy would have explored if he had been able to browse the Web based on the entries in the Diaries.

Its worth noting that there is no particular injunction against the use of material from any era but the elements artists choose to remix tend to be relatively contemporary. The nostalgia culture so endemic to postmodernism has been undone, the world still in the throes of modernization is long gone. Unable to periodize, network culture disregards both modern and premodern equally.

Besides just aggregating it, pro surfers also remix the web vernacular. Scarlet Electric’s MrsCoryArcangel.com, John Michael Boling’swww.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.comand Guthrie Lonergran’s The Age of Mammals are all examples of pro surfer creations.

Oliver Laric is one of the most adept artists working in remix today, elaborating on the genre as it emerges on Internet sites, most notably YouTube. Laric, who generally presents his own work online treats amateur videos as found media loops. In 50 50 2008 (2008), he remixes YouTube clips of amateurs riffing on hips by 50 Cent to form one continuous song, itself a remix of an earlier work he did. In 787 ClipArts (2006), he assembles 787 clip art images into a one minute five second loop, forming a continuous video-loop that brings together all races and activities in one fluid mix, demonstrating not only his ability but also hinting that everything that can already be done has been. In Stevie Wonder Duets (2007), he juxtaposes videos he finds on YouTube of Stevie Wonder songs, one instrumental, one vocal, allowing us to recognize the slippage of time between the renditions only to release them back onto YouTube. As Marisa Olson suggests though, it seems that Laric aims to send his work back into the Net, where it came from. Finally, in Versions (2009), Laric produces a narrative that seems a bit like Leckey’s performances, a theoretical work at times reasonable, at times perhaps a bit preposterous, ranging across doctored photographs of Iraqi missiles, illicitly videotaped and pirated movies, celebrity heads grafted onto porn stars and so on. Remix, Laric points out to us, allows an infinity of parallel worlds to proliferate. Nevertheless, what remix amounts to besides delirious production, be it in the vernacular Web production celebrated by the pro surfers or the carefully orchestrated work Laric does, is as yet unclear.

[Example Artworks]

Oliver Laric, 787 ClipArts, 2006

Oliver Laric, Versions, 2007

Video Link (.MOV)

Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999

- an investigation into how ‘users’ operate
- traditionally considered to be passive and guided by established rules

- last 300 years has focused on the idea that the individual is an elementary unit of society
- groups are form out of individuals and are always reducible to individuals
- purpose of the study is to make systems of operational combination explicit
- expose the actual everyday actions of consumers
- “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”

Consumer Production

- studies of popular culture and marginal groups
- did not locate cultural differences in groups associated with ‘counter-culture’

Usage, or Consumption

- many studies have looked at the representations of a society on one hand and how it behaves on the other
- analysis of tv broadcast images (representation) and time spent watching tv (behaviour) should be complemented by studies of what the cultural consumer ‘makes’ or ‘does’ with these images during this time

- production vs consumption – the latter is devious, silent and invisible

- example of Spanish colonizers forcing their culture upon indigenous Indians; they did not reject or alter them but rather subverted them by using them for ends and references that the Spanish could not relate to or understand
- comparison with consumer culture; the ‘common people’, like the Indians, have a foreign culture imposed upon them by the Elites, but often subvert this culture by using it in ways the producers did not intend

- the presence and circulation of representations tells us nothing about what they mean to people
- we must analyse the manipulation of cultural objects by ‘users’ other than its makers
- difference or similarity between the production of the image and the secondary production hidden in its use

- performance vs competence; the act of speaking is not the same as having a knowledge of the language
- language is “an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers”
- users make countless transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules

The Procedures of Everyday Creativity

- Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault – instead of analyzing the ‘apparatus exercising power’, he focuses on ‘the mechanisms that have sapped the strength of these institutions’
- ‘grid of discipline’ becoming more widespread; how does society resist this? how do people manipulate the mechanisms of discipline or conform to it so they can evade it?

- micro-politics as everyday tactics of evasion from the imposed dominant cultural order
- consumers who are pushed to the limit and who resist social norms form a sort of network of ‘anti-discipline’

The Formal Structure of Practice

- assumption that everyday operations conform to certain rules
- what is an art or ‘way of making’?
- popular culture = arts of making
- an art of combination that is intertwined with an art of using

- two types of investigation, 1) descriptive analysis of readers’ practices, urban spaces, everyday rituals, resues of collective memory. 2) tracing the origins of the forms of these operations, e.g. the recomposition of a space by familial practices and the ‘art of cooking’

- sociologists, anthropologists and historians have examined mixtures of rituals and makeshifts (bricolages), manipulations of spaces, operators of networks (e.g. Goffman, Bourdieu, Mauss, DÈtienne, Boissevain, Laumann)
- linguistics: analysis of everyday interactions in relation to structures of expectation, negotiation, and improvisation of ordinary language. (e.g. Garfinkel, Labov, Sachs, Schegloff)

- formal logics, analytical philosophy: action, time and modalisation
- Noam Chomsky’s study of the oral uses of language

The Marginality of a Majority

- an exploration of the types of operations that characterize ‘consumption’
- to find the origin of the creativity via appropriation that this hypothesis says is inherent in the act of ‘consuming’ culture

- mass marginality: marginal groups have now become the silent majority

- the practice of re-use or adaptation of products is related to social situations and power relationships

- “The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, lends a political dimension to everyday practices”

The Tactics of Practice

- consumer vs producer dichotomy; the collected material, a limited number of practices (e.g. reading, talking, cooking), the extension of the analysis of these everyday operations to seemingly unrelated scientific fields

Trajectories, Tactics, and Rhetorics

- consumers as ‘unrecognised producers’ and ‘poets of their own acts’
- comparison between consumers and autistic children in terms of what they produce

- limits of statistical analysis; captures material of consumer practices but not their form
- statistical analysis of this kind finds only the homogenous, missing out on the reality of the ‘artisan-like inventiveness’ of common consumers

- differentiation between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’

- strategy: the overarching plans of large institutions or power structures
- tactics: belongs to the ‘other’; depends on time; always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized on the spur of the moment; kairos

- many everyday activities are tactical in nature, e.g. talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, as do ‘ways of operating’

- tactics: intelligence is inseparable from them; strategies: based on objective calculations from a collective power or institution; tactics do not seek to take over or win and does not engage in sabotage

- rhetoric: ‘ways of speaking’; manipulations are related to the ways of persuading the will of the audience

- connection between the Sophists and tactics
- Sophist position: make the weaker position seem the stronger
- claimed to have the power of turning the tables on the powerful by making use of the opportunities in any given situation

Reading, Talking, Dwelling, Cooking, etc.

- focus on reading as an example of an everyday practice that produces without capitalizing
- production vs consumption; writing vs reading; consumer as a voyeur in a ‘show-biz society’

- reading as an act of production that is not recorded; akin to a once-off silent performance

- the reader interprets the writer’s words subjectively, making them their own; thus, ‘the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news’

- the text is like a rented apartment where the occupier makes changes in the same way that a speaker changes a text by using their native tongue, accent or turns of phrase.

- reading is an art that is anything but passive, resembling the art whose theory was developed by medieval poets

- the art of conversation creates a collective communication that belongs to no one and everyone

- the possibility of establishing a reliability within the situations imposed on an individual
- making it possible to live in these situations by reintroducing into them an art of manipulating and enjoying

Extensions: Prospects and Politics

- analysis of tactics extended to two areas, 1) prospects / futurology, 2) the individual subject in political life

- futurology: falls short of adequately analysing ‘space’, focus on ‘simulation’
- relationship between rationality and imagination; the tactics of practical investigation vs the strategies offered to the public as the product of these practical operations

- the ‘split-structure’ of so many organisations requires a rethink of all the ‘tactics’ neglected by traditional scientific enquiry

- Freud’s civilization and its discontents; the microscopic connections between manipulation and enjoyment
- “the fleeting and massive reality of a social activity at play with the order that contains it”

- Quote from John Everyman: “When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has”: “I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras…. You’ve no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it’s incredible how one grows.”

My god, that was painful. This text is written using unnecessarily dense and obscure prose and makes it a chore to trawl through. Perhaps an issue with the translation? Someone should translate this translation into more eloquent English!

- move from 20th century media to 21st century social media, especially in the world of video / film
- web 2.0, ugc, long tail, collaboration, moving image cultures on the web
- more users are watching more stuff made by other users as opposed to professional producers
- move from the web as publishing medium to communications medium
- very low percentage of users produce content on the web (0.5%-1.5%)
- most users are consumers of content produced by this tiny group of creators
- dominant media is still the primary source for news, tv shows, films, games, literature, music
- long tail comes into play – top 40 gets largest audience, but bottom 40 gets some audience, if even only 1 or 2 people
- total volume of sales produced by ‘everything else’ exceeds that generated by the top 40
- most people are getting their information and media from social media sites
- wikipedia, myspace, facebook, youtube
- ‘astonishing’ numbers of people creating and sharing user generated content on social media sites
- mobile phone as a platform for media production and consumption
- flickr photos doubled within 6 months, 2007-2008
- how do we interpret such statistics? what do people actually watch on YouTube?
- content gets mixed up on social media sites, e.g. mixture of commercial and ugc on youtube, facebook
- does a person who gets their information from a blog have a different view of the world than someone who reads a mainstream newspaper or watched cable news?

The Practice of Everyday Media Life: Tactics as Strategies

- disproportionate attention given to media activism and political mash-ups in adademia
- these are important but not indicative of typical usage of hundreds of millions of people
- celebrating ugc as alternative or progressive tends to skip over fundamental questions…
- how much is ugc led by the type of camera, laptop or media player you can buy from BestBuy or Dixons?
- how much is ugc shaped by social media websites themselves? (who are interested in traffic so they can sell advertising based on usage data)
- is the move from mass consumption to mass production of cultural objects a progressive step for society?
- ugc and ‘pro-ams’ often imitates professionally produced content or relies on it (in the case of remixes)
- is this a confirmation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of the ‘culture industry’?
- case-in-point: AMVs – all video and music comes from commercially produced media products
- De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life – distinction between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’
- strategies: used by institutions and power structures, tactics: used by individuals in their everyday lives
- tactics are the ways in which individuals negotiate strategies that have been set for them by ‘higher powers’
- most things people use in their everyday lives are mass produced goods, which are expressions of the strategies of designers, producers and marketers
- people create their own worlds and identities by using tactics to renegotiate these strategies on their own terms
- e.g. bricolage, assembly, customization, remix
- strategies and tactics today are now closely linked in an interactive relationship and often switch roles
- especially in the case of ‘born digital’ media like software, computer games, websites, social networks
- designed from the outset to be customized by their users
- physical world industries moving in the same direction, e.g. toyota, nike, bug labs
- since De Certeau’s ‘Practice of Everyday Life’, companies have developed new ‘strategies’ that mimic people’s ‘tactics’ of bricolage, re-assembly and remix
- the logic of tactics has now become the logic of strategies – does this negate the power that tactics gave to individuals in the past? e.g. ability to protest against the system?
- De Certeau claimed that strategies were semi-permanent, while tactics were impermanent, ‘unmappable’ forms of subversion
- Since the 1980s, consumer and culture industries systematically turned every subculture into a target market
- today all groups that would like to ‘oppose the mainstream’ are catered for by mainstream products
- in the 90s, dramatic decreases in costs of consumer electronics resulted in an explosion of ugc
- web 2.0 companies responded by setting up social media websites
- details of the everyday lives of anyone anywhere on the planet with a camera, computer and internet connection became available to the general population to consume
- ephemeral, transient, unmappable tactics became permanent, mappable and viewable
- only a matter of time before constant broadcasting of one’s daily life becomes as common as email (ustream?)
- De Certeau says that strategies are engaged in systematizing, ‘its ways are set.’ It can’t be expected to break up and regroup easily, which the tactical model does naturally
- social media company strategies are the exact opposite – focused on flexibility and constant change
- an important feature of web 2.0 apps is ‘hackability’ and ‘remixability’ – web 2.0 companies make APIs available, Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, YouTube
- social media company strategies look like tactics, whereas tactics look like strategies today
- subcultures are often a result of cultural appropriation and/or a remix of previous commercial cultures
- AMVs as ‘tactical creativity’ – users working on things around them to make them their own

Media Conversations

- terms ‘content’, ‘cultural object’, ‘cultural production’, ‘cultural consumption’ redefined by web 2.0 practices
- new kinds of communication – content, opinion and conversation cannot be clearly separated
- content, news and media become ‘tokens’ to initiate or continue conversations
- act of ‘giving’ a gift, e.g. posting a news item, uploading a picture or video – sharing with the community
- Roman Jakobson – Communication Functions, 1960
- Adrian Chan – exchange of tokens; motive or intent may not be clear, multiple meanings of interaction and communication
- users can respond to the token itself or to the user who contributed it
- youtube or flickr user comments often refer to the work, but also respond to each other
- location and time become irrelevant in infinite conversations continued by infinite people
- the web is essentially millions of such conversations occurring simultaneously
- responding to a youtube video with another youtube video
- The Machine is Us/ing Us – Michael Wesch
- Modern Art can be understood as conversations between different artists or artistic schools
- one artist/movement responded to the previous one
- YouTube metaphor: Jean-Luc Goddard posted a video response to ‘classical narrative cinema’ but did not receive a response in kind from the Hollywood studios for another 30 years
- media today is influenced by different forms, e.g. music videos influence cinema editing, cinematography influences computer games
- differently in web 2.0, individuals are having direct conversations with each other using media

Is Art After Web 2.0 Still Possible?

- can professional art and artists survive the extreme democratization of access to and production of culture by the masses?
- contemporary art has become another form of mass culture
- contemporary art has become a legitimate investment category
- since the 90s, as an effect of globalisation, many countries around the world adopted western values in their cultural politics, including supporting, collecting and promoting contemporary art
- most ugc videos, music, animation, graphic design etc are not exceptional, but enough of them are
- many examples rival or exceed the quality and innovation of work produced by established professionals
- most of this work is produced by young professionals or professionals-in-training, i.e. students
- web 2.0 distribution makes it clear that the world of professional art has no special licence on creativity or innovation
- the web itself is evolving constantly as a medium – software, web mash-ups, plug-ins, apps, etc.

Title: Hybrid Media: How the Remix has become the Defining Form of Artistic Expression of the 21^st Century

How have globalization and the hybridization of digital media content affected the generally accepted concept of the ‘art movement’ across the full spectrum of the creative disciplines? Why are we seeing an exponential increase today in the speed of reactions to so-called artistic styles and trends, in comparison to previous historical movements of the 20^th century, which tended to last for relatively longer periods of time? What comes after the remix? These are some of the questions that have inspired my interest in researching the area of remix culture. Preliminary research was conducted into this area as part of my Masters degree, focusing on the intellectual property issues associated with remixed video content on the Internet. My aims at the doctoral level are to take this research further and deeper and to widen the field to produce a relevant and useful body of work at the end of the 5 years.

The remix artist is a product of the Postmodern era, a cynical multi-disciplinary individual who accepts that originality cannot be attained and so salvages the scraps from bygone days in an attempt to give some sort of meaning to their seemingly random existence. The only logical reaction to Postmodernism  is a return to Romanticism. Glimpses of this transition are beginning to emerge through various aspects of life including spirituality, politics and economics. The new medium has created a new world for all of us, in which the tools of production and distribution have been democratized. What kind of art could be created when an infinite number of artists may be collaborating on a project simultaneously, while an equally infinite number of people are consuming the work at the same time, each one experiencing an individualized version of events? The remix is a hybrid of technology, creativity and content, but is it art?

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the depths of symbolic advertising and how we react to it.  Symbolism is an amazing phenomenon that possesses the ability to appeal to us at an unconscious level and can inspire within us emotion, ideas and contemplation.  However, with such positive traits come also many flaws.  It is debatable whether or not a particular symbol will convey the same meaning to everybody, or even to two people.  In this thesis, I will look at both sides of the argument in detail, using visual examples.

Chapter 1: Symbols – What are they ?
The first chapter will deal with the complicated phenomenon of symbols.  Definitions, in conjunction with theories will be presented in an attempt to clarify the nature of the symbol for the lay-person.  Several visual examples will be analysed and their symbolic value demonstrated.  The origins of visual symbols will be discussed with reference to the earliest historic examples we have on record, and comparisons will be drawn between them and their modern day equivalents.  The area of personal, cultural and universal interpretation will also be introduced.
Chapter 2: Symbolism in Advertising – An Analysis of Symbolic Ads
The second chapter will analyse examples of deeply layered advertising and will show how symbols are used in conjunction with one another to create these layers of meaning.  I will consider how the various layers impact on us, from our first immediate reaction right down to our subconscious interpretations.  I will present a guide to deconstruction, which breaks the layers of meaning of a piece into five distinct sections.  The intention of the designer will be compared to the interpreted meaning of the ad and it will be shown why some symbolic ads are successful, and others are not.  I will take a brief look at the ethics of the advertising industry today and what motivates the production of symbolic advertising.
Chapter 3: Public Perception and the Effectiveness of Symbols in Advertising
The final chapter will place an emphasis on public perception.  Based on the research of Dr. Richard Taflinger, I will explain how symbolic advertising appeals to our unconscious human desires by using psychological appeals.  The effects of such blatant manipulation will be discussed and judged.  A small-scale test will be conducted to ascertain whether or not certain symbols are universally understood.  Six ads will be shown to eight people of various cultural backgrounds and their interpretations recorded and analysed.  The benefits and drawbacks of using symbols to convey meaning in advertising will be examined and consideration will be given to its effectiveness at both national and international levels.
Conclusion
Should symbols be used in advertising?  The answer, like most things in life, is neither black nor white.  I personally feel that symbols should be used, but they should be used carefully.  Certain symbols do possess universally understood meanings, and so these can be used for time immemorial.  However, the vast majority of symbols are transient.  Their meanings change as society changes and time goes on.  Designers using symbols in advertising need to have their finger firmly on the pulse and be aware of changing trends.  For me, symbolic advertising is the ultimate form of visual communication, and the best way to convey meaning to humanity.
Close your eyes for a moment.  Imagine an image of a bird with its wings spread, flying high in the sky.  What does this image mean to you ?  What did it make you think of ?  The answer, for most inhabitants of the Western world, is ‘freedom.’ The image of a carefree bird soaring high above all earthly problems has come to symbolise freedom in Western culture.  But would that same image have the same meaning to someone raised in China ?  In this Thesis, I intend to show how practical it is to use Symbolism in advertising.  What is the function of advertising ?  The sole function, in my opinion, is persuasion.  Advertising exists primarily to persuade and entice people to buy a particular product over another or behave in a certain way.  And how do advertisers achieve this ?  I think it depends greatly on the target market they are aiming to affect.  They could use humour, or the straight-talking informative approach.  Or, they can try to be clever – to make the viewer stop and think for a minute.  The latter usually involves the use of symbolism in one form or another.
But, what is symbolism ? Chambers’ dictionary describes it as “the use of symbols to express ideas.”  So, what is a symbol ?  Well, opinion varies on this point, but it is generally agreed that a symbol, in visual terms, is an image that has layers of meaning or implied connotations above and beyond its surface value.  For example, an image of a red rose is a picture of a flower that most of us would recognise, but it is also a symbol of love and romance.  We do not need to be told that the rose represents romance because we have learned to associate it with this meaning through repetition and time.  But how do certain objects come to symbolise particular meanings ?  This can happen in many ways.  Some cultures will reenact an activity that has occurred out of respect and through time it will become a tradition, and so, certain objects will come to be associated with this activity, and will become symbols of it.  For example, a decorated pine tree has become a symbol of Christmas. Due to globalisation, the world has become a smaller place, in advertising terms.  Because of this, symbols have become more important in the industry in the latter half of the 20th Century and beyond, than ever before.
The greatest flaw when dealing with symbols is that it is an impossibility for every human being to attach the same meaning to a particular object.  Many factors influence this, such as geography, culture, class or personal experiences.  On the other hand, within certain cultures where particular symbols are widely understood, they can be used in extremely clever and original ways and can make people stop and think. In this Thesis, I will analyse this phenomenon to the best of my abilitites and demonstrate the practicality of using symbolism in advertising.
Symbols represent an idea or concept. For example, the heart symbol represents love, something that is ethereal; we cannot see, hear, touch, taste or smell it. It is an ideogram symbol because it does not physically resemble what it denotes.What is a symbol ? To answer this question, I must first give a description of Semiology – the study of signs.  Semiology is most often associated with linguistics, but it extends far beyond this to focus on all modes of signifying systems, for example, music, hairstyles, kitchen recipes and of course, graphic images.  To understand fully exactly what a symbol is, we must first answer the fundamental question: what is a sign ? A sign is anything that possesses meaning.  It is made up of two parts – the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’.  In simple terms, the ‘signifier’ is the physical representation of the sign, for example, the image itself, and the ‘signified’ is what this image refers to, that is, its meaning.  The signifier is empty, that is, it cannot work on its own, because if the signified was not understood, the signifier would be completely devoid of meaning.  Now that we appreciate what a sign is, we can delve a little deeper.
There are three fundamental classes of signs – the icon, the index and the symbol.  An icon is a literal representation of something, as we see it, translated into a two-dimensional drawing.  The relation between the signifier and the signified is based on physical resemblance.  If the icon is poorly represented because of inept draughtsmanship or rendering, then recognition fails.  An index is a sign where there is an anticipated follow-on event or activity, which we are aware of because of past experience.  For example, smoke is an index of fire; a knock on the door is an index of someone’s presence; rain is an index of wetness.  The relationship between signifier and signified is sequential and causal.  Finally, a symbol is a representation of an idea that acquires a widely agreed upon meaning through common usage.  It is a visible way to represent the invisible.  A symbol implies an emotion or thought in addition to its obvious and immediate significance when placed before a particular audience.  The relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary and conventional, that is, the meaning is dependent on learning the relationship.  A symbol stands for something.  For example, roses symbolise passion; a closed fist stands for defiance or aggression.  A symbol is visually precise; it attempts to get at the essence of an idea through visual metaphor.  A symbol can give an identity to a subject and, by repeated use, can come to equal it.  No matter how simplified the visual representation, if it is used in the appropriate context, the meaning will be understood.  Whether rendered in simple black lines or lavishly illustrated and painstakingly painted, if the symbol is universally recognised then so will be its meaning understood.
Symbols represent an idea or concept. For example, the heart symbol represents love, something that is ethereal; we cannot see, hear, touch, taste or smell it. It is an ideogram symbol because it does not physically resemble what it denotes.
However, it does bear a resemblance to the human heart, an easily recognised icon, but its additional meanings transcend it into the realm of the symbol.  If a symbol bears no resemblance to any easily recognised object, it is called non-pictorial.  The following examples fall into this category.
The Yin-Yang is an old Chinese symbol that represents the universe and has become integrated in Western ideography.  It illustrates the two opposing dimensions that give the universe its dynamics – Yang and Yin – positive and negative. Yang  represents the energy, activity, warmth and spirit elements and Yin represents the passive, receiving, recipient, malleable and matter elements.
There exists nothing that is totally Yin or all Yang.  Nothing in life is black and white.  This fact is symbolised by the presence of the small white circle in the black yin field and the small black circle in the white Yang field.
Today the X symbol is used in a variety of contexts, all with negative connotations.  For example, it can mean annulment, confrontation, cancellation, obstruction, unknown, undecided or unsettled.  It is an extremely old symbol having been found on the walls of prehistoric caves in Europe, however we cannot be certain that the symbol held the same meaning for Prehistoric man.
The cross is basically the same as the previous symbol but viewed at a 45 degrees angle, however it holds very different meanings.  The cross, with arms of equal length is one of the oldest known symbols, also found in prehistoric caves.  It was used in most cultures.  In Chinese culture it represented perfection.  In pre-Columbian America it was associated with the four points of a compass.
The Alchemists used it to represent the four elements, with the point of intersection being the fifth, ethereal element.  As a universal symbol, the cross represents the balance between the spiritual and the physical worlds.  The vertical beam stands for the heavenly or spiritual while the horizontal represents the material plane of existence.
These examples are symbols in their most basic visual form.  They exist solely to communicate a meaning to people.  This meaning can be the same whether the image is made up of a few black lines on a piece of paper or a 20 ft tall 3Dimensional metallic structure.  In the same way, photographs are often used to convey the meanings of symbols in advertising.  For example, an image of a jacket, shirt and tie is a symbol of a formal occasion.  This symbol sustains its meaning whether the image is a photograph or hand drawn.  So, the medium used to communicate a symbol’s connotations can enhance the image aesthetically, but if the symbol is quite widely understood, the medium becomes relatively unimportant.
As far back as 25000 BC, humans have been using visual symbols to represent ideas.  In the prehistoric cave paintings found in Lescaux, Southern France and Altamira in Northern Spain, we find representations of animals and people with highly symbolic significance.  We cannot know for sure if our analysis of these symbols is accurate because we know very little of the lifestyle of these cave dwellers.  After all, they lived before the advent of the written word.  The examples in these caves date from about 25000 BC to approximately 4000 BC and depict Bison, horses and humans with animal like heads as well as unexplainable abstract graphic designs.
One of the bison is painted 18 ft long and other are painted in innumerable groups, in comparison to the pictures of humans, which are painted much smaller, less detailed and in fewer numbers.  It could be suggested that the bison was one of the cave-dwellers’ most respected and feared adversaries at the time and so they were painted so large to symbolise their power over the humans.  Today the meaning would have changed.  No human would want to have to face off to a bison, but we now know that we have ways to control them, to keep them caged up, and we have weapons to defend ourselves, so we no longer fear or respect them.
As times change, so too will the ways in which symbols are represented.  A symbol acquires its meaning as a result of a feeling, thought or event experienced by a person or people, and its meaning is sustained through common reference to the meaning when the visual representation is seen.  Some symbols have universal meaning.  For example, a mother and child image will always symbolise safety, love and protection to the vast majority of people.
The heart symbol will always represent love because we can all agree that this emotion is felt through our heart.  An image of two holding hands universally represents solidarity, togetherness, respect, love.  Such symbols will always have the same meaning because they are instinctive human activities that are experienced by all.  Symbols can also be created intentionally.  In the world of Graphic Design, many advertisements use established symbols to convey their meaning.  Most logos, however are not symbols.  They merely trigger a memory of what their company wants you to think of them, a reminder of what has been drummed into the minds of the public through wave after wave of advertising campaign.  However, some logos are symbols.  These are ones that have a deeper meaning or connotation in addition to their obvious and immediate significance.  The following example falls into this category.
This logo is quite obviously a graphic of a cinema ticket and so we presume it has something to do with films.  What nudges the image into the class of being a symbol, are the layers of meaning within it.  In addition to its obvious reference to the world of acting, upon closer inspection, we see that the tear in the ticket is in the shape of two human faces, one black, one white.
This humanises the symbol and leads to suggestions that the organisation is one where all kinds of people are welcome.  Finally, the word ‘PASS’, written on the ticket, in addition to its obvious meaning, doubles up to abbreviate the name of the organisation – ‘Performing Arts ServiceS.’  An ingenious visual symbol.
Symbols can have three kinds of association and often have all three.
Personal : We all have associations with things in our own experience.  One person may have strong affection for dogs while another may fear them intensely because of some experience in their past.
Cultural : Different symbols may have quite different meanings in different cultures.  A lion can represent Christ in Christian culture; in Sumerian culture, the god Marduck, is symbolised by the sun; in Egypt the sun represents the god, Ra.  In Chinese culture, dogs represent devotion, loyalty and faithfulness; in Islamic culture they represent impurity.
Universal : Jungian psychology, along with other theories argues that some symbols have universal meaning to all human beings.  This, of course, is impossible to prove.  An example that could be used is that of a lion, which suggests deity in a variety of very different cultures.
Symbols represent ideas.  To ‘represent’ means to bring before us something that is not there – the memory of that something.  In the experiments of Pavlov, a dog was trained to expect dinner after a bell was rung.  The dog would begin to drool when he heard the bell.  For this dog, the bell became a symbol of dinner.  Once a symbol has been learned, the memories that we associate with it take on special importance – they are the meaning of the symbol.  Once we’ve learned a symbol, we can use it to receive and transmit its symbolic meaning, assuming that the people on the other end associate similar memories for the symbol.  This is a big assumption.  Each of us acquires a unique inner universe, a kind of frame of reference, which encompasses both the symbols we’ve learned, and their associated meanings and memories.  It includes everything we know about the world, our memories, emotional life, and the way we think, learn, play and react.  It includes the symbols we know, their meanings and the way we communicate them.  For symbolic communication to work, the symbols used and their associated meanings have to reside in the frame of reference of both sender and receiver of the communication.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case and can lead to a conflict of interpretation.  Several factors can influence this, from culture and tradition to geography and class.  There are two main problems facing someone wishing to use symbols.  The first is whether or not the intended audience can recognise the symbols in terms of legibility and familiarity. A white dress in Europe and America is a symbol of a bride on her wedding day but in Asia a white dress is worn to someone’s funeral.  Quite a conflict of interpretation there. Secondly, assuming your audience does recognise the symbol, will they connect it with the correct memories or meanings as the designer intended?  The meanings of the designer must match the audience’s meanings for a symbol to be successful.
The design of a symbol is extremely important in terms of audience recognition.  An image can only be distorted so far before it becomes unrecognisable and the design fails.  Here are two visual symbols representing tennis, one of which is successful and one which is not.
In the first image, we easily recognise the tennis ball and subsequently associate the criss-cross design with a tennis racket and so conclude that the symbol represents tennis.  In the second symbol, it is not immediately obvious that this is a tennis ball, even though it is exactly the same shape as the tennis ball in the first image.  The colours have been reversed and as a result, we do not immediately associate the image with tennis, as we are not accustomed to seeing black tennis balls.  The symbol fails because of poor design.
Here are two symbols that could be perceived as having quite similar meanings but which are, in fact logos for two very different businesses.  The first is a logo for the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center.  It quite simply and efficiently refers to the two sides of a person’s personality.  The forehead of both faces is quite prominent, signifying the association of the image to mental health.  The second image also portrays two sides of the personality, but is here, more specific.  It denotes happy and sad in positive and negative colours.  The logo is for the British National Theatre, adopting an original slant on the well-known theatrical symbol of the two masks, comedy and tragedy.  In my opinion, both symbols are well designed and although their meanings are similar, the subtle differences in the design efficiently distinguish them.
As we can see from my analysis, symbols are far from being a simple concept to understand.  By their very nature, in theory, their meaning could be changing all the time, and they may mean something completely different to a variety of people simultaneously.  I feel that symbols possess an ethereal quality that is beyond human comprehension – an almost magical quality.  I have attempted to put them into human terms, terms we can understand, for the purposes of this thesis, and in the following chapter I will show how they are used effectively and not so effectively in advertising.
All works of art, including advertisements, contain levels of meaning above and beyond their surface content.  To interpret an ad on multiple levels, we must first understand how ‘form’ and ‘content’ work together.  The ‘form’ of a piece includes its medium and physical structure as well as its design while the ‘content’ is the subject matter, that is, what is actually shown in the ad.  The following is a simple breakdown of the levels of meaning of an ad that can be applied to any work of art.
Firstly, we will deal with the cultural/contextual level, that is, the background information of the piece.  We must ask ourselves what we know about the artist/designer and the social/cultural/historic/economic context in which the work was produced.  Secondly, we should examine the surface/concrete and thematic level.  What is the plot of the ad?  What is actually happening in the scene?  Are there any formal motifs, for example, unusual language or extremely recognisable symbols?  What is the theme of the ad?  What does it mean?  What immediate message is it trying to convey?  The next level of meaning is the imaginative or metaphorical level.  Does the plot or thematic idea represent anything that isn’t directly named in the work?  Often in symbolic ads, visual metaphor is employed, that is, an object is placed in a situation in which it would not normally be found, and we are asked to make a connection between it and the object we expect to see.  The fourth level of meaning is the visionary level.  Does the work convey any philosophical, mythical or universal meaning?  The fifth, and final level, for the purposes of this thesis, is the symptomatic level.  What does the ad reveal about the society or time period in which it was made, or about the person who made it?  So the five levels of meaning are :
Cultural / Contextual[ Reference - article on ‘Layers of Meaning: Levels of Interpretation’ by Heather Horn.  www.writing.ucsb.edu ]Surface / Thematic
MetaphoricalVisionarySymptomaticIn the following ads, I will identify the symbols and how they are used to convey the ad message, and analyse each piece with reference to its layers of meaning.
This is an awareness ad for a charity hill cycle to raise money for AIDS research.  Visually, it is quite simple with one object and a few lines of text.  The object is a rusting bicycle chain twisted into the shape of the internationally recognised symbol of the AIDS ribbon.  Obviously, the chain is appropriate as the ad is for a hill cycle ride.  This ad effectively demonstrates the power of the symbol.  Here, visual metaphor is put to good use and we practically know what the ad is about before we read the caption.  Communicating a message through imagery is so much more immediate than through written language.  A further level of meaning in this ad is the use of a rusting chain as opposed to a well-oiled new one.  The designer is drawing a parallel with what happens to AIDS sufferers.  Their bodies decay and degenerate.  Using the rusting chain to reinforce this idea leaves us with a very striking, harsh, extremely effective image.
This ad for Austin’s Gym employs the technique of visual metaphor to put across its meaning.  Here, the pear is a symbol for healthiness.  We all know that eating fruit is associated with being healthy and so, using the pear effectively reinforces the idea that going to the gym is a way to be more healthy.  A further layer of meaning is attached to the piece with the ‘before’ pear symbolising an unhealthy, fat person with all their weight in the wrong places.  The ‘after’ pear, however, demonstrates the benefits of attending ‘Austin’s Gym’, symbolising a muscular, toned physique and all-round healthiness.  This ad works because the symbols are easily recognisable, and it is clever because its full meaning may not be instantly obvious, but when the penny drops it is very satisfying for the viewer.
This is an ad for I Nuovi Cosmetic’s Autumn collection of lipstick.  It is a relatively straightforward piece, but potently clever in its directness.  The symbol here is the red leaf, which, for all, is synonymous with Autumn-time.  The message they are trying to convey here is that their Autumn collection is so intertwined with Autumn itself that it would be unimaginable to experience this season without wearing I Nuovi lipstick.  In the ad, a pair of luscious lips have been superimposed onto the image of the leaf so that, depending on which way you look at it, you see either one or the other. It is a double meaning image similar to those of Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte. Another suggestion made by the ad is that your lips will be the most noticeable aspect of your features, if you use their product.
This suggestion is made by the empty space surrounding the leaf-lips.  On a universal level, the ad is making a psychological appeal to the subconscious human need for self-esteem.  That is, our desire to be seen as beautiful.  The ad is offering beauty, if you use the advertised product.  On a symptomatic level, what does this ad say about society?  Perhaps it is putting society in a pretty grim light of petty self-indulgence, vanity and shallowness.  If one finds it necessary to have a certain type of lipstick to correspond to the current season, does it not also suggest a degree of gullibility?
When an Art Director comes up with a concept for an ad, she has many things to consider.  The eventual outcome should result in an ad that communicates the message intended by the designer in an efficient way.  The viewer should come away from a piece enlightened as to what the Designer wanted them to know.  And, of course, one of the most powerful tools of advertising, is the power of suggestion.  Advertisers appeal to our subconscious, psychological desires, which are shared by all human beings and will be discussed further in chapter 3.  Always, there must be, however, a margin for error.  An ad is a piece of art as much as a poem or a painting and so, it is open to individual interpretation.  This is something a designer has little control over.  On top of this allowance for interpretation, add another level of difficulty for the designer – if symbols are used in an ad, there is a risk that their meaning will escape the viewer.  It takes a brave Art Director to use symbols in an ad, as they are putting themselves and their client on the line, and it could go either way.  If the symbols are not understood, the ad is a failure, but if they are comprehended, then they will be more memorable to the viewer than any other type of ad could be, as people feel that they have been touched on a personal level; that someone else associates the same meaning with a particular object as they do.  I do not believe there is a more effective way to help someone to remember an ad.  The following ads contain several layers of meaning and rely on symbols to convey these messages to us.  I feel the symbols in these ads are quite effective, but still leave a certain amount of room for misinterpretation.
Here we have an ad for an American law firm, Womble & Carlyle.  The first impression gained from this piece is a comedic one.  It seems an amusing image to see a bulldog strapped to a parachute.  The bulldog itself is the symbol here representing viciousness, strength, aggressiveness and tenacity.  The firm wish to be associated with these traits.  Dogs are also reknowned for loyalty, flexibility, obedience, gentleness and being man’s best friend.  Womble & Carlyle want to have their cake and eat it with this ad.  They are hoping that all the positive traits of the bulldog will come to be associated with them.  The connotations of the symbol of a bulldog mentioned above are all quite widely recognised and understood so, in this way, the ad could be a success.
However, they are forgetting that dogs are also known as basically dirty creatures and bulldogs are regarded as being overly violent, both of which would not be beneficial traits for any law firm to be associated with.  Also, I can’t help but feel that the idea of the bulldog being aggressive is somewhat muted by the fact that he is shown here in a comic light, helplessly suspended from a set of strings.  Despite these drawbacks, I still feel the ad is successful.
17.There are several layers of meaning in operation in this awareness ad for safe sex.  Perhaps some of the meanings were unintentional, as they do not seem to aid the cause in any way.  First of all, we are dealing with a visual metaphor here; the sock is in place of a condom.  The first message given from this concealing of the condom image, is that sex is a taboo and should be hidden.  Perhaps an unintentional message?  Secondly, replacing a condom with a sock hardly does any favours for the cause of promoting the use of condoms.  Already, it is widely agreed that sex with condoms is at least slightly more unpleasant than sex without them and I feel that associating condoms with smelly feet will not convince many more people to use them.
Socks are worn to protect our feet and make us more comfortable and so, here, these traits are transferred to a condom.  The third message is very effective.  We see a single sock.  We can’t help but wonder who it belongs to.  Perhaps an AIDS victim who has died… When viewed in this light, the ad portrays a stark, sobering message about the importance of using protection.  The single, discarded sock becomes a symbol for somebody who has lost the battle against AIDS through their own carelessness.  However, the ad is wide open for misinterpretation.
All of these ads and advertising itself, exist for only one reason: to influence people.  As it is the human mind that advertising is dealing with, its only scientific basis is psychology.  When advertising began, it was widely believed and accepted that consumers were rational creatures and that, given information about the product and reasons why it should be purchased, they would respond appropriately.  Of course, today we know this not to be true.  Walter Dill Scott, a respected theorist and writer, was one of the first to realise this, and certainly the most influential person in changing the industry to appeal less to people’s understanding and more to their wishes and desire.
According to an article by Robert Wozniak, Scott believed that every normal person was subject to the influence of suggestion, and that suggestion, not reason was the primary determinant of human action.  The idea was to maximise the power of suggestion in advertising and minimise the possibility of raising interfering thoughts within the viewer.  Psychological functions such as memory, feeling, sympathy, instinctive action, volition, habit and attention were the main targets for manipulation.  To make an advert memorable, there are four very important principles that must be employed: Repetition, intensity, association value and ingenuity.  With regard to feeling, it was discovered that if we are made to feel uncomfortable, we become defensive, refuse to receive suggestion, are not easily influenced and are in a suspicious attitude towards everything that is proposed.  So, to be successful, an ad must elicit pleasure in the reader.  If there is a high degree of perceived similarity between those pictured in an ad and the reader, sympathy will be felt and there will be a higher likelihood that the ad will influence the reader through the power of suggestion.
When advertising a product, the most fundamental aim is to induce the public to get into the habit of using this particular product over another, and to keep them using it.  “To establish a habit, advertising must be extensive; to maintain the habit, it must be continued.”[1] Basically, advertising is a tool to influence people into doing something that they probably would not have done on their own.  Is this ethical?  The consumer still retains the right to make a final decision by themselves, so I believe there is nothing ethically wrong with the advertising industry.  People influence us all the time in our daily lives.  It is up to us to make the final choice.  Advertising can be a form of peer pressure but everyone has the ability to stand up for themselves.  If we do not have the courage to stand up for our opinions and make our own decisions, we do not deserve to have the final choice.  Luckily for the advertising industry, the world is full of people who want others to make up their minds for them.  And so, the industry flourishes.
Following are two symbolic ads that I feel are outstanding in their use of symbols to put across their message.  Each ad contains several layers of meaning.
This is an ad for Settebetto Indian style Italian food.  They produce pasta, spaghetti etc. with Indian style flavourings, sauces and spices.  The first impression one might take from this image is that it seems like a hallucination or a dream-vision; certainly not something we would be accustomed to seeing in every day life.  This gives the product an air of mystery; a feeling that it is something a little different.  The spaghetti string is the symbol here.  It represents Italy and Italian food and doubles up as an image of an Indian snake-charmer’s snake, rising from the pot.  The snake symbol has a further level of meaning in that it is suggesting that the spaghetti is so good for you, the consumer will be charmed by its quality.  Also, snakes are reknowned for their bite, so the suggestion is made that this food has more ‘bite’ than other similar foods.  The symbol’s success, however, is reliant on the assumption that the viewer is familiar with the image of an Indian snake charmer.
This is an ad for the Young Master’s Golf Cup 2000 which was sponsored by McDonalds.  We see a golf ball, which has been dissected into three sections.  It is placed on a green background, obviously representing the grass of the golf green.  The golf ball itself is a symbol for the Golf tournament, but in its divided form, it is obviously a reference to a McDonalds hamburger. This image is so rooted in Western culture that even in a distorted form, it is immediately recognisable.  Certain other icons possess this ability, such as Mickey Mouse or the Coca-Cola bottle.  I find the ad displays a certain arrogance on the part of McDonalds; they know that the hamburger is so recognisable that they can distort it and still convey their message successfully.
In this chapter, I have shown how symbolic ads put across their meaning to us, and why sometimes using particular symbols in certain contexts can be ineffective.  The final chapter will delve deeper into why some symbols elicit certain feelings within us, due to our inherent human desires, and it will be demonstrated whether or not certain symbols convey the same meanings to a group of people from different cultural backgrounds.
Chapter 3
Public Perception and the Effectiveness of Using Symbols in AdvertisingWhy use symbols in an ad when you could communicate your message just fine without them?  Why beat around the bush and use tricks and gimmicks when the direct approach will get the job done?  After all, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  Well, it may be the quickest way, but in the case of advertising, it is certainly not the most effective.  A linear approach will register immediately with the viewer, but it will be forgotten just as quickly.  It leaves no lingering memories and does not stir up any emotion, or satisfy any desires within them.  That’s where symbols come in.  As I mentioned in the last chapter, symbolic advertising is perhaps the most effective type of advertising, in my opinion, because a connection is made on a personal level with the viewer, as the symbol stirs up personal memories for each individual and so leaves a lasting impression.  Each human being is born with certain predetermined desires built into our psyches.  We all share these traits and advertisers know this and so they design accordingly to psychologically manipulate us.  The problem with using symbols to trigger these desires is that not all people share the same interpretation of a particular symbol.  The main cause for this is different cultural backgrounds.  This would not be an issue in an ideal world because all it would mean would be to refrain from using ads with cultural references from one country in any other countries.  For example, a Chinese ad with references to Chinese culture would be unlikely to be correctly understood in Ireland, or vice-versa.  So, the obvious answer – don’t use Chinese ads in Ireland.  But what about all the Chinese people who live in Ireland?  Do they fully understand the ads they are exposed to on a daily basis?  I would suggest that they do not.  And therein lies the problem.  In today’s Cosmopolitan world where many cultures and nationalities reside in one place, there has never been a time when symbolic advertising was more open to misinterpretation. Dr. Richard Taflinger, author of ‘Psychology of Consumer Behaviour’ has done extensive studies into the reasons why people are influenced by certain imagery in a particular context.  He puts it down to ten basic traits inherent to all human beings.  Advertisers use psychological appeals to motivate people to buy products.  The appeals are: Self-Preservation, Sex, Acquisition of property, Self-Esteem, Personal Enjoyment, Constructiveness, Destructiveness, Curiosity, Imitation and Altruism.  A psychological appeal is a visual or aural influence on your subconscious mind and emotions.  It does this by implying that by doing what the ad suggests, for example, buying a product, you will satisfy one of your subconscious desires.  It is not a subliminal message, which is an element of a visual presentation that is not consciously perceived but influences your behaviour.  If a psychological appeal was not perceived, it would have no effect at all.  Most people are not aware of the existence of such appeals, or have given no thought to the matter, but once you are aware of them, they become blatantly obvious in advertising.  In addition to our genetic predispositions to regard certain stimuli in a certain way, we also have an additional factor that influences us far more than any other organism on earth.  We have the most complex social structure on the planet and this influences every aspect of our lives.  Who we are, what we do and how we do it is constantly being decided by our societies and cultures. Dr. Taflinger gives the following example to demonstrate cultural difference.“How do you feel about a snack of nice, fresh maggots?”Your response was probably some measure of disgust. This reaction was determined by the society you live in. For some cultures, particularly in the tropics, maggots are considered a wonderful treat. Cannibalism is another example. In some cultures, it is the greatest honour you can have to eat the entrée – if you eat Grandpa, then he, quite literally becomes a part of you, and when you die, you become a part of the living body of your descendants, taking a part of grandpa with you, and so on. So, why don’t we here in Ireland think of things in this way? Our society says we don’t eat maggots and frowns on cannibalism and has taught us that they are wrong. However, when biological forces, like starvation, come into play, such social lessons we have learned lose their power and our basic human desires take over. For example, a group of 19th century settlers got snow-bound in the Sierra Nevada mountains with no food. After a while their only source of food, and thus survival, came from those who were still alive eating those who had died. The basic biological imperative of staying alive took precedence over social proscriptions against cannibalism. The same is true for all of the ten appeals. Everyone wants to stay alive, to reproduce, to have more than they have, to have fun, to be happy. Society has only existed for a few thousand years, whereas we have had biological urges for millions of years, and it is these urges that advertising tries to take advantage of when using psychological appeals. These urges transcend all cultural differences and are shared by all human beings. With symbolism, there are several layers of meaning to be understood, at least some of which will inevitably present problems of interpretation when put before an audience of mixed cultural backgrounds. For the purposes of this essay, I conducted a series of small-scale tests to determine how different people interpret the same symbolic imagery. I used three of the ads analysed in chapter 2 and three others, accompanied by a series of questions of my own invention, designed to demonstrate the difference between people’s personal frame of reference.
Conclusion

When I first began to think about this thesis, I wanted to write about something I was genuinely interested in and hopefully delve a little deeper into the subject and learn something along the way. I feel I have achieved these goals. I have always been aware of, and interested in the symbolic side of life and so, for this thesis, I applied my interest to design, and advertising in particular. A symbol’s success in advertising relies on all the people who see it having the same meaning for it, but a symbol gains its ethereal qualities as a result of different people not sharing the same interpretation. I discovered a great disparity in the interpretations of people from different backgrounds. The core theme of this thesis has been the effectiveness of advertising that uses symbolism to put across its ad message. I wanted to show that there are positive, but also negative connotations attached to this kind of advertising that I find so interesting. It is eternally debatable which are the best ads, but the ones whose intended meaning were most clearly communicated were those that employed very easily recognised symbols. More obscure symbols are not as easily understood. Also, the more symbols used in one piece, the more time it takes to understand and so, it would seem that, as with most aspects of design, the simple, more direct approach is often the best one. On the other hand, more complicated ads take longer to understand, but are, ultimately, more satisfying than simple ones. I suppose this is a matter of personal preference.
A designer has no control over how a person will see a particular symbol. So, assumptions have to be made and risks taken, just as with everything in life, and hopefully the ad will be a success. There are no guarantees. There are certain benefits of using symbols in advertising, but there are as many drawbacks. On the positive side, symbolic advertising encourages people to think. We are requested to make a connection that may not be absolutely obvious at first glance. And when a connection is made, we feel as though we have achieved something. We also feel that we have been touched on a personal level, that somehow the designer of the ad has pierced our steely exterior and made a connection with us, in much the same way as poetry, art and music can affect us. In comparison to ads that use no symbolic imagery, for example, a straightforward, informative poster for an event of some kind, we can see the benefits. Such linear ads leave no lasting impression on us whatsoever. We can tell that no magic has gone into its creation. It will never be more than what it is, a piece of paper that tells us when and where this event is going to take place. Symbolic ads are more than what they are. They mean different things to different people across the world, and through time, their meanings and associations may also change.
Of course, the drawbacks are quite serious too, in terms of functionality. The basic aim of an ad is to persuade someone to do something, but when symbols are used, this function is at risk of becoming redundant and the ad may be a complete failure. As I have discussed and demonstrated, if the symbol is used in an inappropriate context, it runs the risk of being misinterpreted by the consumer, and so they will be less likely to be affected by the ad in the intended way. At the end of the day, this means that they will have no particular inclination to buy the advertised product and so, the ad is a failure. But when a designer gets it right, it is about as powerful a tool as can be used to induce a reaction in the viewer and no other method of advertising can be as memorable as the Symbolic. It is a risky business, but I feel it is well worth the risk for the potential benefits that can be gained. Despite the drawbacks, I strongly feel that Symbolic advertising is the ultimate form of Visual Communication.
(Excerpts from a piece I wrote in 2003 as part of a Diploma in Graphic Design)

It is said that Einstein’s theory of relativity is difficult for some people to understand because of its simplicity.  To comprehend it, you do not need to acquire information, but instead you must discard preconceived notions.  Imagine, if you would for a moment, that the word ‘media’, as we popularly understand it, is incorrect.  What we regard as media, such as television and radio broadcasts, newspapers and magazines are not, in fact, media, but merely vehicles of a medium.  In communications, a medium is a non-tangible intellectual concept through which vehicles operate.  By vehicle, I mean anything that carries content.   The aforementioned examples are all vehicles of the Mass Medium. In an effort to explain this phenomenon, I will draw upon an analogy penned by the media journalist, Vin Crosbie.  To comprehend the distinction between a communications vehicle and a communications medium, we need only observe how the words ‘vehicle’ and ‘medium’ are used when discussing transportation.  Consider that land was the first transportation medium.

Humanity has always walked on land, and still does, but we have used technology to build vehicles such as carts, carriages, bikes, trains, cars and trucks to help convey people or goods more efficiently and more quickly.  The second transportation medium was water and its use as a medium of transport is almost as old as that of land, dating from whenever the first human tried to swim or ride a floating log, perhaps.  Since then, we have used technology to create vehicles to convey us in this medium, such as rafts, canoes, boats, ships and submarines.  Both of these media share similar characteristics to their counterparts in communications media.  For example, humanity’s use of land and water predate technology.  The vehicles that technology created merely extended our speed and carrying capacity.  Most of us can walk and swim without using any technology.  Note also that the vehicles for these media are limited by their medium.  For example, a train cannot operate on water no more than an ocean liner can on land.

Throughout most of human history, people were confined to those two transportation media and their mutual advantages and disadvantages.  It was unrealistic to even imagine the possibility of another medium.  But at the end of the 19^th century, a German inventor, Otto Lilenthal developed the technology to utilise airfoils successfully and began to glide over the German countryside.  Twenty years later, the American Wright brothers converged the glider technology with that of an engine and a third transportation medium was well and truly established – Air.  Other vehicles developed for this medium are balloons, parachutes, planes, helicopters and spacecraft.  These vehicles can transport people anywhere on the planet, encompassing most of the reaches of both land and water, generally without their complementary disadvantages.  Importantly, however, is the fact that the transportation medium of air is entirely dependent on technology, unlike the previous two.  People can walk and swim, but we cannot fly.  So, you may ask, how does all of this relate to understanding the communications medium, now popularly referred to as ‘New Media?’  Well, just as there are three transportation media that we are aware of, there are also three communications media.  As with transportation, two of those communications media are ancient and came about independent of technology.

The third, however, is relatively new and relies entirely on technology to exist.  The first communications medium does not have a widely accepted name, so here we will refer to Crosbie’s term, the Interpersonal Medium.              Animal communication, predating humans and technology is where this medium first developed.  Human technology later extended its speed and reach.  The basic form of this medium is the interpersonal conversation, and later technology developed the postal letter, the telephone call, text messaging and e-mail.  In this medium, each participant has reciprocal control over the content conveyed and this content can be individualised to each participant’s unique needs and interests.  The main disadvantage is that this medium is limited to individualisation.  For example, try holding different conversations with more than one person at the same time.  So, media experts refer to it as the ‘One-to-One’ medium.

The second communications medium is popularly referred to as the Mass Medium.  It is commonly thought that the Mass Medium is a product of technology when, in fact, it began with the words of tribal leaders, kings or priests addressing a group of people.  Technology has extended its speed and reach worldwide.  Examples of vehicles of the Mass Medium are church sermons, books, newspapers, billboards, magazines, cinema, radio, television and bulletin boards.  The characteristics of this medium are that the same content goes to all recipients and whoever sends it has absolute control over that content.  Disadvantages are that the content cannot be individualised and the recipients have no control over what they see, hear or read.  Like the Interpersonal Medium, the Mass Medium is not necessarily reliant on technology, for example, an actor or speaker may perform without the use of any technology.  Media experts term this the ‘‘One-to-Many’ medium.  In summary, the Interpersonal Medium allows delivery of an individualised message, but only to one person at a time whereas the Mass Medium can simultaneously deliver messages to an infinite number of people, but its content cannot be individualised.  In the past, anyone needing to communicate had to choose between the mutually incompatible characteristics of the Interpersonal and Mass Media.

But now, the evolution and convergence of several technologies in the last century has given rise to an entirely new medium.  Those technologies were:

The invention of digital communications in the late 1940s

The Transport Control/Internet Protocol in the late 1960s

ARPANET’s creation of the Internet in the early 1970s

The personal computer in the late 1970s

The invention of Hyper Text Transport Protocol and the Web Browser in the late 1980s

These technologies converged to create a new communications medium with characteristics that were inconceivable even in the late 1980s.  The main characteristics of the New Medium are that individualised content can be simultaneously delivered to an infinite number of people and that each of the people involved shares reciprocal control over that content.  The New Medium has the advantages of both the Interpersonal and the Mass Media but without their disadvantages.  This medium is entirely reliant on technology for its existence.

Experts refer to it as the ‘Many-to-Many’ medium.  The vehicles of the New Medium are only beginning to appear and as such, we are all to a degree, feeling in the dark.  We are only yet scratching the surface of its potential.

For example, if a user visited a newspaper website, he could see a unique edition customised to his own interests. So, instead of everyone seeing the same newspaper, an infinite number of people could simultaneously view an automatically customised edition.  Or, for example, with Digital TV, someone who is watching a broadcast simultaneously with millions of other people worldwide, could pause, rewind or fast forward the program, discuss the show with on-line friends, or even select an alternative ending without affecting anyone else’s broadcast, essentially customising the show to their individual needs.  Existing vehicles in the New Medium include the individualised website, chat rooms, on-line games such as X-Box Live titles and file sharing software and websites like I-Mesh, Kazaa or Napster.

The key term to be associated with the New Medium is interactivity.  With the advent of digital technology, practically all content has become malleable.  It has become editable, easy to change.  This is something completely new to us coming from the age of the Mass Medium when all content was given to us in ‘read-only’ form.  We were passive spectators then with no control over the content.  In the New Medium, everyone with a computer has access to software that enables them to capture, edit and alter digital images, sounds and text to their heart’s content.  As a result, we have all begun to expect interactivity in all of our pursuits.

The term ‘New Media’ is, in my opinion, not only grammatically incorrect, but inadequate.  I feel a more appropriate name would be the ‘Mass Interpersonal Medium.’  It could even be abbreviated to ‘M.I.’ to satisfy the style hounds.  However, for the purposes of universal comprehension, I will continue to refer to it as the New Medium or ‘New Media’ for the remainder of this analysis.

The New Medium is part of a larger historical revolutionary change that is currently underway, referred to as the Information revolution by experts.  This Information revolution is taking over from the world of the Industrial revolution, which itself took over from the world of the Agrarian revolution.  The Agrarian world, which began 5-10,000 years ago, required one to make his own clothes or have them made for him.  Each piece of clothing was customised to one’s own individual sizes and needs.  About 200 years ago, technology had advanced to the stage where we could build factories, and so began the Industrial revolution.  Millions of pieces of clothing could be produced but none could be individualised to the exact size of their eventual consumer.  These traits are strikingly similar to those of the Interpersonal and Mass Media.

Today, we are moving towards a convergence of these traits.  For example, Levi Strauss & Co. are now beginning to mass produce jeans that are requested on-line according to the exact size and measurements of each individual consumer.  The effects of the Information revolution upon society are being compared to those from the time when the printing press was invented and unleashed on society.

The printing press, however, was merely a technological advancement within the Mass Medium.  The New Medium is a quantum leap beyond mere innovations like the printing press.  It will have profound effects on the way we live our lives.  However, just as the development of the transportation medium of Air did not replace those of Land and Water, neither will the New Medium replace the Interpersonal or Mass communications media.  It is simply an evolutionary step on the path towards a brighter future.

What is a New Media Designer?

If one is to refer to himself as a New Media Designer, as opposed to, for example, a Graphic Designer, there are certain criteria one must fulfill above and beyond the duties of the latter.  A New Media designer can decode, evaluate, analyse and produce work in both print and electronic vehicles of media.  The New Medium is an evolution from analogue based vehicles, but it also includes their produce, but now in a digital form.  “The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time.  He is the man of integral awareness.”  (Marshall McLuhan-Understanding Media P.65)

The New Media Designer is an artist.  He is also an author, a graphic and web designer, an interactive and information designer, an audio manipulator, a musician, a film-maker, a special effects designer, an animator, an illustrator and a researcher.  He is all things to all people.  An Umo-Universal.  Not only this, but he must be fluent in all of the software used to realise these disciplines, as practically all New Media Design is created using digital technology.  As a result, he must have his finger on the pulse with regard to changing trends and new and emerging software and technology or be left behind.  This is a new medium developed from established ones, so the playing field is wide open for experimentation.  There are certain qualities that I feel are essential traits for all designers in the New Medium.  They are adaptability, resourcefulness, the ability to compromise and embrace change, discipline, organisation, foresight and planning ability, attention to detail, dedication, a willingness to put in the hours, an open mind, talent and, above all else, creativity – the ability to generate ideas and realise them.  A person calling themselves a Designer who is not highly creative is merely a machine operator.  The ability to use Design software and equipment does not make one a Designer no more than the ability to write a shopping list makes one a novelist.

The necessity of being so multi-skilled puts an added burden on the shoulders of the 21^st Century Designer: Responsibility.  If we are creating design that will be experienced by many people, then we have a responsibility towards those people that should not be abused.  If a new type of interface or a fresh style of font is used on a new website on the Internet, within days it will have spawned many copycat websites who are jumping on the design pop band-wagon, which is as fickle as any of the pop industries.  In my opinion, it is one of our responsibilities as Designers not to latch onto passing style trends and design accordingly, as this is mere regurgitation.  We need to draw inspiration from everything around us, whether it be a magnificent piece of architecture, a melancholy sonata, or a unique chewing gum wrapper.

It would appear that society’s requirement for New Media Designers to become multi-skilled is, in fact, a two-faced coin.  With so many disciplines as working interests, it should become easier to draw inspiration from other areas.  However, taking on so many areas of expertise may cause a forced reduction in the quality of all of the work, due to spreading oneself too thinly.  So, our responsibilities lie in the avoidance of rehashing pop style work at the expense of good Design and in striving for innovation, originality, and subsequently, evolution.  We have a responsibility to make good choices.  Essentially, a designer creates the form of z in an environment in which z thrives.  In the New Medium, interactivity is what is thriving and so that is what we create.  Interactive Design.

We are using all of the tools of the digital age to create this interactivity, to create a memorable experience for the user that responds to the universal human need for individualisation, the ability to make our own decisions.  This is something that the Mass Medium could not offer us.  Humanity is at the beginning of a new age, philosophically, technologically, and socially, and New Media Designers are pioneers at the front line, the very edge of progress, pushing forward the ways in which we communicate.

The Multi-Skilled Individual

Good or Bad?

Aristotle wrote of a universal balance or harmony in his Nicomachean Ethics, which he referred to as the Golden Mean.  This is distinct from the mathematical term of the same name.  Essentially it is about making the right choices in one’s life that lie in between the extremities of action and pleasure.  The right choice is known as a moral virtue that resides between doing or feeling too much or two little.  For example, if courage were the moral virtue, cowardice would be the deficient vice of it and rashness would be the excessive vice.  Of course, the mean in each case is not universal, as it is relative to each individual.  As a New Media Designer in the Design industry today, it appears that it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain an appropriate balance and harmony in one’s work.  The 20^th Century was dominated by a move towards individual specialisation in most areas of education and employment.

People were encouraged to choose one area of study and try to become a specialist in that area alone.  This produced highly skilled individuals in particular disciplines whose potential usefulness was limited unless they were adopted as part of a team – a spoke in a wheel.  In other words, they were not as self-sufficient as they might have been.  This was especially true in the Design industry, where a would-be Designer might specialise in typography alone or illustration, for example.  Their knowledge and skills of all of the other areas of Design would have been quite limited as the education system pushed them towards this specialisation.  As a result, people became less employable.  If work could not be secured in a person’s particular area of specialisation, they had no choice but to resort to taking completely non-related, possibly low-skill work such as bar-work, or working on a building site, for example.

In the Design industry a Design team would be comprised of a group of individually specialised people, each working on their own aspect of a project, for example, a typographer, an illustrator, a layout designer, an art director etc.  Today, one can observe a change in the role of the Designer.  With regard to design courses, the education system in general has experienced a shift in opposition to specialisation.  Budding Designers are now encouraged to cultivate their skills in myriad areas of Design related disciplines.  Graphic Designers are exposed to areas such as photography, illustration, typography, copy writing and, of course, concept generation, making them highly employable in a variety of Design disciplines.  The New Media Designer’s course of study is extended even further to include animation, web design, interactive and information design, audio and video manipulation and content generation for all of these.

This knowledge and experience in such a variety of areas makes for multi-skilled individuals who could turn their hand to practically every Design discipline, if circumstances so required.  This, I feel, is a very positive step forward for all Designers, especially in light of the New Medium, which calls for regular utilisation of all of these disciplines.  What I would be concerned about is the possibility that producing such multi-skilled Designers, who may not be specialists, in the traditional sense, in any of the disciplines mentioned, might result in a reduction of the quality of work produced across the board.  I see two reasons why this might occur.  Firstly, as I mentioned, if Design students are spreading their time between a multitude of diverse areas, they may not be able to develop their skills in each area beyond a certain level of quality.

If they bring this routine with them into the Design industry, then logically one could suggest that the quality of their work will not be as good as it might have been, had the individual been able to spend more time gaining experience in each of the disciplines.  The second reason is that if the Design industry follows suit with the education system, that is, promoting multi-skilled individuals over individually specialised teams, then it would seem that Designers would have even less time at their disposal, as they would be taking on more work individually.  Stefan Sagmeister, Austrian born Designer, feels that “everybody now does everything.  My students are able to design websites, animate movies, edit, write music, do colour separations, type set etc.  The danger is that nobody can do anything really well.”  Currently, the Design industry is dominated by Design teams, but more and more the individuals within these teams are multi-skilled enough to be able to switch roles from project to project.

It could be suggested that this will continue to occur until it gets to the stage where one individual could complete an entire design project by themselves.  Teams would no longer be theoretically necessary and from a client’s point of view it would be much more economically viable to pay one designer than a whole team, for the same work.  The problems with this are that it would almost certainly take an individual some time longer to complete a project than it would a team and, the quality of overall work may not be as good as it might have been coming from a group of specialists.  Of course, I am not suggesting that Design teams will become a thing of the past, just that perhaps more and more designers will be able to take on more of the work themselves.

Also, such a multi-skilled designer is leaving many avenues open to himself, as not only could he do all the work himself, he would make a valued member of any design team, being so flexible.  It all comes down to balance.

The Golden Mean of good design, in my opinion, lies somewhere between being a specialist and being multi-skilled.  What that mean is, inevitably varies from person to person, but I cannot help but wonder about the future of design in the New Medium.  Will the client be able to have faith in the Designer’s ability to produce a finished piece with quality written all over it?  Can the client be sure they won’t get a piece with fantastic visuals but mediocre music?  And will the Designers of the future be responsible enough to recognise their limitations?  Or will we assume that just because we know how to produce all elements of a piece, we can justify creating something that isn’t completely up to scratch in all areas of its Design?  There may be a bumpy road ahead of us as Designers, but perhaps if we can avoid the extreme polar opposite of specialisation, we may just allow our natural evolution to take place.

Individuals vs Teams

There are many pros and cons one could point out in an argument between being a lone multi-skilled Designer or a specialised member of a design team.  My own personal opinion is that neither option is adequate.  For a full experience, one would need to indulge in both.  An individual multi-skilled designer has the advantage of having complete control over the work produced, within the boundaries of the client’s brief.  As a result, the individual will receive credit and recognition for all of the work, not just a segment, which makes for immense personal satisfaction.  On the flip-side, of course, he will also receive blame for all unsatisfactory work and forego the solace of being part of a team unit who can share the blame.  Another advantage of the individual Designer is that all aspects of the piece will most likely share a consistency of style and theme as it is all coming from one mind.  Economically, a Designer doing all of the work himself will make more money for himself than he would as a member of a team.

In opposition to these points, it is very difficult for someone to be objective of one’s own work, especially if you’ve been looking at it for two months straight.  Here a Design team has a clear advantage as you can always get a second opinion on your work as well as having it regularly checked by your Art Director.  As an individual Designer, your time would be significantly reduced.  You would have to spend far more time working than a group of team members who can share the load.  A major disadvantage of the individual is that he may be stronger in some areas than others.  For example, he may be an amazing illustrator and typographer but may have a poor grasp of temperal design, e.g. animation or video and audio.  Also, if changes had to be made in several areas, it would take much longer than it would for a team.

As an individual Designer, you would miss out on the social interaction and solidarity of a team environment.  The amount of work you could produce would also be firmly dictated by time constraints.

A Design team, on the other hand, has many advantages.  It is made up of people who are all experts in their particular field of Design and so it is quite likely that the overall quality will be superior to that of an individual doing everything himself.  Overall quality, however, does not necessarily make for good Design.  With a group of people from various backgrounds, each with different ideas, thoughts and opinions, it would be quite difficult to maintain consistency throughout the piece.  On the plus side, so many different ideas bouncing off of each other can stimulate creativity and establish an atmosphere of motivation and encouragement.  Such social interaction and even fun, is something the individual Designer sacrifices.

As a team member, you have less input and control over what you are working on, which in turn makes for less personal satisfaction.  You are not much more than a cog in a machine.  An advantage of a Design team is that they can work on several jobs simultaneously, maintaining each member’s interest, whereas an individual would most likely have to take one job at a time in order to do it any justice.  So, which is better?  As I said, neither option alone is adequate.  Perhaps a convergence of both viewpoints is the way forward.  Imagine a team made up of equally multi-skilled Designers, each capable of taking on the role of every member of a traditionally hierarchical team, from Art Director to Typographer.

From project to project, each team member could switch roles and eventually receive the credit and satisfaction an individual Designer is accustomed to while still experiencing all the advantages of being part of a team, social or otherwise.

If we take a step back for a moment, we can gain a glimpse of essentially what this whole analysis is pointing towards.  Around the time of the European Renaissance, during the 1400s and 1500s, the Church, who had until then been responsible for the general trend of belief among the masses, was exposed as being full of hypocrites.  The masses lost faith in the authority of the Church to tell them what to believe.  If something bad happened, God was not necessarily punishing us, as was previously believed.  If the members of the Church were committing the very acts that they had been teaching were mortal sins, how could they be trusted?  And how could people believe their teachings any longer?  So, a major upheaval occurred in the general trend of thought.  The whole belief system of the masses had collapsed and now they didn’t know what to believe, so they began to look for answers.  They wanted to know how things worked and why, and they would not accept an answer without proof and evidence to back it up.  And so, essentially, Science was born.

Scientists began to analyse everything around them to see how and why they were as they were and explorers were sent out to find out about the rest of the world, which, at the time, was believed to be flat.  So, for 400 years, humanity worked on the ‘how’ part of the equation, but never discovered any indisputable answers for ‘why?’  It was believed that the deeper you analysed something, the more you would find out about it and so this naturally lead to specialisation.

My theory is this :  It was essential for this move towards specialisation to occur.  We are now living in a time where everything is moving towards generalisation or ‘Comprehensivism’ as MacLuhan called it.  Essentially, we are developing a wider base of knowledge individually.  If specialisation had not occurred, the technology that makes the New Medium accessible to us would not have been invented.  Now that it is available to us, we must move towards ‘Comprehensivism’ to think of new ways in which we can use the New Medium.

Education

Education as we know it is changing.  The linear approach of ‘teacher talk, student listen’ is making room for a new interactive way of teaching that embraces the New Medium and makes for media and technology literate students, a trait that will become essential in the future.  For over four hundred years, literacy has been defined by the technology of print.  The development of analogue recording technologies such as still photography, audio, video and film recording made it possible to capture, preserve and distribute communications with a minimal diminuation of impact.  Broadcasting soon replaced print publishing as the primary vehicle for mass communication.  These technologies made their way into classrooms as aids to teaching e.g. photos in books, audio tapes for learning languages etc.  They broadened the set of tools and communication options available to a teacher however, they are all fixed media.  They are all used primarily for presentation to students which does not allow for interaction with the content presented.  The source material is not changed by either student or teacher.  It is simply a visual or aural extension of the ‘teacher talk, student listen’ approach.  The tools of the New Medium are changing this.

Most schools today are kitted out with computers and Internet connections and gradually, interactivity is increasing in the way content is taught.  For example, Patricia Aufderheide, Professor of Communication at the American University speaks about an Elementary school in America that has adopted interactivity in the way they are teaching poetry.  Using a computer and a projector, the teacher displays a verse of poetry, for example :

“Rabbid dog bites old man’s leg, shooting pain released,

Old man makes poor dog beg, rabbid dog, now deceased.”

She asks the children to change the rhyming words, for example ‘leg’ to ‘head’, ‘beg’ to ‘dead’ and she goes to the computer, replaces the relevant words, thus creating a new rhyme for the children to see.  This creates a memorable experience for the class as they feel they have been a part of the teaching and learning process.  The teacher can then print out a copy of the new poem for each of the students.  The poem represented here was created specifically for this essay to illustrate the point and is not a part of any curriculum.

Patricia Aufderheide feels that everyone needs to become media literate, as she states in a report for the American University – “Media literacy, the movement to expand notions of literacy to include the powerful post-print media that dominate our informational landscape, helps people understand, produce and negotiate meanings in a culture made up of powerful images words and sounds…Emphases in media literacy training vary widely, including informed citizenship, aesthetic appreciation and expression, social advocacy, self esteem and consumer competence.”

By making the learning experience in schools more interactive and by using New Medium technologies in conjunction with Mass Medium techniques, teachers are preparing students for the world of work that faces them.  Literacy in the workplace is becoming more interactive and requires the use of multiple technologies for effective communication.  If teachers do not adopt this new way of teaching, they are essentially failing to prepare their students for what awaits them.

Eventually, interactive classrooms will be common place, producing more media literate people, which in turn means that the role of the New Media Designer becomes even more important as more and more people will expect interactivity in all of their pursuits.  The New Media Designer will satisfy that need.

A Commercial Role vs A Higher Purpose

In the words of Tibor Kalman, “[Design] is a business that affects people’s lives.”

(www.adbusters.org – interview)  Designers produce work that influences people in various ways and so, as with all work that is exposed to the public, a certain responsibility rests on the shoulders of he who creates.  Today’s world is saturated by Design work produced by people who have abused this responsibility to varying degrees.  The majority of offenders reside in the capitalist world of commerciality, stripping away the ethereal qualities of inspiration and creativity and enslaving what little magic remains into an existence of deception and manipulation.  Many Designers in the past have felt strongly about this issue, most notably Mr. Kalman, mentioned above, who consciously and publicly enforced his message of putting meaning back into his commercial work.

Today, more and more Designers are becoming disillusioned with having to bring their creativity down to the level of dollars and cents.  We can see this train of thought manifesting itself in many ways, through writings, websites, events and activist schemes, on a daily basis.  The ‘First Things First’ manifesto, published in the year 2000 by Adbusters magazine and their website, addresses this issue.  It speaks of how too much Design energy is being spent to promote pointless consumerism and too little to helping people understand an increasingly complex world.  This manifesto is an updated, reworded version of another one of the same name, first penned in 1964 by Ken Garland of London, England.

Adbusters is a catalyst for anti-corporate thinkers.  There exist many organisations whose sole aim is to wrest control from the multi-national corporations, allowing design to be used for the benefit of humanity, not the pockets of the corporations. They want to use Design to improve the quality of living for everyone.  Such groups have even taken to extreme action known as ‘Culture Jamming’ whereby they essentially vandalise billboard posters in such a way that the original message of the ad is altered to produce a new message exposing the ads deceptive nature, often in quite humorous ways.  Rodriquez de Garado is widely accepted as being one of the first to practice this form of guerrilla art  and he can still be found ‘refacing’ ads in the streets of New York today.

Such media theorists as Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Mark Crispin Miller, Robert McChesney, Ben Bagdikian and Naomi Klein, who expolore the idea of corporate control over information flows, influence such activists, who transfer these theories to the walls and billboards of cities worldwide using a waterproof marker and a bucket of wheatpaste.  Essentially what these movements are all about is giving Design a social conscience.  There are those who even go as far as to try to change society itself, or create a new one by example, such as Stefan Sagmeister, who publicly left a well paid position in a large Design company to set up a small one of his own, so that he could design for people he knew or who came to him in exchange for services they could offer him.  Such radical measures, though admirable, are not without their fatal flaws and problems.

The Design industry as we know it today, is a commercial industry and that is unlikely to change in the near future.  However, as more and more people realise the potential of the New Medium and discover new ways in which it can be used to benefit everyone, I have no doubt that Design will move closer to its true role as an improver of the world.

The Future

At present, the work of the New Media Designer is primarily concerned with the likes of interactive CDs, higher bandwidth websites, on-line resources and computer games.  But how will our role develop as more and more of the possibilities of the New Medium are explored and discovered?  Many films, books and TV shows have touched on ideas that could only take place in the New Medium.  Such films include ‘Virtuosity’, which told of a huge virtual reality police training simulator that produced adversaries using the personalities of history’s greatest villains.  ‘The Matrix’ is based around a computer generated virtual world that the majority of humanity has been fooled into thinking is actual reality.  Ray Bradbury wrote of an interactive ‘Playroom’ of the future, whose walls were floor-to-ceiling television screens.  Children could input any environment or destination into the computer and then control the scene by way of telepathic sensors located around the room.  In the later Star Trek series, we were shown a futuristic ‘Holodeck’ which is a virtual playground and learning simulator.  It is infinitely programmable and can create virtual people and places as specified by the demands of the users.  Such examples suggest that virtual immersive experiences are the full realisation of interactive entertainment.

If our greatest entertainment visionaries and storytellers are predicting and calling for this type of experience, sooner or later it will happen.  If this is true, then why are our media corporations not laying the foundations for the emergence of this incredible new entertainment form?  The answer is simple…they are.  At some stage in the not too distant future, what we regard today as Science Fiction will become reality.

Thanks to Quicktime VR technology, websites can now offer us 360° panoramic views of any location.  So, now you can visit many tourist sites where you can get a virtual experience of the location with each street laid out realistically.  Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) is evolving gradually and promises to transform the Internet into something ever more closely resembling a 3D space where people can explore new places on-line in a more immersive manner.  CD-Rom computer games continue to refine the possibilities of branched storytelling with multiple outcomes and consequences for the user’s personalised actions and choices.  This will only develop further, utilising higher quality content and creating extremely media rich products as games are produced more on DVD format, which can hold over 7 times as much information as a CD.

Such consoles as the Sony Playstation 2, the Microsoft X-Box and the Nintendo Gamecube are pushing more and more for realistic behaviour, incorporating advanced artificial intelligence into the game characters.  Added realism comes in the form of such examples as the FIFA series of soccer games, John Madden’s American Football or the WF wrestling games which allow you to play the game using players who look exactly like their real life counterparts in facial and physical features and in their physical behaviour.

Artifical intelligence is also used by the US military in simulators they use to train their troops.  They can quite accurately recreate likely behaviour patterns based on past enemy contact and so prepare their troops for what they may have to face in reality.  Simulations they use are known to include artificial intelligence soldiers, jets, tanks, ships, satellites, jeeps and helicopters.  So, the groundwork for immersive experiences has been in development for quite a while.

Gradually, as more are produced, interactive stories are becoming stronger and the balance between gameplay and story development is being refined.  Discoveries and schools of thought are emerging based on these new ideas and gradually, Designers are realising more and more what makes for a quality immersive interactive experience.  But what lies in store for the average user?

Imagine your sitting room has a giant sized TV screen as a wall, which is completely digital and also hooked up to a broadband Internet connection.  Imagine high quality, realistic images of locations being fed through to the screen via an online game site and your copy of the latest on-line interactive game on DVD.  Add a microphone and the interactive story designs and principles that have been evolving for time immemorial, and you have the foundations of  totally immersive interactive experiences.

The wall size TV screen is emerging through such ideas as the media wall, projection TV and High Definition Television (HDTV).  Everything is already here.  By the time HDTV, DVD and broadband Internet connections are in enough homes to allow the average user to immerse themselves in virtual reality, the era of the New Media Designer will be in full swing.  We must design today for the future.

Legends of The Past

Tibor Kalman

Specialisation: Advertising Art Director

Tibor Kalman is best known for trying to expose the commercial world of advertising as the deceptive industry that it is.  Over the course of his career in the Mass Medium, the vehicle he became most associated with was the magazine.  He created ads and covers for countless companies including Barnes & Noble, United Colours of Benetton, Art Forum, Interview and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  He also established his own company, M & Co. and started Benetton’s controversial magazine, Colors.  His main strength was his ability to conceive a good idea and create a memorable ad from it.  He became well known for his unorthodox, socially conscious, sometimes controversial style.

“I am an extremely privileged person.  People seem to pursue money, most commonly.  Some pursue a political agenda, some pursue fame.  I pursue the blissful moment of coming up with an idea.  That makes me very, very happy.”

“I have an incredible belief in the future and in technology.  I even believe that we will begin to solve our social problems.  I think that people are basically good and that the good qualities will prevail.”

Saul Bass

Specialisation: Motion Typographer

Saul Bass is best known for designing the opening title sequences for many famous movies.  His area of specialisation was designing motion typography and there is no doubt that he excelled in this discipline.  The first film he designed the titles for was Otto Preminger’s ‘Carmen Jones.’  He pioneered the use of animation techniques to achieve a range of psychological and emotional effects unobtainable with conventional straight type.  His most notable title sequences appeared in the following films:

Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest, The Man with the Golden Arm, Exodus, Anatomy of a Murder, West Side Story, Goodfellas, Cape Fear and The Age of Innocence.

“Design is thinking made visual.”       “Symbolise and Summarise.”

Paul Rand

Specialisation: Logo Designer

Paul Rand is best known for his Logo design, which was characterised by wit and simplicity and a Bauhaus approach to problem solving.  He designed logos for IBM, Westinghouse, United Parcel Service and ABC.  His work has influenced successive generations of designers through his writings and involvement in design education.

In his Design work, he explored the formal vocabulary of European Avant-Garde movements including Cubism, Constructivism and De Stijl.  His influences developed into what is now regarded as a unique, distinctly American style of Graphic Design.

“The idea is the result of careful study and observation, and the design a product of that idea.  The visual statement, which seeks to express the essence of an idea, and which is based on function, fantasy, and analytic judgment, is likely to be not only unique but meaningful aswell.”

“Design is the method of putting form and content together.  Design, just as art, has multiple definitions, there is no single definition.  Design can be art.  Design can be aesthetics.  Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.”

“Bad design is irrelevant, it is superficial, pretentious…”

“The fundamental skill of a Designer is talent.”

These three masters of design all have a major trait in common : They focused on one area of specialisation and became the best at it.  Tibor Kalman is considered one of the best and most innovative Art Directors ever.  Saul Bass is unsurpassed in his pioneering of the animated typography genre and  Paul Rand is divinely respected for the simplicity and style he brought to the art of Logo Design.  All three tried their hand at various other projects throughout their careers, but in the end, they settled on what they were best at.  They did this because they could.  They were working in the Mass Medium.  Working in Print, Film or Corporate Identity did not require these three masters to become multi-skilled in order to succeed.  They needed to concentrate on one area and become the best they could be, and they certainly achieved that.  Had they been born in this generation, I have no doubt that these men would have had the ability to learn and practice in all of the Design disciplines, but they belong to a different, equally important era.  Without the foundations, the building cannot be built.

Pioneers of the Future

Hillman Curtis

Skills : Interactive Designer, Graphic Designer, Typographer, Writer, Musician, Film-Maker

Hillman Curtis Inc. was founded in 1998.  In their first five years, they grew from designing small Flash advertisements to designing some of the most trafficked sites on the web.  Curtis is a New Media Designer, a firm believer in the equal and inseparable power of visual and functional communication.  Each member of his staff is proficient in the online, broadcast and video areas of Design and focused on merging all of these together to design for the New Medium.  Curtis believes that “Design is a plan for action”, to quote Charles Eames.  He believes that Design isn’t necessarily about making something look better, it’s about moving someone into action.  He is a commercial artist who feels a responsibility towards the brand and the product he has agreed to promote.  He feels an equal responsibility as an artist, to do what artists have always done: respond to, reflect upon and hopefully influence the world.

“Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.”

Todd Purgason

Skills : Interactive Web Designer, Graphic Designer, Architect, Typographer, Animator, Writer

Californian, Todd Purgason is the Creative Director for Juxt Interactive, a web design studio based in Southern California, specialising in Internet strategy and Flash-based interactive web sites. Juxt Interactive work has been highlighted in several publications and books around the world including PDN-PIX, I.D. magazine, HOW magazine and Create Online.  The work Juxt has completed has earned a number of awards, including the Clio Award, the How Magazine’s International Design Competition award for Outstanding Design, IPPA StudioONE and DesignONE Awards, the Communication Arts Magazine Web Site of the Week, and the High Five Award. In addition, IPPA has selected Purgason as one of today’s top ten web designers in the world. Purgason is also an author and regular speaker on the subject of interactive web design. In addition, he has contributed to a number of books including Hillman Curtis’ ‘Flash Web Design.’

“I created Juxt Interactive out of a passion to do good work for people interested in using the Internet to evolve their business.  Design is a tool, technology is a tool, branding is a tool, we are mechanics of communication.”

“It’s all communication, whether that is to enlighten, inform or entertain.”

“Trends and personal style should be like the salt and pepper on your steak.”

Matt Owens

Skills: Interactive Web Designer, Graphic Designer, Typographer, Film-Maker, Animator, Producer

Texan, Matt Owens is the co-founder of the on-line Design firm, One9ine. He began his career working on a magazine founded by his brother, Mark and then the two started a radio station.  After that, he worked as a print Designer, doing posters and record covers for local bands.  Since then, he started a record label with his brother called The Buddy System and on top of his design work, they put out a few albums a year.  His personal website, VolumeOne is a vehicle for expressing his views on Design and he regularly updates it with new projects and writings.  In a recent communication to him, I asked his opinion on whether or not a New Media Designer needs to be multi-skilled to survive in the industry.  Here is what he said:

“Owen.

I am a big proponent of the multi-skilled approach. I think there are two currents happening right now. As admin tools become more complex and the web begins to mature, I think the division between Designer and developer will become greater. On the other hand, as studios pitch the ability to do print, web and broadcast, there are going to have to be folks that are actually multi-talented. In this day and age, the more skills the better. The thing that I dislike most is having to take art direction from someone that does not understand the technology and as a result makes poor or overly simplistic decisions. So I think there needs to be more education on the part of art directors so that Design work remains smart. As far as the industry reflecting a multi-tasked environment, I think it is. All the motion guys I know are also Designers and all web developers I know (Flash and HTML) design websites and build them. However, when you have big projects, specialization is key especially for back-end development. For me, I love being able to do a lot of different things but when I need help, I always seek out a pro in a specific task to help me out. This balance between work load, specialization and knowledge is what can give a small studio a competitive advantage over larger, slow moving studios. Let me know if I can answer any other questions for you.

All the best – Matt”

“New Media is just that – media – a hollow vessel.  That’s where developing your own ideas and concepts has to happen before you even get to designing.”

New Media Designers need to be multi-skilled.  The three examples I chose to illustrate this point are so multi-skilled, it is almost unbelievable.  But, this level of multiplicity is an essential trait for anyone who wishes to Design for the New Medium. By its very nature, it incorporates Design elements of text, still imagery, animation, video, audio and of course, interactivity.  Not all projects include all of these elements, but a New Media Designer will have to deal with and be proficient in each of these disciplines eventually if they work in the industry for any length of time.  These pioneering multi-skilled designers, Curtis, Purgason and Owens are not unique in their spread of interests today.

They reflect a changing pattern in the way Design is practiced and in the way people in western society are living their lives.  Surrounded and encompassed by so much accessible information as a result of the Internet, the general population seem to be evolving their spread of interests as well.  With such exposure, comes the inevitable expectation.  People now expect much more from websites, games, interactive cds and so on because, on some level, they are aware that technology is evolving and the possibility of higher quality, media rich work is now available.  New Media Designers are in a position to use this technology to give the masses what they expect and push out the boundaries even further, continuing the cyclical vacuum that is responsible for the evolution of Design.  But they can only produce such work by being skilled in a variety of Design disciplines.

(Excerpts from a piece I wrote in 2004 as part of a Bachelor’s degree in Digital Media Design.)