If you are a comic book fan from the 80’s, or have read the TPB’s, then you should appreciate the joke at the heart of this short film. You can also watch without any knowledge of the Marvel Limited Series and still laugh at all the nerdiness on display:
The rubber is getting dangerously close to the road. In less than 24 hours my interview at RIT begins. So right now I’m deep into writing the presentation I’ll have to give tomorrow. I’ll update more later.
The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to…, seizable by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee (or in other words, to the encoder and decoder of the message); and, finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication (Jakobson 1960: 353)
In doing a little bit of surfing earlier today, I happened across this passage from Roman Jakobson’s landmark work “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” I read this dense text over a year ago as part of Michael Silverstein’s Language and Culture class. At the time, a stranger in the strange land of poetics and metapragmatics, the majority of the text was over my head. Since then the article has been on my to read list, but I have not been able to make it back to it.
What strikes me about the passage is Jakobson’s definition of the CONTACT component as “a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee.” The notion of contact as at once physical and psychological is an excellent jumping off point for a discussion of the creation of identity (and its spoofing) on-line. It addresses how each interlocutor projects a created image of their partner (the psychological component of connection) from the physical correspondence (the tools, hardware and software, that are facilitating the interaction). And it seems to me that this is the section where trust is injected into the relationship. Trust that your partner is who they say they are. Or, perhaps more accurately, trust that you are capible of correctly interpreting your ADDRESSER’s MESSAGE (based on your knowledge of CONTEXT and CODE) to identify if it complies with your understanding of what the addresser should sound like.1
Needless to say, I wish I had grasped the value of this statement while I was working on my thesis. Thankfully, its still available to assist me as I rewrite for publication. Either way, I think this is a great quote for anyone whose interested in supporting texts for a discussion of the creation and mediation of self and identity through technology mediated communications.
Reference
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” . in Style in Language, edited by Seboek, T. A. Cambridge: MIT Press.
1 – Of course at that point we bridge into Bakhtin and the notion of Genres… oh the tangled webs woven on the web.
That question has been front of mind for most of the last week after I first encountered it on the In The Balance Blog.1 It seem an especially pertinent as I prepared for my interviews at the School of Print Media. There is little question in my mind that print is sexy — though limiting it to just being sexy seems to do it a bit of a disservice. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to recognize the printing press, and the dissemination of the printed word, as the most important technological advance of the last millennium. Likewise, the translation and reproduction of thought and knowledge in the printed page is at once an intellectual and a sensual process. And, as I’ve previously posted, there is something inherently sexy about machines that can print, in perfect registration, at speeds approaching 60 miles an hour. Finally, I think there can be little doubt that the products of the process can be sexy as well — the US Supreme Court, among others, has spent quite a bit of time trying to decide exactly how sexy printed materials can be.2
The question at hand is whether or not the printing industry is sexy. I seem to think that it once was, though that may be misplaced nostalgia for bygone days of stripping and before that of hot metal and letterpress. As I delve further into its present state, I see sexy aspects to the current industry — I’m just not sure how we we are taking advantage of them. In my view, tied up in the question of sexiness is a return to the tension between craft and automation. I find the day-to-day sexy — if there is such a beast — is contained in the craft and is embodied in the connection between the printer, her equipment, and the product they are producing. The problem we face is that automation has often disrupted those relationships and, as an industry, we haven’t compensated for those changes.3
Over the past hundred and fifty years, more and more aspects of the craft of printing have transitioned out of the print shop. Take for example prepress. At one time, the printer would receive handwritten (or perhaps typed) text and loose illustrations. the barest of building blocks for a job, and through the alchemy of their craft, the printer would transform these elements into a finished book. Slowly, with the introduction of photo typesetting and new printing processes, the art began to come to the printer in more and more complete forms. Still, as late as the mid 1990’s, it was up to the printer to take these break down these elements and reassemble them into the job.
Today, thanks to desktop publishing, much of that process has been automated.4 And in that transition, and countless others like it, we have lost more and more of the traditional craft of printing. Granted, new technology has developed new craft areas, but not at the same rate as what is lost. Nor necessarily are these new crafts quite as diverse. This, in my mind, has led the industry to feeling less sexy.
The challenge we face is to bring more craft back into the printing industry. This doesn’t mean that we return to Linotypes. While automation might provide technical and production parity (or something close to it), the sexy is found in new areas of differentiation. We need to reclaim areas of the production cycle that moved out of the print shop. One area where this contains immediate opportunities is in the area of Variable Data Print (and Publishing). This is an example of an area where printers can develop new crafts, advising their clients in the structuring of data, the development of offers, and the optimization of design. Granted this may involve moving out of comfort zones and taking a few risks here and there. Isn’t danger an inherent part of sexy?
2 – I’m not trying to conflate sexiness with pornography. There is little doubt in my mind that they are two different things. That said, they are often bound up together and their edges sometimes blur.
3 – I am not arguing against automation. Its a powerful tool. But being a tool it also is a subtle form of trap, and needs to be acknowledged as such.
4 – This is not to say that prepress and preflighting have gone away entirely. Nor am I suggesting that most clients get the prepress aspects right. Still from all the evidence I’ve seen there are far less prepress workers today than there were at the height of mechanical stripping.
After a lot of frustration with WordPress’s rather bare-bones WYSIWYG text editor, and even more frustration with copying and pasting from Word, I downloaded Editor Monkey. So far its running pretty smoothly. I definitely recommend it for WordPress users (at least until this functionality comes out in the next build of the WordPress tool).