I
came across a website during my research that I have been using as a touchstone
throughout this entire blogging process. The website, newmedialiteracies.org,
is based entirely around Jenkins’ 2009 article on Participatory Culture. I have
really only been using for clarification on certain aspects of the new media
skills that Jenkins presents. But I noticed that on the list of media skills
that they present, they added one that was not on the list given by Jenkins.
This
additional skill was labeled as “visualization” and it was defined as the
ability to convert information into visual representations, or vice versa. This is a constant within our society
nowadays. It is no longer enough to just present information in a written form,
one must always accompany it with at least one photo, or diagram, or graph. The
latter is the most common visualization, I think. It is exactly what the
website defines as visualization. It takes the information that you gain from
research and puts it into a visual representation that allows the reader to
glean all of the information in one look.
Being
able to convert information into visual representations is not as easy as it
sounds, this is clear in advertisements. An example of this is an AIDS public
service announcement presented by the French company, Aides (French for help)
(Macleod, 2008). WARNING: the advertisements are very much not safe for work so
I will post a link to them in my works cited, rather than post them in this blog post.
In
this series of advertisements, the company attempts to portray the dangers of
experimentation without protection. They choose to do this by depicting naked
women exploring strange penis-filled landscapes while wrapped in a condom
bubble (Macleod, 2008). While this can be construed as a visual representation
of sexual experimentation, it distracts the reader because of its absurdity.
This
is why it is important to strive to create accurate and clear visual
representations of concepts, because otherwise one may simply create something
that will be mocked on the internet (the only reason I know about this
advertisement is from an article on Cracked.com). Therefore, I believe that the
skill of visualization, while not proposed by Jenkins, is integral within today’s
society.
Works
Cited
Jenkins,
H (et al). (2009) "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:
Media Education for the 21st Century".
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and
Learning. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Macleod,
D. (2008, November 30). AIDES – Explore But Protect Yourself. Retrieved
December 7, 2015, from http://advertisingforadults.com/2008/11/aides-explore-but-protect-yourself/
New
Media Literacies. (n.d.). Retrieved December 7, 2015, from
http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/