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Screen

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on graphic design, new media, and visual culture

Jessica Helfand is a critic of digital media and design matters. This collection of essays Screen first appeared in Eye, The New Republic, and Print Magazine. They deal with issues of visual design, digital culture, film, and media in general – including television, radio, and the Web. They are commendably short pieces, and it has to be said that they are elegantly written. Her formula is to take a single observation as a starting point, then spin it around with lots of cultural references to make gnomic statements about the state of culture in society.

ScreenThe problem is that they are basically personal opinions, and she very rarely examines concrete examples in any detail. This approach leads her into the marshy swamps of false generalisation. On our sense of space in a digital age, she claims:

The computer is our connection to the world. It is an information source, an entertainment device, a communications portal, a production tool … But we are also its prisoners: trapped in a medium in which visual expression must filter through a protocol of uncompromising programming scripts

Yes, it’s true that using computers requires mastery of complex techniques – but we are not its prisoners, because our sense of space is formed by many sources beyond the computer screen.

It’s obvious that she is well informed on digital technology. She discusses issues of web design, navigation buttons, splash screens, and the cultural significance of ‘rollovers’. Yet she confuses navigation with content, and even thinks that email has a homogenising effect:

In the land of email we all ‘sound’ alike: everyone writes in system fonts … Software protocols require that we title our mail, a leftover model from the days of interoffice correspondence, which makes even the most casual letter sound like a corporate memo.

That is simply not true. Anybody who receives more than a couple of dozen emails a day knows that most people generate their own ‘voice’ using this medium. And the titles of some of the messages I receive would certainly never make the ‘corporate memo’ file.

The fact is that there’s lot of techno-scepticism here. Underneath the glossy media guru carapace, she is actually digitally uncertain. Yet she’s not averse to patting herself on the back; she drops lots of Post-Modernist names, and at its most acute, her writing comes dangerously close to something from Pseud’s Corner. Encountering a consumer quiz on chicken nuggets, she reports

while I would like to report that my thoughts … drifted to Martin Heidegger or Giles Deleuze, to existentialism or metaphysics or even postmodernism, alas, they did not.

Fortunately, the collection is rescued by two excellent essays on the designer Paul Rand, where her analyses are much more meaningful because they are focused on concrete examples. The first is an analysis of his work as a commercial designer, and the second an interesting account of his methods as a teacher at Yale.

These two essays are first rate pieces of work. It’s a shame that the rest of the collection doesn’t match up. But having said that, the book comes larded with praise by other designers, and copies at my local bookshop have been flying off the shelves – so you will need to judge for yourself.

© Roy Johnson 2001

screen   Buy the book at Amazon UK

screen   Buy the book at Amazon US


Jessica Helfand, Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001, pp.175, ISBN: 1568983107


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Filed Under: Graphic design, Media, Theory Tagged With: Design, Media, Media theory, New media, Screen, Theory

Understanding Media

July 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

re-issue of classic 1960s media studies text

This is the book which made McLuhan famous with the phrase ‘The medium is the message’. Understanding Media was issued as a warning to the many pundits who refused to take seriously what we now call ‘media studies’ – though his range was much wider than just communication. The first part is a critique of contemporary culture – ‘electric’ as he calls it. Much of this is couched in rash generalisations and dressed up in some of his slightly batty distinctions – such as those he makes between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media. All this is steeped in a rich soup of cultural references. On any single page you might be taken from Matthew Arnold and Edward Gibbon, to de Tocqueville, E.M. Forster, and the World Health Organisation.

Understanding MediaThe second part consists of meditations on cultural phenomena ranging from clothing and money, to transport, comics, radio, and the telephone. These tend to be thought-provoking and patchy rather than systematic – but it has to be remembered that reflections on the cultural significance of television shows, advertising and motor cars was something of a novelty forty years ago.

Since all media are extensions of ourselves, or translations of some parts of ourselves into various materials, any study of one medium helps us to understand all the others.

He has interesting observations to make on anything from clocks and bicycles to advertising and weapons – and these are often delivered in a witty and epigrammatic manner.

There’s a lot of generalising about the relationship between technology and history (or ‘civilization’ as it was still called back then) and he places a great deal of reliance on books such as Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History and Louis Mumford’s The City in History.

His reflections on the typewriter made me wish he had lived long enough to comment on the word-processor and the computer – surely two of the most powerful and widely used devices of the ‘electronic age’. This is a lively and a thought-provoking book. If you didn’t read it first time round, this is a good chance to catch up.

© Roy Johnson 2003

Understanding Media   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Understanding Media   Buy the book at Amazon US


Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, (first published 1964) London: Routledge, 2001, pp.392, ISBN: 0415253977


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Filed Under: Media, Theory Tagged With: Communication, Marshall McLuhan, Media, New media, Theory, Understanding Media

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