Let's Discover the Unknown

So there we were, my sister and I stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on the M4 motorway in a frantic attempt to get away to The Blue Mountains for a rushed 24 hour holiday. All in all it was a successful trip, it was only the two breakdowns along the motorway which made our initial plan to get there in one and a half hours skewed as we resorted to sitting in the car trying not to go crazy. As we sat there, I think my brain was still some what hot wired into thinking of publics, publishing and in particular visualisation. My mind is easily stimulated. As my brain is wandering off into its own little world of obscure thoughts, sure enough we crawl past this sign over head which immediately alerts me to firstly the fact that what I am witnessing is visualisation of text and secondly to indeed wake up! 

I got a little overly excited and whipped out my iPhone, and with one hand on the wheel I snapped this photo while moving at 10km/h on a 110 km/h road. Life.
The fact is, this form of visualisation is working in a number of ways to stimulate and interact with the thousands of minds of drivers that are passing under this sign every hour. Instead of communicating audibly or through colour pictures, the sign is working with words to help us visualise the message which is clearly to 'wake up' and concentrate on driving. 
Information graphics, a rather complex term pertains to the idea of visually representing information, data and knowledge. If we were to get overly technical one could say it is the aesthetics associated with the publishing of data and it usually stems from this concept of archives that collect said data over a period of time. 
After pondering over the idea of data visualisation, I figured it would be too easy to include a subway map of the train systems of a busy city like New York or London, or to include a strange graph with data people only pretend to understand, hence I got thinking of the data visualisation of another sort. The sort that follows here...

I think this is a fantastic representation of data of another kind...a human and the way it changes over the course of time. Instead of looking at statistics on paper of weight, height and age we see it before us transforming on the screen of this man and a visual representation of him every day over the space of six years. Phenomenal! 
I believe it is this sort of visual information graphic that uses images to allow us to structure different epistemologies surrounding human quotidien development. 
Please ignore the irony surrounding the fact that I have clearly written far more on a topic of visual and graphic representation than I have inserted graphics...however hopefully this has been interesting and provided some food for visual thought. 

program(me) program(you)

Media we are being subjected to daily culminates eventually to be somewhat ritualistic in nature to the point we aren’t even aware of how much we have come to rely on it in regards to defining moments and time in our daily routine or ‘dailiness’ as Scannell puts it. Upon realizing this main concept within this topic of time I got thinking about my typical ‘media-day’ and was it inadvertently the component that determined my time of day or gave me the security surrounding the normal actions in my day? My initial interaction with media commences as soon as I wake up I turn off my alarm which sure enough almost yells at me what time it is as I slide my thumb over the screen to silence it…I then progress to navigate my fingers to the sneaky little blue ‘f’ icon placed at the bottom of my iPhone screen as even though I am still in my sleep stupor I manage to somehow check the notifications from the past 9 hours that I have been sleeping. Without a doubt this is the routine first 5 minute action I take every morning. For me, one could say that media has become a priority within my life…this morning routine is a prime example that it comes above my highest needs as a human being, considering I haven’t even eaten yet my day has already started –I mean considering this perhaps Maslow’s Heirarchy of needs might need to be re-adjusted to account for 21^st century media and technology – just a thought.

Regardless of the fact there are multiple studies which show that sleeping with your phone on next to your head at night lead to all sorts of cancerous dangers it does not stop me…nor does it stop anyone else I know…yet why is this? You would think that on the grand scale of things receiving a text message the minute it is sent as opposed to perhaps 6 hours later when you turn your phone on would not be worth a brain tumour. However this is the society we have turned into, time has become even more of a precious thing due to the media which regulates our usage of ‘our-time’ or on a more personal level ‘my-time.’

My interaction with my iPhone has turned into my primary media interaction. On the bus I will listen to my ipod, at uni I will use it for the internet and to check emails. At night occasionally if I am at home having dinner I will be watching the news with my family. The news broadcast has become a central part of our household. My Mum who cooks the dinner has always made dinner time to coincide with the 7pm ABC news bulletin as she knows that is when my Dad will be watching it.

Scannell deals with an interesting concept in his article that the news is constantly being broadcast in the ‘now’ and that this becomes a means for the public notion of time. Whether a it is a radio broadcast on the hour or a weather update every 15 minutes we know what to expect and we know it is the current time news. The media in this sense have an obligation to fulfill to the public hence are constantly being manouvered by public demand. A prime example and quite a surprising one at that is even when a day ago the top story has continuously been the crisis in Japan, today it turned to the viralRebecca Black song on Youtube. Whether or not the story is deserving to be number one is another question it is simply a prime example of the ways in which news broadcasting and time interact and show how it does indeed become 'linear and irreversible' as Scannell puts it in 'Dailiness'.

There are certain events and circumstances in my day and year which without I wouldn't feel as accustomed to my routine. It is from the constant news feeds on Facebook and Twitter that allow me to keep up to date with the happenings of the world and keep up with events as time is changing and not stuck on the stories of yesterday or even an hour ago. Time is this constant component that every action and interaction is based around and indeed through society, time has become fundamental to how broadcasting has become integrated into the motions of our everyday life.