Communicating with our senses
As of now we can communicate using any of our 5 senses. For purposes of making this somewhat professional I will not talk about communicating via smell or taste. Also, for those with a disability, communicating by touch can be effective but if we were to look at changes that dominate how society communicates, we are left with the main two (visual, which includes reading as well as pictures) and audibly. A couple of our readings in the past 3 weeks have talked about the change between communicating from visual to text back in the early days to a societal switch from text to visual with the help of the internet. We also read about the frameworks that allowed these changes to take place. The one main idea that I captured was when Kress talked about sequence and how authors got specific power in how they communicated their messages. “It is the author’s order, as mentioned earlier, that dominates, initially at least. If the hearer or the reader wishes to reorder what has just been said or what has been written, the recording has to be done on the basis of and against the author’s prior ordering.” (Kress, 2004) Even in the old Choose your own Adventure books that were popular in the 80’s the author still had power over the sequence in which you read the information.
My vision of the future differs a little from our readings this month. As, mentioned a lot was said about going back to a visual framework, and I can see that with the popularity of Facebook and Instagram, where people communicate by showing a picture. (Picture describes a 1000 words). I however see a future of a lot more audio based communication with technology. If you had the choice, would you watch a youtube video of a presentation, would you read the transcript or would you download the podcast and listen to it? Do you find it easier to ask Siri a question or to search it up yourself? I think in the next 10 years Siri will be at the point where she will understand anything and everything you ask her and you won’t need to google as much. Imagine having technology in your ear and just asking siri without the use of holding a phone, and then her voice calmly tells you the answer? Would we ever need to look at your phone again? It’s too distracting to use your phones in cars so we have created technology that reads your texts out to you while your driving, and it works.
I think I plan on doing my last assignment on this idea and go through the frameworks of Kress in his research on how society manages its way through changes.
Hi Michael,
It is a good point to mention the shift of technology from visual to audio form. I relatively agree with you that hearing while driving or doing some other visual related task is highly recommended, However, I find that using the form of communicating depends on the task being performed. Therefore, visual communication is still important and is going to keep improving in the near future. And so, I agree with you that these two senses are dominant in the form of communication and the use of technology. They are related to each other and their use is relative. Besides task related mode of communication, I strongly recommend the establishment of choice of selection in all communication products for those visual and auditory learners as the learning needs can be approached by these two different learning styles. In addition, I recommend the enclosure of different learning approaches within the classroom as the students learning mode is more apparent and recognizable which demand the change of the curriculum to meet the students’ audiovisual needs in effective modern technology based learning environment. On the other side, I still agree with you that the power embraces the ability of any author to generate a work still exists, but, to be practical and successful, the author should comply with the mode of society as the readers’ needs still resilient and dominant.
Bassam