For our Telestrations activity, six of us played a virtual cross of Pictionary and Telephone where each of us took turns either drawing a phrase or deciphering a phrase from a drawing. Deirdre began the game with a drawing which was sent on to Sandra. The links are provided below if you wish to continue perusing each member’s additions to the activity.
I was given the following image to decipher into a word and/or phrase:
I interpreted this image as “One man’s medicine is another man’s poison”
You can look at the other steps in this digital rendition of this visual-linguistic “telephone game” by visiting these blogs:
- Deidre’s Original Drawing
- Sandra’s guess
- Kirsten’s drawing based on Sandra’s guess
- My guess based on Kirsten’s drawing (this page)
- Ying’s drawing based on my guess
- Selina’s final guess based on Ying’s drawing
This activity was an interesting exercise on the absence of context that can manifest in online environments as users visit ‘static’ websites that may or may not adequately explain the context for the content on display. The importance of context is also present as users often quote/cite online sources that do not actually represent their argument but simply have the surface appearance of doing so. This can take the form of parody such as news outlets unironically quoting satirical sources such as The Onion (Ex. All the Times People Were Fooled by The Onion (ABC News). 2015) or a more sinister form as misinformation becomes a weapon in cyber-warfare between nation-states. A milder version of this issue was represented in our activity as each of us had to confidently pass on our interpretation or representation onto the next player to continue this increasingly warped information through text and images.