Representation of idea dispersal via the internet

Oral Culture in the Digital Age

This illustrated slide show was a fun project I created to help explain the many facets of an oral culture as defined by Marshall McLuhan, and how oral culture relates to different aspects of the digital age.

Due to the generally strong ties which words like “oral” and “auditory” have with actual speech and sound, Canadian philosopher of media Marshall McLuhan’s looser use of these terms to describe the mechanics of how information is broadcast and received tends to leave many newcomers to his ideas either struggling to understand what he means by oral culture, or overly sure of their own understanding when they’ve actually only understood on a superficial level.

I sought to help deepen the understanding of viewing the digital age as an oral culture with this hand-illustrated, phone-narrated, and sound-effected slide show.

Aside from the fascinating insight into the current state of digital technology that can be gleaned from observing it’s parallels to pre-industrial oral culture, understanding the patterns can also help us predict  where the digital technology could be heading next.

I hope you enjoy.

All illustration, coloration, narration, and editing by me. Please pardon the cold I had when recording the narration. ?

hands typing on a keyboard

Good advice on providing copy

In the back of one of my favorite foundational typography books, Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton, are a couple of tips for clients providing copy to designers which I find to be useful to both parties so that time is not wasted, work is not doubled, and the workflow remains efficient overall.

  1. “Writers should not over-format their texts. The more time you spend fiddling with formatting will be spent again by the editor and/or designer, removing extra keystrokes. Provide flush left copy, in one font, double-spaced.”
  2. “The space bar is not a design tool. Don’t use the space bar to create indents (just key in a single tab), and don’t use extra spaces to create centered effects or layouts (unless you really are E. E. Cummings).”

Providing minimally formatted text which has already been proof-read and approved will do a lot to save time and effort that you and your designer can instead spend making sure your project is exactly what you need.