Materiality: Material Communication

As I understand it, Materiality is the context and format within something is written. For example, newspapers are papers with news that are printed on what we call, guess what, newspaper. They can have crazy headlines like, "One-Armed Man Applauds Kindness of Strangers," or "Tiger Woods Plays with Own Balls, Says Nike," and get away with it because that's what's expected of newspapers. Those incomplete, fragmented titles wouldn't fly anywhere else except maybe Yahoo! News or Twitter.

So what happens when the medium changes? Now we have electronic newspapers, which are thin, sleek computer screens that allow you to not only display breaking news stories, but can also hold entire books. They attempt to mimic the look of a newspaper, but certainly not the feel.

In this case, even though the medium has changed, the message is still the same. However, this example seems to be the exception when it comes to technology. Ever since the first text messages were sent and the first chat rooms were opened to the public, people have been finding all kinds of creative ways to express themselves with as few characters as possible. The new mediums generated a fresh frontier for 21st century communication, ultimately bringing every english teacher's worst nightmares to life as bad spelling and horrible grammar became an overnight pop culture sensation. This online literary craze would eventually spawn buzz-worthy social networking sites such as Twitter and Digg.

Here is a video that captures perfectly the essence of life on web 2.0

Materiality 2.0

A brilliant professor of mine once told me, "the message is informed by the medium." So I came up with a couple examples to prove his point.

Here are a few things I found laying around my girlfriend's apartment:

First, are two postcards hanging on the fridge that her roommate brought back from Germany. They say, "Achtung! We are German!"

Next is a girly sample she brought back from a paper convention

And lastly, a couple business cards she brought back from the renegade craft fair

Notice that the design of the medium matches the messages that are being communicated. For instance, these business cards are squeaking in a high pitched voice, "I'm cute, buy me!"

So to test this theory of materiality, I decided to conduct a little experiment. Pay attention to the stark contrast between these two mediums and their respective messages:

Let's see what happens when the roles are reversed...

(Please excuse my awful cursive)

And yes, I also stole that giant sticky note from my gf's place.

Is doesn't take long to realize that once the medium is changed, the validity of the message is seriously jeopardized.

Materiality III

I found this video lecture on communication technology as material culture. It's kind of interesting...

When you get bored with that, consider this your long awaited distraction, justified only by the fact it has 'material' in the title: