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NEWMEDIA

READER

The French Have a Word for It

In French they use the term l’Informatique to mean,

approximately, the presentation of information to people by

automatic equipment. 

Unfortunately the English equivalent, informatics, has been

preempted. There is a computer programming firm called

Informatics, Inc., and when I wrote them about this in the

early sixties they said they did not want their name to

become a generic term. Trademark law supports them in this

to a certain extent. (Others, like Wally Feurzeig, want that to

be the word regardless.) But in the meantime I offer up the

term 

fantics, which is more general anyhow.

Media

What people don’t see is how computer technology now

makes possible the revision and improvement—the

transformation—of all our media. It “sounds too technical.” 

But this is the basic misunderstanding: the fundamental

issues are NOT TECHNICAL. To understand this is basically

a matter of MEDIA CONSCIOUSNESS, not technical

knowledge.

A lot of people have acute media consciousness. But some

people, like Pat Buchanan and the communards, suggest that

there is something shabby about this. Many think, indeed,

that we live in a world of false images promulgated by

“media,” a situation to be corrected. But this is a

misunderstanding. Many images are false or puffy, all right,

but it is incorrect to suppose that there is any alternative.

Media have evolved from simpler forms, and convey the

background ideas of our time, as well as the fads. Media

today focus the impressions and ideas that in previous eras

were conveyed by rituals, public gatherings, decrees, parades,

behavior in public, mummer’ troupes . . . but actually every

culture is a world of images. The chieftain in his palanquin,

the shaman with his feathers and rattle, are telling us

something about themselves and about the continuity of the

society and position of the individuals in it.

Now the media, with all their quirks, perform the same

function. And if we do not like the way some things are

treated by the media, in part this stems from not

understanding how they work. “Media,” or structured

transmission mechanisms, cannot help being personalized by

those who run them. (Like everything else.) The problem is

to understand how media 

work, and thus balance our

understanding of the things that media misrepresent.

Thoughts about Media:

1 Anything Can Be Said in Any Medium

Anything can be said in any medium, and Inspiration counts

much more than ‘science.’ But the techniques which are used

to convey something can be quite unpredictable.

2 Transposability

There has always been, but now is newly, a UNITY OF

MEDIA OPTIONS. You can get your message across in a play,

a tract, a broadside, a textbook, a walking sandwich-board, a

radio program, a comic book or fumetti, a movie, a slide-

show, a cassette for the Audi-Scan or the AVS–10, or even a

hypertext.

(But transposing can rarely preserve completely the

character or quality of the original.)

3 Big and Small Approaches

What few people realize is that big pictures can be conveyed

in more powerful ways than they know. The reason they

don’t know it is that they see the 

content in the media, and

not how the content is being gotten across to them—that in

fact they have been given very big pictures indeed, but don’t

know it. (I take this point to be the Nickel-Iron Core of

McLuhanism.)

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21. Computer Lib

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People who want to teach in terms of building up from the

small to the large, and others who (like the author) like to

present a whole picture first, then fill in the gaps, are taking

two valid approaches. (We may call these, respectively, the Big

Picture approach and the Piecemeal approach.) Big pictures

are just as memorable as picky-pieces 

if they have strong

insights at their major intersections. 

4 The Word-Picture Continuum

The arts of writing and diagramming are basically a

continuum. In both cases the mental images and cognitive

structures produced are a merger of what is heard or

received. Words are slow and tricky for presenting a lot of

connections; diagrams do this well. But diagrams give a poor

feel for things and words do this splendidly. The writer

presents exact statements, in an accord-structure of buts and

indeeds, molded in a structure of connotations having (if the

writer is good) exact impreciseness. This is hardly startling:

you’re always selecting what to say, and the use of vague

words (or the use of precise-sounding words vaguely) is

simply a flagrant form of omission. In diagrams, too, the

choice of what to leave in and out, how to represent

overweening conditions and forces and exemplary details, are

highly connotative. (Great diagrams are to be seen in the

Scientific American and older issues of Time magazine.)

This word-picture continuum is just a part of the broader

continuum, which I call Fantics. 

Fantics

By “fantics” I mean the art and science of getting ideas across,

both emotionally and cognitively. “Presentation” could be a

general word for it. The character of what gets across is

always dual; both the explicit structures, and feelings that go

with them. These two aspects, exactness and connotation,

are an inseparable whole; what is conveyed generally has

both. The reader or viewer always gets feelings along with

information, even when the creators of the information

think that its “content” is much more restricted. A beautiful

example: ponderous “technical” manuals which carry much

more connotatively than the author realizes. Such volumes

may convey to some readers an (intended) impression of

competence, to others a sense of the authors’ obtuseness and

non-imagination. Explicit declarative structures nevertheless

have connotative fields; people receive not only cognitive

structures, but impressions, feelings and senses of things.

Fantics is thus concerned with both the arts of effect—

writing, theater and so on—and the structures and

mechanisms of thought, including the various traditions of

the scholarly event (article, book, lecture, debate and class).

These are all a fundamentally inseparable whole, and

technically-oriented people who think that systems to

interact with people, or teach, or bring up information, can

function on some “technical” basis—with no tie-ins to

human feelings, psychology, or the larger social structure—

are kidding themselves and/or everyone else. Systems for

“teaching by computer,” “information retrieval,” and so on,

have to be governed in their design by larger principles than

most of these people are willing to deal with: the conveyance

of images, impressions and ideas. This is what writers and

editors, movie-makers and lecturers, radio announcers and

layout people and advertising people are concerned with; and

unfortunately computer people tend not to understand it for

beans.

319

;

John B. Macdonald

Research Leader, Computer

Applications: Graphics,

Western Electric Company,

Engineering Research Center

Problems, Perils, and Promises of Computer Graphics

I would begin with some definitions which may be obvious but

bear repeating.

1. Engineering is the application of science for ($) profit,

2. Computer graphics does not make possible anything that

was previously impossible; it can only improve the

throughput of an existing process,

3. A successful application of computer graphics is when

over a period of five years the cost savings from improved

process throughput exceed the costs of hardware, software,

maintenance and integration into an existing process flow.

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