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The other day i was at the train station in Richmond on the way to uni, when i noticed something quite interesting. Right next to the Sandringham platforms are a long line of large advertising billboards. Generally i glance at them, but they never hold my interest for anymore than a couple of seconds.
However, recently they’ve put up a new billboard thats advertising Converse shoes (see below). It is very striking visually, and it had me standing and staring at it for a good couple of minutes. I was trying to identify who the people were, i was thinking about how they could have put the graphic together… i was really quite impressed by it. What impressed me more however was that pretty much everybody else on the platform were also staring at it.
Being designers, we are always looking at billboards and advertising and dissecting them for their communication and so on, but there were so many ordinary, non designer people staring at this billboard. I’ve never seen anything like it to be honest, at least not for a commercial billboard.
Just goes to show how a good design can really make people pay attention to a brand or message.
I finished reading Unspeak yesterday (finally). It was a really interesting book, and has made me aware of a lot of new things. The book explored many examples of language misuse across a diverse range of areas, like environment, war, freedom, community, religion and many others. At some points i was disgusted at the actions taken to water down language and manipulate people.
Shows like the Chasers War On Everything and The Daily Show work to expose language of this nature, but it is done in a satirical way. While this method isn’t necessarily wrong, and it is quite funny at times, i think it needs to be taken more seriously as well. If its only exposed in a humorous way, are people more likely to just accept it and not really speak up about it?
It was interesting to read in the Epilogue of Unspeak that the author’s hope in writing the book was essentially to raise the awareness, which is common with our group’s goal. Steven Poole writes:
“As BBC World presenter Kirsty Lang explains: ‘It’s much easier to take the language that’s given to you, and the government knows that full well. So if you keep saying “coalition forces”, “coalition forces”, people will use it. I think people do need to be more careful. They do take phrases willy-nilly from the government without thinking, without seriously analysing what they say.’ The citizen’s plan of action is simple. When the media do this, talk back: write and tell them. Possibly the growth of Unspeak cannot be reversed. But that doesn’t mean we have to go on swallowing it.”
People need to be aware of the language that they are being bombarded with. Once they understand it, they have the choice of whether to do something about it.
So Nadia and myself have just got our team blog up ‘here’. Its lacking content at the moment, but by the end of the weekend we’ll start filling it up with our discussions and ideas for the project. At this stage, we are writing a new literature review, formulating some new research methods which include survey and interview techniques, and we’re also working on the direction of the new poster. We feel like we are on the verge of a really fun and interesting project, we just need to uncover it with some further thought and research!
Thats all for now.
Alex.
I’ve almost finished reading Unspeak (yes i’m a slow reader). It has really opened my eyes about what governments can get away with. Its quite sickening really. For example, the word ‘Global Warming’ was decided upon to describe the state of the earth heating up, mainly due to pollution. However, the term ‘Global Warming’ could be interpreted to imply that there were parties responsible for the act of ‘warming’ the globe, and most people would assume that the parties responsible to be oil companies. The oil companies wanted none of this, so they essentially pressured the government to change the wording to ‘Climate Change’. This term was less frightening, and didn’t point the finger at anybody.
I find it disgusting that governments will use over the top language in instances like the Iraq War, to try and convince the public that their cause is just. They use terms like ‘Weapons of Mass Destructions’, ‘Terror’ and ‘Freedom’, which are all highly emotive words, to whip up support to their cause. It seems with environmental issues, like global warming, the government is doing the opposite. Instead of using frightening language, they use dumbed down language. They replace Global Warming with Climate Change. Is making it less threatening really going to help get people to take action? If it doesn’t sound like an immediate threat, why would people want to do anything about it? I guess essentially it all comes down to who’s really pulling the strings.
Today i watched Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, as i was interested to see what type of language he used and whether any evidence of this ‘Unspeak’ came up. And sure enough, it is covered. Towards the end of the film, he talks about how its pretty much unanimous across all environmental scientists that global warming is happening. The only doubt and controversy over it just being a theory is brought up by the media, who are influenced by higher powers.
All this is making me very interested in how people perceive language, how they respond to it, and to what extent they believe it.
I haven’t updated my blog in a while as i’ve been quite busy with other work, but here is a run down of what i’ve been up to and some thoughts on things.
Last Tuesday, our initial poster group presented our literature review for the Methods class. We presented language as a topic very broadly, which was good, and bad upon reflection. Good because it revealed lots of start points for further research, but bad because it sort of left us a little behind other groups who had already picked a somewhat refined area within their topics.
I have joined up with Nadia Hisheh to form our group for the major project of the semester. We formed with a shared interest in a few of the areas that our group looked into. We are yet to come up with a title, or a well defined phrase to describe exactly what it is we are doing, but we are getting there.
Essentially our topic extends from some of the reading i was doing by the author Steven Poole, who i have mentioned in other posts. We are interested in the way people perceive truth. What is true to someone? How does one come to accept a truth? What makes someone a credible source for truth? We can see some interesting social experiments that could come out of this pathway, we just really need to flesh out a refined direction and work out the best method to research.
Our team blog will be up shortly, so keep a look out for it!
