Media iconology

In a society where most gadgets are accessible only and only through an interface, almost always graphic, one claims to be "visual"; the presence of the graphics, communicably totally justifiable, could also be considered a symptom of this anguish of being noticed and delivering fast in the communication, virtues that are attributed to the image above the text.

Back in the days when I was working in the newspaper, it could happen that an editor call me to the direction desk to tell me he/she wanted to make an infographic about certain story.

At that moment, I usually asked for the nature of information available, and if there was quantifiable data (numbers, measurements, anything of sorts). And not a few times, of course - oooof course- there wasn't any of that kind. To my retort that I needed that type of information otherwise it wouldn't be possible to make such a diagram/schema/infographic, the editor, flexibly enough, asked instead of something similar to a graphic, a pseudo-infographic, an infographish thing".

If I had luck, I got away to do other works, unless it was the case that they double down on the request, because it was the editor-in-chief idea/article/proposal or other thing of such importance in their editorial priorities. Walking back to my desk, I could not less than complain of how poor was the understanding they had of what was an infographic.

What I didn't understood is that the editors have a grasp of something different, something I usually applied more in y artistic practice than in my daily job: that there is not such a thing as a clear divide of content and form in real life, that as Marshall Macluhan (1911-1980) said, the medium is the message, and as Susan Sontag (1933-2004) claimed, the style was part of the content, and as Erwin Panofsky deducted, a piece of visual communication said more than usually meets the eye.

The nature of the informative image, specifically in the way it is perceived as inherently being "information"and not just a container for it, could be equated, somehow, curiously, to the old notion of "aura" that Walter Benjamin attached to unique objects in the era previous to the invention of mechanical reproduction.

Art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) divided his approach to the meaning of the image in three levels that grow in complexity and go from the abstract to the general. From the object to the contextual, from the merely representative, the shape, colour, size, the formal description of the piece to the deeply symbolic, in a progression built on the basis of the data obtained from the image, its author and its time. This method was conceived for art history, but it can be useful for us: this approach becomes particularly interesting when we ask ourselves how to apply to an infographic. Although not "Art" in capital letters, the infographic corpus is filled of images, and is, for many practitioners outside the academic world``, more art in the medieval sense of the term, the domain of trade and a technique.

However, if you ask in a newsroom, we consider infographics as a tool, a container of information. But the divide between content and container is a tricky one, because, paraphrasing Bruce Lee, content is like water; if the content goes to a jar, it becomes the jar, if it goes to a glass, it becomes the glass; while maintaining its essence, its shape flows according to the container. And the container is the media.

The media tells the others what to make of what you are saying in the same way gestural non-verbal communication does. The very idea of content as an amorphous term tends to flatten its diversity and part of the value. Many criticise even the term content-creator.

In that sense, the chart Charles Minard made of the Russia Campaign, and a graphic about Maradona goal are tools that are stories in itself.

McLuhan says the media itself has meaning. His examples: the electric bulb, the printing press, the television. While the cryptic writing of the Canadian expert can lead to divergent interpretations, the idea of the importance of the media in the delivery of the content is clear. The digital, the technological, is part of the new quadrivium to be taught to everyone in schools and learning centres of all sorts, working as a companion, as a vehicle of information, and even more of the almost immediate, ubiquitous information, consumed with fruition-daily, hourly-signalling the transition from the print, and from all the structures that MacLuhan attributed to it in the Guttenberg Galaxy.

By this time, we have bypassed the TV, but the TV set found its own niche beside the print and the radio, being more of a group meeting, attached to a physically static device, establishing the notion of 'event television'. Maybe in these succession of media changes, the "mobileverse" has more in common with print that we think, while the upcoming aural media wave, leaded by Ai assistants as Echo, Alexa o Cortana, has more in common with the radio and TV, while the culture of print and the digital mobile has a text-based linked relationships, one the child of the other.

Nevertheless, the role of the newspaper as 'the' medium as 'the' channel of information, as such, is questioned; to what extent it is still to be settled, because although it is true that more information is consumed through the web, the web still produces information too uncontrollably, from a each time more ephemeral news cycle, to fake news, passing through to AI generated videos, and due to the growing phenomenon of digitization of information, where you do not know who is behind the information or if it is true at all in the most basic sense of the term. While the newspapers are far from perfect, this sensation of obsolescence that is felt in a medium that traditionally became a vehicle of information, paradoxically, causes it to be questioned and perfected more quickly, the design is sophisticated, the quality of print the best ever, all while trying to assimilate concepts extracted from other fields, thinking about how to engage more with its readers.

Although the role of print is affected in its totality, from a more detailed point of view, the very nature of the print and the way we see it is being changed by the digitisation of production processes; the new communication models proposed by web design first and later mobile design (concepts such as navigation, icons, informative graphics, etc.). However, tangibility and materiality are under-the-cuff assets for print to stay with us, beyond the pale flatness of the bright screen. Would it be enough for the industry? Anyway, the nature of communication, information and the image will take paths that for us are still new or even more unknown, maybe not in the spectacular way of the exterior nature of the image, but in the more subtle way of the interpretation, understanding and meaning creation.

Let's wait and see.

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Notes

1) Update 2021: A mention to Panofsly in this video: Dick, Murray:Murray Dick - Making sense of the visual in data visualizations – a new(ish) method of analysis. DataViz Lisboa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivHgtS1FyFI&list=LL&index=8

2) Another great critical approach to the "neutrality" of data visualization: D'Ignazio, C and Klein, L. Datafeminism. Strong Ideas collection. MIT Press, 2020.

3) Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. https://employees.csbsju.edu/dbeach/beautytruth/Sontag-Against%20Interpretation.pdf

4) Macluhan, Marshall. The media is the message. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf