This thesis attempts to explain how the Internet and social networking will revolutionize the way design is perceived and approached. It will look at how the global community as a dynamic whole can affect the approach and execution of design. The theory is that the power of the Internet to connect people will extend into the graphic design community. Take for example the effect of myspace.com on the music industry or youtube.com on the newly established video community.These two examples illustrate the power of a body as a whole to create and inspire beyond that of what is currently possible or even understood by any individual perspective. This paper will show how the theories of Post Structuralism and Semiotics hinder a single design message to a large audience. This thesis will also show how the inherent chaotic nature of a community of individuals allows for a natural and organic categorization of data and the emergence of creative content. Furthermore, in this is a global democracy of content, the power of what is seen, read, and experienced rests with individuals and not the mass media. The core of this concept is expressed best within the contributing user base or community of Wikipedia.org and digg.com. The collaborative effort of the whole helps to create a dynamic forum of information. The resources for the paper are that of the definitive social work, the collective data formed by the extensive users of the Internet. The paper will take the form of both print and as a wiki. With any luck, it will evolve with the community in an expressive form whose very creation helps emphasize its topic. The uses for these tools of creation in the design community are extensive, from exploring the concept of plagiarism in imagery to assisting in the refinement of navigational and informational graphics.

History

Early in the Internets infancy, newsgroups were crucial to the culture and success of the Internet. In fact, the Internet initially consisted of only a few of these sites and BBS message boards. The sites were easy to navigate and see what was offered as they were text based with little to no graphics and contained, in comparison to today, little information.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, more popularly known as CERN, proposed a new protocol for information distribution called ENQUIRE. That protocol later became known as the WWW or World Wide Web protocol, which is based on hypertext and hyper-linking. Hypertext is the concept that words can act as direct references to entire pages of content; an idea well understood in modern times. The early text-based browsers offered little flexibility and few display choices to the graphic design community. It was not until 1993 that Marc Andreessen and his team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) developed the first graphical browser, Mozilla. While limited, Mozilla provided designers a visual way to represent how information was displayed. For the first time, graphic design became digital. That said, the early graphical web was clumsy, slow, and often poorly designed.

Microsofts First Website

The job of the design was often left to programmers and it showed. It wasn’t until subsequent revisions in the standards were made that proper graphic web design was possible. The biggest change in web design was cascading style sheets (CSS). CSS is a standard that allows for immensely more control over layout options by separating content from design.

Once the popularity of the Internet grew, design became as important as content. A problem, however, was still huge limitations in the system: bandwidth and processing power limited design options. Graphic designers were often forced to “dumb down” a site or invent creative ways to lower content to a manageable file size. This often daunting and hugely technical task was out of reach of many of the designers. The situation inspired the creation of a specialty, the web designer was born. For a number of years there was a very clear method of web content creation. The site creator had a programmer to do the back end or framework / coded structure, and a web designer created the front end or user interface. Once again, tools and standards were created; it became increasingly easier for the everyday designer to create web content. Increases in the speed and efficiency of the network backbone, computers, and personal connections helped make rich content accessible to the masses.

The Internet provides two primary computing powers. The first is the mass categorization of information (i.e., Google.com and its web servers). The second is the power of the people to create and network. Effectively, these two have not been combined to provide more information and tools for graphic designers. The search queries and information access methods have not been adequate to allow rapid spontaneous searches and intelligently created inspiration for design, like the results one would get from personal interaction. The future, however, will bring new communication, design, and search tools to help aide the designer. The next generation of search engines will use both visual and text based inputs.

Post Structuralist meanings

As computer and technology continues to advance, the basic elements that make good graphic design remain the same. Logical layout, effective representation of ideas, and proper balance will not be replaced by technology. What technology will do: allow the masses of content to be sorted and understood. The ideas of post structuralism define why one message for a large target is difficult. People don’t understand and interpret things in the same way. The understanding of the meaning is placed on the reader and not the author. One example of this in a digital world is a website called Flickeur.

This change in message based on context and reader is known in Post Structuralism as destabilized meaning.

One of the primary advantages to the social network provided by the Internet is the transfer of information and methods. Designers can share techniques and tools for creation. These tools and techniques can vary from the form of simple verbal advice to something as complex as a tool for a system of creation. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins calls a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another a meme. Dawkins describes memes as tunes, catch phrases, clothes, fashions, and ways of making pots or of building structures. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution and diffusion. Trend propagation and Internet phenomenon are crucial elements of social networking. Often times a funny image, a video, or a concept is passed through the masses of networks. What will eventually emerge are often hundreds of thousands of different perspectives and alterations to the original concept. This original concept or idea acts as a rule to a system with the goal of representing both a new interpretation and the original concept. One example of this is the “This is Spartaaaaa” trend that started on the website YTMND.com. The original was a piece by the YTMND.com user “NorthAmericanDangerDuo.” It consisted of a crude animation of the scene from the movie 300 where the main character, Leonidas, kicks a Persian messenger into the city’s water well after he brings a message of destruction. Due to the technological restraints inherent with the old format of animated gif graphics and non-synced mp3 audio - the standard medium of YTMND.com - the piece is choppy and crude. The advantage of this meme of content creation is that the huge amounts of technical skills that full-motion video require are not as important. In short, the message of the piece becomes more important than its technical portrayal. In the scene from 300, Leonidas yells, “This is Sparta!” The revised version was extended, so instead, Leonidas yells, “This is Spartaaaaaaa(extended syllable),” with the messenger then flying into a building, exploding it on contact.3 It was intended to be one in a series of 300, but instead it so appropriately exploded into a new phenomenon of its own.

The concept was manipulated and altered slightly; it spread wildly across the various social networks. After two weeks, it could be found in hundreds of places, including youtube.com, myspace.com, and digg.com. The success of the piece was due to several reasons. The most significant factor was that the movie 300 was just about to be released. The piece played on the outrageous nature of the scene and took it one step further. Indeed, the piece started to blend with other social phenomenon. When the piece finally finished its run, it had been combined with nearly every other popular meme.

Often times two or more phenomena are combined to create a piece with an entirely different message, depending on the viewer. This change in message is one of the core concepts of Post Structuralism and Semiotics. When this concept is combined with the random expressive nature of the viewers/creators and the rules of the inherent system brought forth by the nature of the phenomena, a naturally emerging system of creation that grows and evolves. For the casual viewer, the design is both complex as well as confusing; often times the message is lost without multiple references.

"The shift in terminology he[Björn Engholm] describes is taken a bit too seriously, to the extreme that, under new names, design products "identified as good" offend the eye. In today's design, ideology is written in upper-case letters. American design or Italian design is no longer concerned with a subject, but with representation. Design degenerates into sign."

This is often seen in Internet phenomena where the design is lost to the message, which is often meant to be humorous.

Chaos Theory and emergent systems

Game of life

In the 1970’s, mathematician John Conway created The Game of Life, a set of rules for cellular automation that simulates a micro world. What made it so interesting was that the evolution of the system was both dynamic and different for each emergence of the system. It is possible to use these simple rules to create primitive systems that reproduce and regenerate.

Design can follow these same primitive systems using certain basic rules. While not fashioned after the basic concept of reproduction or death, these systems are used to create complicated units from simple models. A designer could make a small set of rules such as color palate, font selection, and so on, and use the computer to create a new piece using existing elements.

Information and interface design are also affected by the emergence of a system. The website Digg.com has one simple rule: Digg up or Digg down (bury) When users likes the story, they digg it up. What emerges from this system is a news site that is both dynamic and, in a way, organic. Each reader acts like a nerve ending for a story. The web server, as the brain, uses algorithms to determine what the body is saying and dynamically changes the website to adapt. If a story is quickly dugg, then it is placed on the homepage just as quickly.

What is left is a semi-organic-democratic way of viewing the masses of data and news stories that currently exist. Another feature is the ability to move away from what the masses have dugg to the home page and choose a group of people who have similar interests in stories. This ability is important for a designer because it allows for selective references of news and information sources. Presumably, most designers would rather see postings from other designers rather than those from other fields of study such as engineers. The most important stories are placed in their appropriate locations automatically, based on user input. This concept can be applied to other media such as advertising. The future of advertising design is dynamically targeted content that appeals to the individual viewer.

Power of social networking

There have been several examples of the power of the social network, but few as strong as the recent HD DVD key revolt that took place on the pages of digg.com in early May of 2007. HD DVD is a competing format in the latest digital videodisc wars. One of the technologies built into the format is the encryption of the video and other content so that it cannot be easily duplicated and stolen. Recently, a hacker was able to determine the string of numbers or key that unlocks the content. Many people were excited by the premise that they could make legal copies of videos that they purchased as described in the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. The problem was that the key could be used for malicious reasons such as making illegal copies of a disc. The revolt was caused by the censorship of the key content on the democratic social news site Digg.com. Many of the users of the site believe that the masses should control the content, not a moderating “big brother.” A link to a blog about the key and bypassing of the copy protection was linked on the Digg.com homepage automatically when enough users “dugg” or voted it up. When the owners of the HD DVD format discovered the link, they sent their lawyers after Digg and ordered the removal of all of the related content. When the links were removed, the community responded by flooding the homepage and comment sections of other stories with the “censored” key. A few Digg.com users believed that if the site continued to be censored, the very essence of the democratic site was ruined. Many users responded saying, “This is the end of Digg as we know it.” Many argued that the key was a random string of numbers and not a creative content; therefore, it could not be copy-written material. The counter argument claimed that the string is the digital equivalent to the code to a bank vault and therefore should be protected. The key became an Internet phenomenon. People began taking the numbers and forming hundred of variations on how it could be presented. The string of numbers was displayed as colors, road signs, t-shirts, made into a song, and even translated into nearly every form of common number representation from binary (base 1) to hexadecimal (base 16).. Some users even went as far as to premise that with enough calculations, the number could be found within π(PI). Although it was never proven, the theory that any string of numbers exists within π, an infinite chain, is theoretically true. Due to the overwhelming propagation of the key, Digg.com and other sites decided not to censor it.

"But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying. Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com."

One site that continued to censor the key was Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia built its entire catalog based on user-submitted content, but continued to prevent the key from being posted on its pages for quite some time. It was not until the revolt hit mainstream media that posting was permitted..

The issue with this un-censoring of intellectual property is that the community determined the ownership, not the original author. Indeed, there is little stopping someone from copying other copy-written artwork and, by mob mentality, effectively dissolving ownership. This situation is bad for the designer because it makes controlling content difficult. There have been several examples of images stolen from flickr.com and other photo-sharing sites and then used without permission for another person’s profit. For the most part, the community has been extremely harsh against the thief, but members offer little to no apology for saving or even reproducing these images for personal use; this double standard is one of the future issues the Internet faces.

Digital theft

Digital theft has been an issue with the music business ever since Napster and other music-sharing tools were designed. The answer has been to introduce DRM or digital rights management. The community backlashes against DRM lead some companies to sell DRM-free music at a slightly higher price. However, due to the visual nature of graphic design, there is little an artist can do to prevent theft of artwork except avoid showing it in the first place, which defeats the purpose in many cases.

Easy access to information is one of the key tools that has made the Internet successful. Early search engines such as Archie and Gopher were crude and provided little to no valuable results. They they only matched words or strings of words. This was due to the lack of programming skill and the lack of computing power. Furthermore, the varying meaning of a term and how it was applied proved difficult for computers to interpret. Often times the meaning of a word changes depending on its association with other words or references. The solution was to create a better search engine. What was created was the smart generation of search engines. This virtual intelligence is what made sites like Yahoo and Google so successful. Most search engines relied on computers to analyze the information and determine the appropriate results. The problem is that since computers reliably and consistently interpret information, the results could be manipulated by malicious content creators. Often times a site contained excessive keyword information in order to boost its search engine ranking. This term is known as spam, after the ambiguous meat and shares its sound with the word scam. One way around this exploitation of the system is the addition of user feedback. The community can provide valuable information about a specific page by categorizing the content and adding additional tags or content references. An example is the comment tools provided to the Flickr.com community. The main limitation behind this is that more content is added every day than can actually be categorized.

New Technologies

Text-based content has been fairly consistent with rapid categorization, but other forms of media, such as videos and images, are still left by the wayside. The future will bring computer systems that can identify images and categorize them appropriately. One example is image searching for pictures containing apples and having results returned that contain the visual representation of apples, without human interpretation. The premise is simple, but often the execution is difficult. Computers simply do not have the programming and processing power to decipher the masses of images contained on the Internet. Google Image search relies on text near or around the image to return a result. Many of the results are often unconnected to the original search and, consequently, are relatively weak in nature. The idea behind the new-age search engine is that elements can be identified and categorized by the massive power of computers and made accessible to any designer. The next step will be to upload an image and have the computer categorize it appropriately and return results. The result could be anything from identifying the core structure of the design to determining the perceived message that the image presents. Currently, there are only a handful of sites that have some of this capability. The first, Whatthefont.com, allows the user to upload an image of a typeface from a logo or some other source and then determine what typeface was used to create the source image. This is especially useful for designers who want to see what else is available and similar as well as determining if a typeface was stolen. The other but less successful site (in technology, not popularity) is the celebrity look-alike page by Myheritage.com, which provides the portrait user/loader with celebrity look alike by matching tones, colors, and facial positioning. While this is not entirely applicable to design, it offers a useful concept. Several other sites perform similar functions, but they are currently limited to very basic offerings. Retrievr, a tool for accessing the user-submitted image database of Flickr, allows a user to paint color swatches in specific areas of an image. It then searches its database for photos with similar areas of color and returns an image. At its current functional state, Retriever is more of a toy, but with advancing technology and better programming, it could be highly useful to graphic designers. These tools allow a designer to utilize both the computer’s power to analyze and the community’s input to provide content.

Conclusion

The democratization of content and organization of the Internet will help change the graphic design community in a profound way. The sharing of tools, technologies, and methods will allow for expanded learning and skill sets. The range and scope of graphic design will continue to increase to include interactive, video, and web design.

The future technologies of the Internet and social networking will continue to change the way designers learn, conceptualize, and present information. Powerful tools will be developed to assist and expand ideas and help prevent fraud and copyright infringement. Communication will be made easier by utilizing the power of both the community and the computing power presented by the network structure. Graphic design will be more dynamic and more powerful than it ever has been.

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Last changed Thursday, June 14, 2007, Andy Yeckel