Wednesday, March 21, 2012

COMMUNICATION, ONE BIG JUMBLE OF STRINGS


         
 Communication is the exchange of information between people, through speaking, writing, music, picture, ideas or gesture. It requires a sender, message and recipient(s). As obvious as it is communication is a humongous factor in our life, it basically controls how we live and interacts with things or people around us. Communication derived from such simple things as: cave paintings, smoke single, Morse code, printing press and more. These give rises to many other following generation of more complex and efficient communicational technology in which shape up our lives. Today, communication is used everywhere, school, office, public places, stock markets just to name a few. In my opinion, communication is one of the biggest factors responsible for the improvement and connectivity of the whole world. My Modern World Studies teacher told me that stock markets only grow as much as communication lets it, but in MY opinion that theory does not apply to only stock markets, but to the entire world.


        As seen below, my group and I made an info-graphic on communication and we all know now through experience that it certainly was not easy. Obviously, planning of how to proceed is what we have to construct.
1)      We all searched up and look at examples of info-graphics other people have done to get some idea of which format we should follow and figure out how to make it presentable and interesting.
2)      One of my team mates decided that she is going to be the one doing the graphic part through photo-shop, while the rest will provide her with information, graphs, data tables, and the theme color.
3)      While the person working on photo-shop, the rest of us start listing types of communication since the olden days until the contemporary time.  Then we choose 15 most interesting ones and researched on them. Information we chose are things people don’t usually know but are interesting. All the links we got our information from are right are the bottom of the info-graphic (you should check some out, they are pretty cool!)
4)      Lastly, after all information are organized they are now paste into the info-graphic.




              Considering the amount of collaboration in our group, I would say that some has to do more work than others, but everyone got together quite nicely. The person who has to work with photo-shop and graphic things are obviously the person with most working to do (since info-graphic are based mainly on graphic). You may think graphic part could have been shared and helped, but the sad news is out of 3 people in the group, there is only one person who actually knows how to operate photo-shop. But the good thing about our group is that at least everyone contributed to the work. The rest of the people do researches on communication, find data and graphs.
                If I have to explain my info-graphic and how its’ information effect the present opinion regarding technology then I would simply say that the growing of technology from the ancient time has been quite a climb. From the info-graphic it is apparent that technologies in the early times were not as efficient or sophisticated as the modern days. People in the early time must have had worked really hard and put in extreme thoughts to come up with those ideas, it is harder for them than inventors from the mid 1700 or 1800 since in that time inventors develop new inventions from the past existing technology or adopting existing ideas. Modern technology today mainly derived from past inventions.
                Now, making info-graphic for my Modern World Studies is not completed but let’s go back and reconsider some things that worked and did not work. Of course our info-graphic is not completely trash but it is not perfect either. First of all, I think the colors and design worked quite fine, the result looks presentable and interesting. It was hard deciding which color to use, since we really have to mind the color contrast of the background and the text themselves (or else they would not be readable). Secondly, the information used were not history-book-boring, we found many fascinating facts. Thirdly, the thing that did not quite worked, was the narrow shape of the info-graphic. It was too narrow that we were not able to fit extra graphs and data tables, so that was a disadvantage our info-graphic holds.
Why are info-graphics so popular at the moment? I have found out, after researching for examples that info-graphics are booming right now. In my opinion, the reason for that is because of good qualities the info-graphic itself holds. These qualities would be factors which hold viewers interested such as: information, data, graphs, pie charts, visuals, texts and design. Personally, I do not like the method of reading lots of texts to gain knowledge, but rather learn those information through visuals. That is exactly that info-graphics are for, they provide interesting information, charts and visuals to make want to know more about the topic and therefore have a better understand of the big picture.
Lastly, I just want to say that without communication us human would not be able to develop this far. We should just take a moment right now to THANK all of the contributors and inventors for taking a part in advancing our society and making our lives so much easier.