Professor: What does this say?
Entire Class (except me): "This is not a pipe!"
Me: o.O
No, I had no idea what that was. I also never really read comics (aside from my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle obsession in 10th grade) before now, so I was surprised when "Vocabulary of Comics" was so accessible. It also had little to do with comics and everything to do with cartoons in comics, but it still gave me a better understanding of comics. One thing that confused me, however, was the concept of an icon.
An icon to me has always been a representation of something. A human can be an icon, and an object can be an icon. A picture can be an icon, but I wonder if the same thoughtfulness that McCloud describes in cartoons goes into every picture. For example, the pipe. Does everyone who draws a picture think that their representation of whatever they're drawing is picking out what is important? Does anyone ever make a conscious decision that the smell, feel, and sound of an object doesn't matter? If that's true, then what does that say about all artists? Painters? Writers? Actors and Actresses? Musicians? When I write a short story, am I excluding most of the world by picking out key pieces important to my story? I suppose my answer is yes, but thinking about this in depth might make my writing a little better.
No one really thinks in terms of cartoons while writing, but everyone does the same thing while writing. When we write a paper, we choose information that is unimportant. When we describe characters, we decide whether or not to describe what he or she is wearing. When we write poetry (or in my case, when I am forced to write poetry), we use words that will make our reader feel a certain way. In each instance we are picking out pieces and throwing out the rest of the world if it doesn't aid our own written work.
It's a bit difficult for me to think of icons this way, especially since up until now icons were those witty 100x100 pictures that you put on forum profiles, but I've learned that icons appear everywhere in our writing. We constantly make decisions about what to exclude and what to describe, which gives us incredible power over our audience. For a little while, we control the senses. We make icons.
(this comment is from James)
ReplyDeleteIt's also important to note that there is a flip side to the icon, as in what it represents to you. The only reason that I knew of this picture is that it was in both my intro to communication and cultures class and my intro to telecom class, yes I have a variety of interests and yes telecom is wayyyy more fun. This is an example of communication "breaking down" or "failing" to some extent, but I think it just landed into the more confused grey area then it actually failed. And I think that all great artists may not think about ways that their art can be interpreted, but they do try to put in as much information into their message as possible. They want their audience to think a certain way about their art, but they know that not everyone is going to see it how they were intended to see it and may find a perfectly reasonable interpretation that doesn't resemble the artist's intended meaning at all.
It is a glaringly obvious problem, but it's one that we can't solve or should be able to solve. If we were all just able to go around and beam our ideas straight into each others heads with perfect clarity then all art would be lost, all motivation to communicate would be lost. It's because I have to try to communicate with you that I keep trying. And if we were all able to beam thoughts, then we would eventually settle on some sort of mass conscious, where we are all thinking the same thoughts because we have been perfectly communicating for so long that our own individual thoughts are now gone and have been replaced by the thoughts of others.