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©2008 Deidre Adams

This semester, I have two classes with very similar names: Visual Thinking and Understanding Visual Language. It took me a little while to get the names straight, but the basic difference is that the first is a hands-on class, kind of a survey of different software programs combined with a sprinkling of design principles, and the second is about theory and kind of an introduction to some of the higher-level critical stuff that we’ll be getting into down the road.

Since my day-job is graphic designer, it seems like I would have been able to test out of taking this Visual Thinking class, but I’d heard horror stories about how hard they make it to do that, and the class had already started, so I decided to just stick with it — how hard could it be? Turns out it was really pretty fun and had some good assignments. The last one before the final was to do a “social issues” poster. I was rather stuck in trying to come up with an idea, vaguely thinking maybe global warming or something political, but then the answer came up in the Understanding Visual Language class.

‘We were talking about the Cyborg Manifesto, which describes a cybernetic organism — a hybrid of machine and organism — and how this might apply to, say, a person with a cellphone or an iPod with headphones. I’ve really been struck for a while now by how many people walk around constantly talking or texting on their cell phones. This includes two people very close to me (no need to name them, they know who they are!). It also involves the syndrome known as “CPA,” or “constant partial attention,” in which I will be having a conversation with a certain person, when all of a sudden he stops dead, takes the Blackberry out of its belt holster, and proceeds to read the e-mail that just caused him to receive a vibe. Is it just me, or is this crazy? Personally, I don’t see how being a slave to this thing makes anyone’s life any better. Call me a Luddite, but I dream of the days before we all had to be constantly available by cell phone, and when you could have a nice conversation in a restaurant because there weren’t TV screens in every possible direction you could look.

Of course, I have my own issues. I can rarely go more than a couple of hours without reading my e-mail, for instance. I have no idea what gem of wonderfulness I might miss if I don’t get on for an entire day, but I sure as heck don’t want to take the chance.