Digital Metaphors: DIY Design and Thinking | Veneeta Singha

 

In a media-infused world such as ours, daily messages and message construction, vital to information at its most functional level, take on diverse forms and meanings that not not only enrich human cognition and everyday life but also provide dimension. Popular metaphors exist in near abundance. Cloud-based thinking and data management, seen from this POV, become the "visual and acoustic space" in M. McLuhan's Tetrad and the bases through which media are technology and vice versa. 

 

 

"All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new form." 

 

 

Information in this dynamic, then, is the transformative principle. It is creative, reflexive, structural, technological, symbolic, conceptual, multi-locational and, finally, artistic. Cognition plays a key role, leading us forward from the "high, dim Sierras of speech." The "experientialist" in all of us and, in particular, communications practitioners will continue to extrapolate designs and opportunities for the "social good" because of the all-pervasive, diffuse and diverse nature of metaphor and message. Development design and the larger sphere of the "public good" in this constituent reality pose not only vast possibility and potential but also extreme causality. (Erring on the side of caution has never made more sense.)

 

 

The typographic world (the makings of which we can understand via McLuhan's writings) is too expansive and extended to externalize through anything other than the "spatial metaphor." I struggle to minimize affective issues that reverberate everywhere (and nowhere) including those arising from the "knowledge gap." It unleashes so many long-held (and cherished) social beliefs and paradigms that it seems to defeat and negate the very norms that allowed the paradigms their breathing space. The Knowledge Gap Hypothesis has assumed an uncertain structure here in Nepal. The towers stand tall and the signal lights are constantly flickering.