We just participated with the IT department in a Technology Fair last Friday. Using the basement as the location was the real draw for us since we're always looking for more exposure down here in the invisible recesses of the college. We feel over-looked by tours of new students and faculty so we relish visibility in any form. The IT side of it was to help people with laptop problems either real or imagined.
I was given two time slots for a talk titled "media for the masses", whatever that is. But as I prepared a Keynote presentation it felt awkward and forced. Technology isn't what we really do, though it may seem like that to outsiders. What the media basement is for is storytelling – in a lot of different forms using a lot of different methods. That's what we do.
Media is just storytelling from one person to another without the teller actually being there. That surrogate "other" is media. It's the autonomous teller, an automatic presenter of the story thoughtfully packaged and tuned for an effective unfolding of a particular story. Some stories need to be told in a specific way for reasons of content, effect, or cost. Others can be related in many ways and often it's the audience that selects the form to which they are most attuned.
So I stopped the presentation in the middle and launched into what I think is one of the fundamental elements of media in form, method and philosophy and that's making posters. They're simple, powerful and work best when you finally understand the essence of what you're trying to say. The form forces you to edit down to what's possible to display on a single page and that usually improves your thinking and writing. It's a refined combination of design and concept. If done well you get a lot of bang for the buck.
So I talked about my personal progression of poster making – the first and its results, the following ones, the most successful ones, the most contentious ones, the art ones, the business ones, and the personal ones. At least it was colorful and fresh. The poster of Ken and Jerry is really popular with donors to the college. The one on lighting technique is the most popular with students (it gets stolen the most, which is one of the best metrics for gauging success or at least desirability).
I use the software application Pages for doing the work. It's Apple's version of InDesign, but a little lighter and much easier to use. It's true for some images I do a lot of the work in Photoshop first, but for the text and layout I work in Pages. It's part of the iWork collection of software: Pages, Keynote and Numbers. Pages can do both word processing and layout. Keynote is Apple's version of Powerpoint, only it's fun and easy. Numbers is the equivalent of Excell, only better with images and layout. I do confess that I don't actually use Numbers that much and Excell, for what I do, is fine after all.
So in the end the presentation went better than I expected since I didn't really know who would show up or how many people there would be. I confirmed in my own mind that we're really storytellers first and tech people second. Everything we do is at the service of the story. We learn what we need to know in order to help the story unfold and find its own voice and form and we always try and push that form into new shapes using as broad a range of methods as possible. Often out of that re-directing or re-presenting of the story we get a new story or at least one with a different flavor - a variant, but in the end the final vote of success is always made by the story itself. Did we serve the story well? That's what the world of media is all about and anyone can learn to do that. It just takes attention, practice and the desire to tell an effective story.
gunther
