IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

8 Literacy
A few years ago I met a woman in Bombay who was completing her Ph.D.
in social anthropology. She had just returned from a field trip to Rajasthan,
where she had spent time with a group of traveling storytellers. This particular
group went from village to village, unannounced, and would simply
start a performance in the village square. Although each story would have
a familiar plot—the storytelling tradition dates back thousands of years—
each event would be unique. Prompted by the storytellers, who held up
pictorial symbols on sticks, villagers would interact with the story. They
would be part of the performance. I commented to the woman that with
that depth of knowledge about interaction and the combined use of words
and images, she could get a job with Microsoft tomorrow. ‘‘What’s Microsoft?’’
was her reply.
This episode confirmed my prejudice that when we talk about design
for communication, what we actually mean and do is the design of messages.
As a consequence, the world is awash in print and ads and packaging
and e-mail spam, but these one-way messages do not contribute to our understanding.
On the contrary, they are the output of a point-to-mass mentality
that lies behind the brand intrusion and semiotic pollution that
despoil our perceptual landscape. The average American is now exposed to
254 different commercial messages in a day, up nearly 25 percent since the
1970s. Advertising people call this the ‘‘clutter problem’’—and solve it, of
course, by adding to the clutter. 1 We’re so flooded by noise that it’s hard
to understand what’s going on. True, we have learned to filter out noise
and distraction, but in so doing we have also constrained our capacity to
reflect on and make sense of the bigger picture. Our perceptions of change
through time and the behavior of processes are especially weak. Our way
of life is probably threatened by changes to our natural and social support