New Media Skills: Visualization?

I came across a website during my research that I have been using as a touchstone throughout this entire blogging process. The website, newmedialiteracies.org, is based entirely around Jenkins’ 2009 article on Participatory Culture. I have really only been using for clarification on certain aspects of the new media skills that Jenkins presents. But I noticed that on the list of media skills that they present, they added one that was not on the list given by Jenkins.

This additional skill was labeled as “visualization” and it was defined as the ability to convert information into visual representations, or vice versa.  This is a constant within our society nowadays. It is no longer enough to just present information in a written form, one must always accompany it with at least one photo, or diagram, or graph. The latter is the most common visualization, I think. It is exactly what the website defines as visualization. It takes the information that you gain from research and puts it into a visual representation that allows the reader to glean all of the information in one look.

Being able to convert information into visual representations is not as easy as it sounds, this is clear in advertisements. An example of this is an AIDS public service announcement presented by the French company, Aides (French for help) (Macleod, 2008). WARNING: the advertisements are very much not safe for work so I will post a link to them in my works cited, rather than post them in this blog post.

In this series of advertisements, the company attempts to portray the dangers of experimentation without protection. They choose to do this by depicting naked women exploring strange penis-filled landscapes while wrapped in a condom bubble (Macleod, 2008). While this can be construed as a visual representation of sexual experimentation, it distracts the reader because of its absurdity.

This is why it is important to strive to create accurate and clear visual representations of concepts, because otherwise one may simply create something that will be mocked on the internet (the only reason I know about this advertisement is from an article on Cracked.com). Therefore, I believe that the skill of visualization, while not proposed by Jenkins, is integral within today’s society.

Works Cited

Jenkins, H (et al). (2009) "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century". The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Macleod, D. (2008, November 30). AIDES – Explore But Protect Yourself. Retrieved December 7, 2015, from http://advertisingforadults.com/2008/11/aides-explore-but-protect-yourself/

New Media Literacies. (n.d.). Retrieved December 7, 2015, from http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/