Hi
I wrote what follows in anger at an www.elearningeuropa.info forum called "The Role of the New Technologies in Cultural Dialogue" http://tinyurl.com/5m7ks , where all the initial posts insist on how important the use of images would be for multicultural exchanges, wondering at why so many sites are still textual, "refusing the multimedia revolution".
The total absence of any mention of tech limitations to access angered me, and I wrote a post entitled <<"A picture is worth a thousand words!" "Yup, in kilobytes">> http://tinyurl.com/5qmaj :
This subject line is from an actual exchange during the World Summit on Information Society http://www.itu.int/wsis/ in Geneva last December.
With another participant, first met online through the "Information Society: Voices from the South" mailing list, we were joking about the Summit's official pages and PDFs, made huge by the addition of clumsily formatted logos and pics of personalities, offered by the organisers of WSIS with no regard for people with slow modem connections, web e-mails with scanty storage, forced to use antiquated computers in cybercafes.
The most insensitive use of pictures was made by the Austrian organisers World Summit Awards http://www.wsis-award.org/ . At first, if you didn't have the shockwave pug-in, you just couldn't enter their site, because there was no alternative to their flash home page. They also produced a pdf for the nomination of experts for the award: enormous and locked. I asked them to produce a text version in several parts, as several people on the above mentioned mailing list were unable to download it, yet wanted to submit expert nominations for their countries. The organisers refused because they couldn't understand what it meant to have "non hi tech" internet access conditions. So I asked Andy Carvin, then working for the Benton foundation http://www.benton.org , if he could have a go. It worked. He got the separate texts forming the PDF from them and reposted them, separately and unlocked, at the Benton site.
Americans are ahead of us in tech, but for them, it is just a tool, that must be adapted to the user's conditions. We Europeans all too often seem more enamoured of tech for tech's sake :-S
Reading the erudite quotations about "Image language" provided by Pierre-Antoine Ullmo in this forum, I can't help wondering if their authors have ever been forced to use the internet in measly conditions, and what they actually know about bandwidth, hotlinking, storage, RAM capacity, CPU's, W3C accessibility rules...
In About the Image http://www.elearningeuropa.info/forums.php?fPage=viewtopic&t=437&p1=1&p2=1&p3=1&p4=1&lng=5 , Ullmo himself writes:
Quote:
"However the majority of applications on the web remain conventional, giving priority to the text and to a lineal and rigid reading mode. There is no real revolution of the writing process that accompanies the progress of new media."
True, but only in part. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page , probably the best online Encyclopedia, multilingual, made by users from different countries, makes abundant use of hypertext, inviting non-linear reading. The scant use of pictures is not due to conservatism, but aimed at insuring accessibility for all. The same consideration for less favorised users explains the austere look of most "GNU" sites. See http://www.fsf.org .
As to websites made in poorer countries, there is another reason for this scant use of images: bandwidth theft. Hosting rates are calculated in function of the bandwidth used by a site.
If a small association with little means can only afford a limited bandwidth, using images for its site means running the risk that someone will copy-paste them in another site: it unfortunately happens all the time, in particular in "usenet" sites like MSN or yahoo groups, where anyone can post messages or pages, and where people often haven't a clue about bandwidth, because they don't pay for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_theft , under "Linking", explains the consequences of such copypasting:
Quote:
"For example, Site A hosted by Party 1 puts up a commentary on paintings. In this commentary they would like to post a few images of the paintings discussed. Assume that the paintings are public domain or such use is covered under fair use. Party 1 could host the images (such an option is legally possible), but, instead, Party 1 embeds a tag that causes these images to be downloaded from a server belonging to Party 2. When WebSurfer 1 opens up Site A in his web browser the bandwidth for Site A is provided by Party 1. However, the images are obtained from Party 2. (This practice is sometimes also call hotlinking.)"
Hence the wariness about using images: if you can't cough up for extra bandwidth, it is sane to stick to text: bandwidth theft only happens with "objects" like image files or sound files - not with text.
So, sure, it would be great for multicultural dialogue if pictorial language could be more widely used. But who is going to cover the costs? Who is going to pay for universal access conditions pemitting its use? Who is going to pay for legal tools enabling victims of bandwidth theft in poorer countries to get affluent but clueless hotlinkers to pay for the damage they cause?
Erudite "communication science" scholars should be forced to take an "Internet 101" course before they shoot their mouths about the advisability of multimedia language for multicultural dialogue.
</rant>
cheers
Claude -- Claude Almansi www.adisi.ch [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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