Hi Claude,
And as my computer science students discovered:
A picture is also worth a thousand different interpretations!
:)
BC
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Barbara Combes, Lecturer
School of Computer and Information Science
Edith Cowan University, Perth Western Australia
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-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Claude
Almansi
Sent: Wednesday, 20 October 2004 3:32 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; The Digital Divide Network discussion group;
[EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [DDN] A picture is worth a thousand words! Yup, in
kilobytes
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=viewtopict=437p1=1p2
=1p3=1p4=1lng=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
