[c]

This describes an interesting idea on the rhetorical use of necessity as a notion or term.

“institutions of government must correlate with the structure of the economy and the information system”…

“Must correlate”? Did you notice? They insisted that we must correlate with economics and technology.

“Necessity.” William Pitt said two centuries ago, “is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”(Saul 112)

You have to accept that you live in a modern society where globalization and capitalism are the dominant systems, and learn to find a way to work within that system—the argument of a tyrant.

Here is a basic overview of sitemaps, process maps, and wireframes. It’s provided in PDF format (136 kb) so just click on the link below to download it.
Link: sitemapsEtc.pdf

Digital Thread
This site is an excellent resource for searching out interesting and inspiring exemplars in web and interface design.
http://www.digitalthread.com/webdesign/

Don Norman’s jnd Site | User Advocacy and Human-Centered Design
Don Norman is the author of The Design of Everyday Things and co-founder of the Neilsen Norman Group
http://www.jnd.org/

Use It | Jacob Neilsen on Usability and Web Design
Jacob Neilsen is a guru of web design and usability, widely recognised as one of the great contributors to web interface design theory and practice, and yet sadly, often referred to as “the web designer that designers love to hate”. He offers valuable insights into user interface design for the web. He is the other co-founder of the Neilsen Norman Group.
http://www.useit.com/

Below is taken from John Raulston Saul’s Unconscious Civilization and refers to how our language has been separated into two parts.

There is Public language—enormous, rich, varied and more or less powerless. Then there is Corporatist language, attached to power and action. Corporatist language itself breaks down into three types. Rhetoric, Propaganda, and Dialect. […] Not the old-fashioned regional dialects, but the specialized, inward looking verbal mechanisms (I’m avoiding the word language because they are not language; they do not communicate) of tens of thousands of monopolies of fractured knowledge. These are what I call the dialects of individual corporations. The social science dialects, the linguist dialects, the artist dialects. Thousands and thousands of them,purposely impenetrable to the non-expert, with thick defensive walls that protect each corporation’s sense of importance.
Obscurity suggests complexity, which suggests importance. The dialects are thus more or less conscious weapons of self-protection and unconscious tools of self-deception.(Saul 47-48)

The Arrival

At 5:30 am the plaza outside the San Cristóbal bus station is quiet other than the sound of birds, crickets and the occasional distant motor, as an unseen vehicle turns onto an unknown road. These streets are still wet with the remains of an earlier rain and the smell of the damp mixes with that of the soil and the stone. How is it that stone smells? It seems implausible but there it is. Even the plaster and paint is there and, of course, the poo

Preamble

This was originally part of a research thesis I had started that was to look specifically at image and identity in the Zapatista Organisation. Since that time the thesis had passed through a number of iterations and was concluded with something a little different. The original reason for changing the subject emphasis was based on, what  I now believe to be, a lack of understanding of the fundamental principle behind the new Zapatista movement. Looking back at this now, I feel as though the original emphasis did have value and ought to be explored further. I don’t know if I will actually do that, but it’s worth considering.

Here it is…

The three primary constituents of this research subject developed from a simple question.

“What do people think of when they think of the Zapatistas?”

In order to answer that question, others needed to be asked first. What constitutes the message to the public, how is it presented, and how is in disseminated? How is it received by the public? And this brought up another question. Does the meaning that is intended to be conveyed by the Zapatista organisation correspond with the perception of those receiving the message? That’s really how the idea started.

The emphasis on image, meaning and perception has not come directly from a semiotic model, though the similarities to elements of a Piercean model in particular do definitely exist. It seems useful to consider a semiotic triangle in analyzing the three constituents of this research. That said I expect it will inform the research rather than performing some structuralist model to be adhered to.

When communicating issues of social justice, there exists a significant space for the inclusion of Art as a form of indirect communication, as a compliment to the traditional uses of language, and as a medium for specifically conveying emotion and creating empathy. It is an opportunity to reach beyond the traditional use of rhetoric as a methodology for communicating emotion.

It is generally accepted that language is the traditional domain of communication, whether that be through the use of words or signs. “By means of language we can conceive the intangible, incorporeal things we call our ideas, and the equally inostensible elements of our perceptual world we call fact.” (Langer 21)

An excellent and concise explanation of the difference between modernism and postmodernism, courtesy of the Open Learning University.

The modernist tradition rejected the mythical and religious views of the world and gave rise to science, democracy, liberation movements and a belief in the supremacy of rationality. Within this tradition there was an implicit belief that there existed a given external reality and that the task of all enquiry was to develop a better and better model (or map) of that external reality.

The postmodernist perspective is that the assumption about a pre-given external reality is not valid, especially in the domain of human culture, values, beliefs and organisations. In general, and particularly in these social domains, it is impossible for anyone to have a model of reality that does not constrain their perception in some way. So while postmodernists do not say that there is not an external reality, they would claim that it is impossible to have an unbiased perspective on what it is.