OUGD401 - Lecture - Digital Culture & Distribution

One significant digital change was the analogue clock to the digital, the main quality of this is that it is a linear progress that always moves forward instead on cycling around and repeating every day. There has also been a shift from a mechanical aesthetic to a technological aesthetic in the past few years. This aesthetic is clean and simple rather than mechanical. This is mainly seen in recent robot films where the design has gone from mechanical to very human and realistic. There has also been digital aesthetic introduced, this is unrealistic images which we accept as a reality because of our knowledge of digital processes, for example special effects in films. At the moment an analogue aesthetic has come back where people are starting to want retro phones, TVs and lights due to the more personal handmade touch.

We also have a split prediction of Utopia vs Distopia, this is shown in films such as Terminator or the Matrix where we have a paranoia over machines and digital culture. However, there is also the Utopian ideology of working side by side to enhance life which has become more apparent in recent years due to the fact that we are moving more into that age, the more it becomes a reality, the more trust we have in these machines and devices. We also  have to look at the internet to connect us in a digital culture and a way of distributing information. The speed and availability of communication via this process is due to the evolution of devices such as the mobile phone.

The evolution of publishing documents online have made long paragraphs obsolete. The use of short instant messages have made us less able to concentrate on long documents and now with the introduction of emoticons, we have taken a 3000 year cycle back round to the Egyptians, representing our written language using image.