Reading Visually

After reading the McCloud comics, I found that even as a parent, my two girls do the same thing when I ask them to tell me about a toy. I never really thought about how in their minds, they just run through the actions of what the toy does, and they don’t really think to tell about it. “It’s a cool toy that does stuff, duh!” Weird how in our society it does consider it normal to do things as kids, but you need to outgrow them as an adult. I see the parallelism with this as education ruining creativity.

If everyone ‘outgrew’ this technique, where would movies, comics, children books, graphic novels, video games, etc… come from? What does this say about people who regularly read the political comics? Or people who spend their life and education on translating hieroglyphs? Funny how it works that the comic talks about this ideology, then there is a huge metaphorically BUT, when commercialism comes into play. “We need these child-like ways of thinking to go away, BUT, when there is millions to be made….we will make exceptions.” I had to laugh at the scene where the ‘narrator’ is talking about how modern art became incomprehensible to the average viewer!! “I know the artist is making a statement, but I don’t know what the heck it is.”

How many times has anyone told another person, “I read this awesome book and it said this...”? Much like the part 2 of McCloud (page 25) we use words to describe things that aren’t really true. I have to correct myself all the time over that little detail. No biggie, because people tend to let it go, but it really depends on the type of writing or talking you are doing. You have got to know your audience.

I never looked at random objects the way McCloud describes. We want to see ourselves in everything we buy. It makes sense though, when selling a house (have done it twice) you want to remove any trace of your family. You want the prospective buyer to see themselves in the house raising their family. Same with cars, remove all stickers and such you might have put on it. Remove all personality to it. I think the parmesan cheese lid, might be going overboard though.

The A/V projects: I found it interesting to see what different path we took in creating our videos. I guess that’s what makes them unique; we all have different views of the world around us. I’m pretty sure my video would have been much different if I was single without little ones running around.

Hyper-Readers was interesting, in the sense that I had read some of the ideas before, just not in the detail as the author puts them. I have dealt with other classes in which a classmate has ‘trespassed’ and taking snippets of material and put in their own writing. Luckily I was able to catch it, and remind them to cite the source. What I also found interesting was; the material being quoted was being used to defend the author’s claim, when in reality, the information was going against their claim. If the classmate would have actually read the whole article versus ‘skimming’ over it, she would have picked up on that.