[DDN] "A picture is worth a thousand words!" "Yup, in kilobytes"

[Claude Almansi]

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
claude.almansi at bluewin.ch