Filed under: Introduction to False Truths | Tags: art, design, direction, experiments, observations, survey, website
What a difference one hour can make! Yesterday we were quite concerned with our position in this project. We thought our topic was fine, we were just panicking because we didn’t know what we were going to do, what could our outcome be? We had a really productive hour long discussion and brainstorming session and managed to come up with a direction that excites us both!
Basically our new direction involves a web based solution that we hope to have up and running before our presentation in week 13. This solution encourages user participation and discussion regarding truth surrounding current social issues. We want to run some experiments/observations before we start building the site that will help inform us on some decisions. We are also finalising questions for a survey that will help us get some insight into how we should pitch the website and collateral.
We will go into more detail about the website and what it’s all about soon, so stay tuned!
Filed under: Introduction to False Truths | Tags: achievements, aims, deceit, empower, English, George Orwell, knowledge, language, media, politics, public awareness, spin, truth
Now that Alex has introduced you to our topic, I just want to briefly explain what we aim to achieve with it.
We aim to show the truth in language by exposing it for what it really is, be that good or bad. People should be able to judge what is true based upon the best information possible (one cannot say ‘based on the truth’, because ‘truth’ is so subjective), not on the surrounding spin – it is only then they will know what they really think. We aim to empower people with the tools to see through this blurry haze created by deceitful language.
This empowerment will occur with knowledge – hence the need for a public awareness campaign, but there are also other subsidiary needs within this. As well as people knowing what and how manipulation takes place, we aim to create a public dialogue on the issue. This is an issue that ought to be on the agenda – it should be something we can discuss because we all know about it. Perhaps that would be the ultimate way of draining manipulative, deceitful language – and the greatest advocates of it – of some of its power over us (individuals and society).
We hope this public dialogue creates a climate in which people feel able to question the information they receive rather than accepting it, and where people feel able to challenge the status quo. Not everything must remain the same forever!
George Orwell hoped we would one day do something about the apparent decline of the English language. He suggested we could change the problems with language by striving to eliminate expressions which are meaningless through actively seeking out words which best serve our meanings and to choose phrases which express these in the simplest ways.
This forms only part of what we aim to set in motion. Be ready.
Filed under: Introduction to False Truths | Tags: communication design, design, euphemism, false, graphic design, language, manipulation, media, misuse, politics, rhetoric, spin, truth, truths
Welcome!
So this is the team blog for False Truths, the Communication Design Honours 2008 project of Nadia Hisheh and Alex Turnbull. We apologise for the slow start in terms of blog activity, but we have been busy working to produce a new literature review and get our proposal underway.
So, what is False Truths about? Nadia and myself started the semester looking at ‘language’ as an overall topic, and once we split into smaller groups, we paired up and decided to look at an aspect of language that we had explored in a wider sense in the previous project. False Truths is a name we devised for our topic, which is essentially looking at the use and manipulation of language by politicians, media and other people with power and influence over people. Euphemisms, rhetoric, spin, etc are all language devices that we are exploring.
We are very interested in the idea of ‘truth’ in relation to language. With the amount of information people are bombarded with everyday from the tv, newspapers, friends, family, etc, we would like to investigate just how people perceive the language from these sources. How does one perceive something to be true? What is the motive for someone to believe something? Who are people more likely to believe? There is so much misuse of language in the media, but whether people are aware of it or not is questionable.
We feel that there really isn’t adequate public knowledge and awareness about the language techniques employed by politicians and the media to influence, and manipulate people. So our overall goal is to develop some sort of awareness campaign. What this campaign is we don’t know yet, that’s what we’re working on now!
So this week we are hoping to:
- complete our new literature review
- get our proposal underway in draft form
- get our new poster to draft stage in terms of concept and content
- formulate some research strategies (like survey questions, interviews, etc.)
That’s all for now, check back soon for more!
Alex.
