exam project proposal

'Hell is other people talking webspeak on mobile phones.' John Humphreys (2000)

The rising popularity and dependence of mobile phones has given lead to the obvious imperfections of technology. When mobile technology was first available, few thought how popular and used the text message feature would become. Initial growth of text messaging was slow, as it was originally designed for deaf and hard of hearing people, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 messages per GSM customer per month. Today text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service on the planet, with 72% of all mobile phone users worldwide or 1.9 Billion out of 2.7 Billion phone subscribers at end of 2006 being active users of texting.

Despite being an extremely popular tool, predictive text has its downfall. Users perhaps over estimate its capabilities, relying on it to fix their mistakes for them and it can be argued that this over reliance on technology is making users lazy and more careless

The Aim: To communicate the idea of miscommunication using the theory of parody and pastiche illustrate the imperfections and unreliability of this specific digital media, as if it were a dyslexic machine.

Pastiche and parody involve the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles… Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humour…
Frederic Jameson (1988)

The Brief: Hand drawn images, animated within After Effects to demonstrate the frustration and miscommunication of predictive text. The images are in the style of an old alphabet poster, but with the words as they would appear garbled in predictive text. For example the letter ‘C’ could be ‘cat’ but the word would appear as ‘act’

The text would appear under each respective letter and be animated as if they are being written and constantly changes. Music would accompany this piece well and in particular, relaxing, royalty free music will be used, working as a good contrast to the frustration, disorientation and annoyance of a ‘dyslexic machine’. The style of the aesthetics will be ornate and old fashioned, another contrast, this time with the modernity of technology.

To avoid repetition, the animation will also contain other elements of text messages such as switching to manual enter a word, or entering a word into the phone’s dictionary.