We shouldn’t be talking about the rise of the social media and new media any more. It’s here, in everyone’s lives on a daily basis. And it’s doing things to us. It’s changing the way we communicate, learn, socialise – to name a few. But what is it really doing to our cognitive (and perhaps social) skills?
The question arose…
There is no doubt that the human brain is an amazing and complex bodily organ, perhaps even the most amazing of them all. Personally, I do not think I will ever cease to be amazing by it. But, despite its impressive capabilities, the brain has its limitations too. In fact, Norman goes as far as to say that…
The definition by Card et. al. of information visualization as “the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition (1999),” is the basis for many. But there are also parties involved from outside the academic fields in the popularization of information visualization, as Viégas and Wattenberg write. Tag clouds for example go against certain theoretical design principles but still seem to work. Lima praises the way “they observed how the last couple of years have witnessed the tipping point of a field that used to be locked away in its academic vault, far from the public eye. The recent outburst of interest for information visualization caused a huge number of people to join in, particularly from the design and art community (2009),” resulting in the development of a multiplicity of projects.