1/27/2005
   slide 18
CG as Tipping Point for Visual Literacy
•Gladwell’s Tipping Point
–Understanding rapid change, e.g., epidemics
–Why did crime drop so dramatically in New York City in the mid-1990's?
–Why is word-of-mouth so powerful? E.g., viral marketing
•Printing press à textual literacy
•Computer graphics and networks  à visual literacy
•with the advent of computer graphics and the Web has it become, as it was thousands of years ago,  almost as easy to make and distribute images as it to make and distribute texts.
this change has set off a chain reaction, an exponential growth in the use and exchange of images that is changing our lives.

•Malcom Gladwell, in his book “The Tipping Point”, suggests how these types of dramatic change can come about.
•SLIDE POINTS
•Creating a discrete way of making and showing images isn’t just a convenience, we believe it is  a tipping point for images, and thus for the need for visual literacy.
•ANALOGY: invention of the printing press made textual communication profoundly easier and created a need for textual literacy, so  CG and Web are creating a need for visual literacy (there was need before but this is tipping point).

•It is time once again to integrate visual education with the textual and mathematical
EXTRAS
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1.  What is The Tipping Point about?
It's a book about change. In particular, it's a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. For example, why did crime drop so dramatically in New York City in the mid-1990's? How does a novel written by an unknown author end up as national bestseller? Why do teens smoke in greater and greater numbers, when every single person in the country knows that cigarettes kill? Why is word-of-mouth so powerful? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? I think the answer to all those questions is the same. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us. http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html#whatis

•Similar to: Idea of memes and memetics
•Meme: an information pattern, held in an individual's memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual's memory.
Memetics: the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes
•A meme is a cognitive or behavioral pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one. Since the individual who transmitted the meme will continue to carry it, the transmission can be interpreted as a replication: a copy of the meme is made in the memory of another individual, making him or her into a carrier of the meme. This process of self-reproduction (the memetic life-cycle), leading to spreading over a growing group of individuals, defines the meme as a replicator, similar in that respect to the gene (Dawkins, 1976; Moritz, 1991). http://pcp.lanl.gov/MEMES.html