Social media for business
Information Recall
In the last post Information Overload we discussed how we have created a world of complex information.
And then question, “Why is this information not making sense”
then wonder, “Why people don’t understand us”
and ponder, “How to communicate effectively all this information”
I believe the answer to these questions all point at one factor: PowerPoint Presentation @Slideshare
And it is here that I want to take us back to where it all began – when visuals were used to communicate information in the form of stories.
Visuals was not just used in the time when mankind lived in caves. Why Leonardo-da-Vinci (1452-1519) used them to express his ideas and explain things. His sketches are some of the wonders – and I am not talking about ‘Monolisa’.
“No one could hope to convey so much true knowledge without an immense, tedious and confused length of writing and time, except through this very short way of drawing from different aspects” – Leonardo-da-Vinci
And most of the well-known scientists and statesmen used visuals to express their ideas, discuss theories and explain their discoveries and inventions to people – Karl Pearson (Statistician), Lyon Arthur Steen (Mathematics), Michael Faraday, James Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Henri Poincare, Alexander Bell, William Yeats, William Blake, Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan are some of the ones who have left behind quite a lot of sketches as evidence of their tendency to use visuals to communicate better.
Today we are at a time where we are bombarded with not just verbal information but also a whole lot of images – both movable and constant. We live in a world of photographs and videos and the growing expanse of the web, the expanding bandwidth, the multi-functionality of mobile phones are all creating a lot of user generated information. While this does gladden my heart, it also makes me sad at the dual nature of our communication. For we have pushed ‘visuals’ to the realm of entertainment and maybe allow it a little front when it comes to adding that little decoration. The very minds that open with praise at a Hollywood production or any movie is reluctant to use the learning and methodology in other streams – be it business, technology, politics, financial, legal, and especially education. One area that visuals could invade and hold sway is in the world of advertisements – but there is more to visuals than just these.
“Other than being different and having an ‘older’ aspect, is Visual right for me?” – if this is your question, then the answer is “Of-course”
You see, we belong to the category called primates and this group of God’s creation have been created to process the world visually! The optical nerve has more than 1 million (1000000) nerve fibers while our auditory nerve has only 32000 nerve fibers. If we consider the VAK theory of learning, our learning through oral-verbal-audio language is 25%, our learning through visual-space language is 70% and our learning through kinesthetic is 5%.
“Images are a natural interface for communication” – Adel-Al-Saleh
Look at the babies, toddlers, preschoolers – they all learn visually! Every book produced in that category uses a lot of visuals and interactivity – Why? Simply because that is the natural way of learning! But the sad part is once we help them learn the basics of verbal language (alphabets, numerals and their rules) we wean them out of visual learning and even out of creativity. We even create in them the understanding that ‘being learned’ means a mastery of the verbal language (reading, writing, speaking, counting, memorizing and accounting). A child is graded on his/her ability to master the same through rote. Science, Economics, Mathematics, Arts and literature become facts – which we need to memorize – and then your capacity to store such facts and recollect them is tested. The better your capacity to recollect these facts results in a higher grade and grants you a better standing in society. Einstein for example, could not master this and he ran away from school saying, “No to rote-learning”. Fortunately he could find an institution in Switzerland which believed in using visuals to produce creativity. By wrongly pushing aside the visual learning capacity of our nature, we are depriving our brain of its creativity and doing things the right way! Oh! By the way, the essence of science is making discoveries about patterns in nature through seeing patterns in complex information. And mathematics is the science of patterns (Lynn Arthur Steen)
Howard Gardner says, “Those who naturally gravitate towards a visual approach have often seemed to be in the minority – although they seemed to be part of an especially creative and productive minority”
Isn’t language (the written one with alphabets and numerals) visual?
Not really. By visuals we refer to images, symbols, colors and shapes. The human eye can capture these in a fraction of a second. Remember the ads, remember the photo, remember the movie clip – you do, isn’t it? And that is because they incorporate visual elements.
“Your eyes will send ideas directly to your brain. And this will happen without the distraction of translating what your eyes see into words”
But now a new stream is emerging called as Visual Language. It incorporates images, shapes, symbols, metaphors, ideas and verbal – giving it a wholesome meaning.
By using visual language, one can easily address all three areas of the VAK model of learning (Visual, auditory and kinesthetic) and helps a person to recollect almost 90% of what was seen. And that nearly solves the problem of information-recall. A continuous experience using visual language to learn, think, share, dialogue and produce information will not only enhance one’s creativity but also produce knowledge which could be recalled with ease.
“A picture is worth a 1000 words
A picture with text 10000 words
A picture with text and audio – 1000000 words” – Philippe Kahn
The good news is, slowly Visuals are finding their place in the society, especially in the forbidden realm till now ruled by verbal alone.
The New York stock exchange found they were drowning in lots of data and they needed ways of making sense of it. And they found the power of visuals to clarify the huge complex information. Nowadays they handle complex financial data visually and the benefits of the change are huge. It is said they can track trends, quickly identify any rogue traders, make predictions, analyze various parameters and present needed facts to different audiences.
Some businesses have realized the value, visuals provide and are using it to capture their ideas, plans and conversations and work in collaboration to find solutions. For it is said, that the one who can see the problem clearly is the one most likely to solve it (Dan Roam)
Many visual thinkers from western world have started this change process and slowly it is finding its way in almost all categories of this world – including education.
What are the broad categories of visuals?
- Sketching or Doodling – aids in capture of information and enhances comprehension
- Images or Photographs – powerful real-life visuals; when used relevantly – speak a story of its own
- Moving images or videos – these can explain and give you the wholesome learning
- Information mapping – mind-mapping with visual patterns and processes
- Computer Visualizations – software that uses data to produce maps, illustrations, infographics etc which aid in understanding complex data
What are some of the uses of visuals?
It is used in
- Organizing information according to categories
- Discovering patterns and processes
- Digging out core messages
- Mind-mapping of thoughts and plans
- Explaining complex stuff with clarity and relevance
- Presenting information meaningfully and beautifully
- Predicting along a timeline
- Finding solutions to problems
- Retrieving information by visual recollection
The very word ‘information’ itself is derived from the English ‘enforme’ which has its roots in the French ‘enformer’ which was formed out of the Latin ‘informare’ which simply means, “Give form or shape to an idea”. And what better way to do that, than using visual language!
Visuals are here to stay. They can make a big difference in the way you handle information. To do really creative work, you need to go back to visual approaches once again – So think visually using visual methods and technology.
Ashley Chris Vinil
Bibliography
Information Overload – Guus Pijpers – John Wiley & Sons
Visualization for Information Retrieval – Jin Zhang – Springer
Envisioning Information – Edward Tufte – Graphics Press
Going Visual – Alexis Gerard & Bob Goldstein – John Wiley & Sons
Thinking like Einstein – Thomas West – Prometheus books
Visual Language – Robert Horn – Macro VU
Information Overload
“AYODHYA VERDICT RUNS INTO 8,189 PAGES
The final High Court verdict in the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid runs into an staggering 8,189 pages. The three judges-Sibghat Ullah Khan, Sudhir Agarwal and Dharam Veer Sharma -gave separate judgements in the 60-year-old legal dispute on the ownership of the disputed land in Ayodhya. Justice Agarwal gave the lengthiest judgement that runs into 21 volumes totaling 5,238 pages. Justice Sharma too gave a detailed verdict running into 2,666 pages with separate judgements on four different title suits filed by litigants. The verdict also included five neatly indexed annexures running into 1,566 pages. Justice Khan was comparatively brief with his verdict running into 285 pages (Press Trust of India) “
How many of us went through it all? Are we planning on doing that anytime soon?
Today, information is the keyword that is moving and shaking society. We live in a world where information is everywhere. And I mean everywhere! We are actually in the era of information overload. Tell me one place where you can’t find information – even finding that is information-search!
Just type ‘information’ in Google and you get about 3,300,000,000 results in 0.09 seconds
1 million terabytes of data is generated annually = 100000 X 1024 GB = 10000 X (1024)2 MB
And 99% is in digital form and most of them are complex and dynamic.
The Times newspaper contains more information on a single day than what was accessible to a person in the 17th century!
A manager today accesses 2000 times the amount of information accessed by his counterpart in 1980.
An ‘internet savvy person’ accesses 34GB of information every day
Stunning, isn’t it? Now close your eyes and tell me what all you read above. I said ‘eyes closed’
Were you able to recollect? If yes, then how much percentage did you recollect???
Information is great! It is probably one of the differentiators in companies making profits too. It is exciting, new, gives you even a sense of power – but the biggest problem we have is not of ‘information-availability’ but that of ‘information-recall’.
Today people are almost drowning in information. They are bombarded on all sides by information. Not just any information, but complex information. And though there is so much of information available, many for ‘Free’ over the digital medium called the web, people spend more and more time in search and have less time to analyze the same. They also end up spending more time segregating between what is crucial and what is noise. The main goal of information is to produce knowledge in the recipient. But information overload creates a gap between the volume of information and the conversion to useful knowledge.
Information can be broadly classified into two parts – mental (the content) and material (how it is represented). People usually start the search for content by asking other people (whom they know – maybe trust!), then experts, then the web, then their databases and their storages. Now the ‘other people’ circle has become bigger because of the social networks (facebook, twitter, linkedin etc) and one can get answers direct from people. I remember searching for ‘Gerry Martin’ (who has a farmhouse in Bangalore, which people can visit with children) but could not get an answer from even google! So I went to the social network and got answers from facebook, linkedin and twitter – even from people who got to know about my search from their friends. So why people still top the search list? It is because people alone can share the information with emotion, feeling and add their experience and opinion.
We know that information needs to become knowledge for it to have any use. So the big question is how can you ‘present information’ to a varied group of people, so that they can receive it easily, be able to analyze it and slowly over time convert it into knowledge.
I am not going to deal with the content part of information but the material part. (the way it is represented)
Now, to understand this, we need to travel back in time. To the time when mankind began; when people gathered in groups and shared information through stories. Stories were not just used to share myths, legends and values – but they were the framework for transferring all kinds of information – information that led to creation of identity, uniqueness, culture and ways of living. As communities developed and established identities for themselves, storytelling became the chief method used to transfer information from one person to another, one generation to the next.
Soon this art of storytelling took on the next form: recreation of the story shared using Visuals. The walls of Lascaux, France and many other caves found by archeologists tell us how mankind used visuals, sketches and drawings to communicate information. These were the earliest form of written communication. And they all share stories; stories that were significant enough to be captured on the rock walls. The Aztecs, the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Dravidians and every early civilization then began to customize the visual communication with their own pictograms or hieroglyphics – branding a unique identity to their visual creations. This is identified as visual-verbal language, as it used a combination of visual images, symbols and established alphabets and numerals to communicate.
Then the Semites – Canaanites, Phoenicians, and Israelites created what is known as the first verbal language. This was the first step forward in the birth of documented language.
From then on, it was a race by each civilization to make their dominance over the world and one way was by making their language the authorized medium of communication. They developed alphabets, numerals, rules and guidelines and promoted their use inside their boundaries. Each society began to produce documented manuscripts and scrolls to establish the superiority of their language and to document the stories that made them who they are. Soon a new elite began to emerge – people who were literate (could understand and use the verbal language) and thus began a separation of the visual and verbal ways of communication. And as we know verbal began its dominance and was identified as the language of the intellect, the religion and the state. Then in 1455, Gutenberg invented the printing press and in that very year, 20 people could produce 25000 books and from that moment on, nothing could stand in the way of the verbal language. But as the use of verbal language grew across all sectors, so did their complexity. Scientific communities, legal establishments, religious bodies, financial institutions, educational communities and the like began to script volumes of complex materials – which could only be understood by a certain niche of people. Even the establishments created to teach people, worked keeping the principle of complexity as the vital guideline of intelligence. (Today literacy means adequate knowledge in writing, reading, counting, memorizing and accounting)
Thus we created a world of complex information.
And now we question, “Why is this information not making sense”
then wonder, “Why people don’t understand us”
and ponder, “How to communicate effectively all this information”
So is there a solution? Stay tuned…