Google before you Tweet is the new Think before you speak – LeMasney Consulting
Okay. Where to begin? I got the saying from my good friend @gservo on his tumblog at https://gservo.tumblr.com/#_=_ where he pointed to the original (at least as far as I’m concerned) a repost by artpixie at http://artpixie.tumblr.com/post/395862226/design-is-mine-isnt-it-lovely which was likely found originally at in the glorious letterpress form by Joe Newton. I thought it was lovely, indeed, but I wanted to make my own take on it. I’m counting this as a 365 Request from @gservo even though I’m fairly sure he has no idea that he was involved yet.
So, I typed out each of the words as separate objects in Inkscape, only keeping the fragment “is the new” together, so that I’d have plenty of placement flexibility. I then began to do separate treatments for each piece, trying to evoke some emotion and connotations with color, feel, and size. So, for instance, I treated Google as though I were creating a refreshed logo, adding a web 2.0 candy coating. I gave Tweet a twitter blue glow. I lifted the words off the page with shadows (dark dupes with some blur and distance) and invoked age and a bit of sadness with 70’s colors in the words “think” and “speak”. “before you” in the second phrase got muted, contrary colors. To give the whole design a bit of drama, I added a yellow tinge at the corners with a center gradient.
If I was successful, you get a bit of irony, humor, and perhaps sadness. I wanted the first phrase to almost seem superficial and short lived. I wanted the second phrase to have some direness to it, to seem like an old idea that’s really not.
I also just fell in love with the idea that this statement evokes: that we are changing in the way that we process, store, and deliver intelligence. I heard a recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross on the idea that we are moving towards a time where intelligence is defined not so much by what we can hold in our heads and spit out when called upon to do so, but rather how quickly we can filter and manipulate the google-store of data, the invisible web, and the shallow web (which is how I refer to fleeting social media and data). How we use and interpret metadata, semantic supporting information, and tags will likely become more important than whether we can recall the capitals of all 50 states.
Google before you tweet (and think before you speak).
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SO awesome !!!!
Thanks. I know I’ve told you before but I absolutely love what you’re doing with your photos. Keep it up, and thanks for the inspiration on this one. 😉
So before I decide to tweet something I should not do so until I go to google first to make sure it hasn’t already been tweeted? It’s a neat saying, but I’m a little confused. Nevertheless it looks pretty sweet! You John are the inner workings of the wheels that are constantly churning in this day and age. There is no time to reflect upon the old for the old comes so much faster. Thanks!
I tried to explain it a bit in the description. I don’t believe that you would Google something to determine if it’s been tweeted already, but rather to check your facts, see what’s been said before, and pull from past conclusions before adding something new.
I believe it’s a new take on truth is relative, in that the more informed you are, the more likely your idea is to be newly valuable. In terms of art, for instance, I believe it helps to know what comes before in order to make work that benefits from what came before. I think, for instance, of your encyclopedic knowledge of art and artists and how it informs the work that you do. Google (and other engines) can inform us before we tweet (or status update, or speak) — it goes beyond thinking to consider google (et al.) as an external brain that we tap into.
Great image! May I have permission to use it in a presentation on new digital literacies?
Thanks, Alice! You may, in fact all of these pieces are licensed creative commons attribution share alike, which means that as long as your project attributes me for the work and links back to http://lemasney.com/consulting/ and that people can continue to use the piece freely, you may do with it as you wish. Thanks very much for asking!