Month: September 2010

the fine art of coloring

two versions of Edward Munch's Sin

Could a green light signal stop? Could a red light signal continue naturally?  Perhaps, but the colors used for traffic lights seem to have deeper psychological significance than merely a social convention.[1]

From early mass market prints to modern display devices, the details of coloring do not greatly affect the strong human preference for colored images.  Moreover, humans’ electroencephalographic responses to emotionally differentiated pictorial stimuli don’t vary with formal pictorial properties such as color.[2]  Such evidence suggests that color contributes mainly to sensory efficiency, not sensory semantics.[3]

The U.S. National Gallery of Art’s exhibition, Edvard Munch: Master Prints, shows an artist acutely concerned with the emotional significance of color variations.  The exhibition places side-by-side Munch’s multiple variations on a single composition.  Many of these variations involve changes in coloring.  An image in black and white that might be seen as a woman consoling a broken man becomes with some red and yellow coloring a woman biting a man’s neck and sucking out his life (Vampire II, 1895/1896-1902).  The acuteness of a sick child’s suffering seems to vary with the intensity and contrast in red across the composition.  A dramatic change in the coloring shifts a naked woman from repulsive to alluring.  Both images are appropriately entitled Sin and were made in the same year (1902).  An important part of Munch’s art seems to be creating images that not only powerfully express emotion, but also have considerable emotional complexity.  Munch’s iconic Scream isn’t a good representative of his emotional art.

Mundane life is complex only to those who aren’t experiencing it.  Color variations can occur from no more than changes in lighting.  They typically have little significance. Edvard Munch’s art, in contrast, is far from the ordinary. See Edvard Munch: Master Prints, now at the National Gallery of Art.

Edvard Munch: Master Prints is at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, from July 31 through October 31, 2010.

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Notes:

[1] I was told that in a certain country, everyone runs red lights.  So drivers stop at green lights to make sure than no one is coming through the red.

[2] See Junghöfer, M., Bradley, M. M., Elbert, T. R. and Lang, P. J. (2001), Fleeting images: A new look at early emotion discrimination. Psychophysiology, 38: 175–178. doi: 10.1111/1469-8986.3820175

[3] Being color-blind affects how one interacts with the world much less than does being blind.

Image credits:

Edvard Munch; Sin, 1902; lithograph in black on heavy polished white wove paper; The Epstein Family Collection; © Copyright Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2009

Edvard Munch; Sin, 1902; color lithograph, from two stones in red and beige with blue applied à la poupée on very thin Japanese tissue; The Epstein Family Collection; © Copyright Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2009

the moment you need yellow pages

distribution of yellowbook through on-street box

Yellowbook, a Yellow Pages telephone directory, is now being offered in Arlington, Virginia, through on-street print distribution boxes.   The boxes offer the 2010 yellowbook that was distributed to area apartments about nine months ago.  At least in one apartment complex, most of those books were not picked up.  The books in the boxes weigh 3.1 pounds each.  The prospects for them being picked up on the street and carried home seems worse. But perhaps when the books are placed on the street they are counted as “distributed.”

Yellowbook join a wide array of publications offered through on-street print distribution boxes.  Most of the publications, such as the Apartment Guide and Rentals publications with which yellowbook shares a box, are not large or noteworthy businesses.  Among them, the Washington Post grasps for respect by securing its box to a pole with a thin metal wire.  The other boxes are unsecured.

Total U.S. Yellow Pages revenue in 2007 was $14.3 billion.   The collapse of this business isn’t pretty.

mapping average Internet download speeds in U.S.

Akamai’s publicly filed dataset of observed average Internet download speeds for U.S. network connections is now on Needle.  Needle makes it easy to map the reported cities and states according to an average speed threshold.  For example, 79 out of the 500 reported cities have average Internet download speed less 2048 kbit/s.  Here’s a map of states that contain those cities.  The map shows that relatively low average Internet download speeds by city are widely dispersed geographically.

To generate a map for an average speed threshold of your own choosing, click on “city” under “every” on the left of the Needle page.  Then click on “>>” on the table heading, just to the right of “every city.” Then click on “keep only those where…”, and then click on “ave speed.”  Ave speed jumps to the top of the list and a drop-down selection box appears. Select “is less than,” and enter a figure (kbit/s) in the box to the right. Then click on next.  The screen will change slightly to reflect your choice, and a “done” button will appear.  Click on the “done” button. You’ll then see a list of the relevant cites.  On the upper right, change the drop-down selector from “table” to “map.”  You’ll then see a map with markers for states that contain cities that satisfy your selection criterion.  If you change the “group by” drop-down selector from “state” to “city,” the map will change to include markers for each city that satisfies your selection criterion.  You can similarly map state average speeds by clicking on “state” rather than “city” in the first step.  To change your selection criterion, you must start by clicking on “city” or “state” on the left and redo the steps above.

Related post: dispersion of Internet download speeds

whither telephone companies?

trees made horizontal

Telephone companies face serious business problems. Broadband Internet connectivity can support telephone service as just one app among many apps. For example, Google voice is just one feature among the many that Gmail offers. Texting is already competing with telephoning, and video communicating is likely also to do so in the future.  Providing network connectivity squeezes the telephone business from below, and a multitude of new communications apps squeezes telephone service from above.  Vertical disintegration of the telephone business seems inevitable. Yet vertically disintegrated communications services may fall far short of generating as much revenue as did the historical telephone business.

Martin Geddes, a thought leader on telephone company business transformation, believes that telephone companies’ future is in serving enterprises’ commerce with customers.  He calls this business framework “connect-interact-transact.”[*] In place of traditional media for companies’ advertising,  companies can reach out to connect directly with customers through their own custom-generated content.  Companies’ relations with their customers can become more ongoing and more interactive, and customer-relation management now includes managing relations among customers, i.e. distribution of information and recommendations across social networks.  Communications services like those built into PayPal and Amazon OneClick can contribute significantly to enabling and facilitating purchases. Offering enterprises advantageous trans-organizational communications networks  is a promising future that Geddes sees for telephone companies.

That future makes telephone companies into new media companies.  Corporate advertising dollars have funded traditional media’s mass-market distribution networks.  Those print and television networks lack the cost advantages and capabilities of Internet-based networks. Telephone companies as new media companies would have a business position similar to that of traditional newspaper companies and television networks, but with a better cost structure, greater technological capabilities, and a wider array of business services.

Peter Csathy, Sorenson Media CEO, offers a similar view on the video business.  He argues that video monetization through ads, download sales, and subscriptions is only a small part of a much bigger business field:

While certainly important for media companies and other content providers, that narrow definition of video monetization has little to no resonance with the other 95 percent of businesses online who can benefit in a big way by harnessing the unique power of video to better monetize their businesses themselves — that is, by using quality video to better market their goods and services, engage with customers and potential customers, train their staffs, share best-practices and maximize overall revenues.

The development of the Internet has unleashed wide-ranging business warfare.  In these circumstances, selling communications weapons to all sides seems like a propitious business strategy.

Media businesses involve considerable political engagement and significant political exposure.  For example, telephone companies that market business communications advantages need to avoid net-neutrality blow-ups.  From the personal vanity of business leaders in boardroom strategizing to the intensely mediated theater of national politics, media businesses involve much more than calculations of business profits.  Media businesses can be highly lucrative, but also politically complicated.

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[*]  See also Martin Geddes, “Connect, Interact, Transact: a paradigm shift in the business model of communications service providers” (Aug. 2010), available from Geddes.