The Visual Representation of Communications in the Postage Stamp Medium
From Networkedchange
Holding page for collaborative writing.
Questions to be considered:
- How is communications portrayed in the medium of stamps broadly
- How self referential are they?
- Role of International Postal Union
- How does this change over time
- When the stamp is no longer the fastest medium of communication how does this change?
- As postage becomes less the medium how do stamps represent this?
Useful Quotes
"All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this (italics) is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings. Poster-ready photographs - the mushroom cloud of an A-bomb test, Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the astronaut walking on the moon - are the visual equivalent of sound bites. They commemorate, in no less blunt fashion than postage stamps, Important Historical Moments; indeed the triumphalist ones (the pictures of the A-bomb excepted) become postage stamps." - Susan Sontag "regarding the Pain of Others"
