According to article on CNN  the  police have found a new way to help keep the public informed.  They post the event on Twitter.  For example in Lakeland, Florida a report of a possible explosive device which was found on top of the roof of a city parking garage came in to the local police department.   The article states that, “public safety officials there sprang into action. They sent out a squad to investigate and they posted a notice on Twitter...” (France, 2009) The use of social networking devises to quickly get information out to the public is being used more and more frequently by law enforcement agencies and emergency services.  Lakeland Police Assistant Chief Bill LePere stated that, “We think the police department has an obligation to get information out to the community through whatever means or mechanisms we have at our disposal.  Traditional media releases, expecting the local print media to pick it up and run it in the newspaper tomorrow, is 24 hours too late.” (France, 2009)  These sites are being used to inform the public of road closings, press releases, Amber alerts, suspect descriptions, etc.  They work similar to interrupting a television show for an emergency bulletin except that the information is distributed even more quickly and does not have to be of such a drastic nature. 

Bruce Frazier, public relations specialist for the Dalton Police Department in Dalton, Georgia, said “the way in which Lakeland police utilized Twitter is exactly what he envisioned when his department started using the site a few weeks ago. His department has a blog and Frazier said he learned the value of being able to keep the public updated quickly in October after a bombing at an area law firm."[The bombing occurred] across the street from an elementary school." (France, 2009) Frazier said, "I was on the scene there pounding away on my PDA trying to send out press releases letting people know what was going on with the evacuation, what they needed to do to pick up their kids. If we had been using something like Twitter, it would have been [faster to get the information out] from my PDA." (France, 2009)

            The article goes on to provide many other examples of how the police have been able to use soical networking sites to relay information such as in Coralville, Iowa a Police Department Community Relations Officer Meleah Droll used twitter to tell those in the area about a bank robbery.  While at this time most “police and fire departments number their followers in the dozens or hundreds, but many said the word can spread quickly when followers "re-tweet" to their friends or post the information from Twitter on their Facebook accounts.”  (France, 2009)

I think that this is very true.  The concept of using Twitter and Facebook as a tool to distribute potentially very serious information is still very new.  While it seems somewhat  foreign, I do not think that it should.  Instead, it is the logical next step. In case of an emergency information should be spread as fast as possible.  As social networking sites continue to grow it seems logical to use them as a means to spread all information including types that are of a more serious nature.  I think that this trend will continue to grow as long as these sites are popular. 

 

France, L. R. (2009, March 13). Police departments keeping public informed on Twitter. Retrieved March 13, 2009, from CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/13/police.social.networking/index.html

"The history of typography is marked by the increasingly sophisticated use of space." Ellen Lupton, Thiking With Type.



    We read "Thinking About Type" by Ellen Lupton this week. Lupton's book fits in nicely with the other thing we've been talking about, most especially Tufte. The book is a quick read, and provide a brief history of typography and a run-down of how the discipline has transformed over the last 20 years.



     Few disciplines are as tied to technological advancements as typography. After all, the very discipline was born just 500 years ago with the advent of movable type. Fast-forward to today and it's easy to imagine how important typography has become to the dissemination of information. Whereas typographers needed to worry only about how type would look on a printed page, they now must consider how it'll look on a computer screen. Lupton explains some of the affordances- and constraints of early computer monitors- and how they influenced the design of type. Early computer monitors of the late 1970s and early 1980s could show many fewer lines of resolutions than their modern-day counterparts could. As a result, typographers were forced to create new types that would show up well on the screen. This technical constraint led to a whole new category of typography which made what was once a limitation into a quirky artistic artifact.

    Typography was once a vocation for the few, but this is no longer so; anyone who puts together information of any type- online or off, should understand at least some fundamental ideas of typography. Typography is really just one element of information architecture, or information design, or whichever term strikes your fancy. Typography is important for anyone presenting information because it is imperative to present information well. There is too much information to sift through to waste people's time with a poor lay-out.

     From typography we move to lay-out. I appreciated Lupton's explanation of the grid. The grid essentially, organizes the layout of particular book, magazine, newspaper, and now, website. The designer must use her time economically and logically. This skill is important to people presenting information online because I believe it is much easier to present information poorly than it is to present it well.

     Lupton shows how the concept of reader/writer have been, until recently, considered separate entities. No more, says Lupton, who points to the work Roland Barthe's concept of text in which all manner of written materials exist together, more as matrix than cohesive unit. Now that we see readers as active interpreters of information and no longer as passive consumers, we must adapt how we present this information. One convention to facilitate this active readership's capacity is to provide them with links for further reading. Some cites have allowed people to comment on things written for the same reason.
 
   Lupton shows how these developments, primarily the wide-spread use of the Web, are rekindling interest in "universal design principles". Instead of a set of design principles for printers, others for web designers, others for artists, others for scientists, and others for architects, Lupton sees designers of all types working together to create something that works, for everyone.