Attempts to Streamline World Languages

In 1973, Irish (Gaeilge) was accorded “treaty language” status by the European Union with the advantage that the founding treaty was restated in Irish. Irish (Gaeilge) was declared one of the authentic languages with which to correspond with EU institutions. However, despite being the first official language of Ireland, including its minority-language status in Northern Ireland, Irish was not made an official working language of the EU until January 1, 2007, which means that until then legislation approved by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers was not translated into Irish. Because there are only 538,500 citizens who use Irish on a daily basis (of a maximum of 1,660,000 speakers in a population of 4,240,000), there is the fear that the EU will see the requirement for Irish as too cumbersome and expensive, and favor the Anglicization of its communication with Ireland. Even though one easily thinks that after achieving Irish independence, the number of citizens speaking Irish would have increased, today’s facts show a serious decline, with possible reasons due to the state’s pressure on upon Irish-speakers to use English, the primary language of education and employment. The December 2006 government announcement of a 20-year plan to help Ireland become a fully bilingual country, encouraging the use of Irish language in daily life, does not assure staving the decline or endangerment of disappearing.

Supposedly, when Bill Gates launched Microsoft’s Encarta World Dictionary in 1993, using his “one world, one dictionary” slogan, he was considered a representative of an evil totalitarian empire, because in his Internationalist attempt to streamline world languages, he ran afoul immediately with the Irish culture, in which many scholars had observed the serious decline of their root languages and the erosion of Irish language, which was slowly giving in to the control of English. They argued that the Belfast Agreement recognized that all languages indigenous to Ireland are part of the cultural wealth of the nation, and will continue to be central to the social development of the Republic and Northern Ireland. They worked diligently to rebuild the Irish language from the ground up. They hoped that mankind never would descend into the abyss of making a uniform world. “One world, one language” seemed just a generation away, and Gates was blamed for a false totalitarian, culture negating ideal. One mind, one world, one word dictionary, was considered by many was just as a retailing gimmick. But it loomed heavily of Irish cultural survival. Under great pressure, and sharp rejection, Microsoft developed an Irish language version, and publicized its accomplishment: “At Microsoft, we believe that people and their communities around the world are more likely to benefit from technology when it is available in their native language. This commitment is shared at Microsoft Ireland where we have developed Irish language versions of our popular Windows and Office products.”

Linguists K. David Harrison, Swarthmore College, states that some 7,000 distinct languages are spoken in the world today, and one of them dies about every two weeks. This rate of language extinction far exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish or plants and that language loss often parallels loss of biological species. More than half of the world’s human languages have no written form, therefore, he warns, when the last speaker of many of these languages vanishes, the language will be lost because there are no dictionaries, no literature, no text of any kind. Losing languages translates directly into losing knowledge. Most of what humans know about the world is encoded in oral languages. With their loss simultaneously centuries of human thinking and knowledge are also lost.

Sociolinguistics

All linguistic systems, including “visual language”, innately respond to behavioral, social, and cultural needs of a group; supporting the person’s self identity, that of groups, and signaling clearly to others their territorial status and position in perceived hierarchies. In “visual language” as in “sociolinguistics”, each segment of its taxonomy is organized to accommodate high and low, casual and formal aspects of a language. Designers need not to agree or even like these facts, all “living” languages here are constant and dynamic shifts, but they need to understand and appreciate the cultural and social contexts. If citizens need to understand and appreciate the complexity of the world in the process of globalization, they need to become tolerant but not necessarily share same experiences.

A contemporary sociolinguistic view of “visual language” would not exclude any visual statement, but would rather place it clearly into a functional taxonomy in which it is not pitted against all odds with everything, but placed into an analysis within its appropriate context.

For an example, one may or may not find the Hallmark greeting card of high artistic value or of great design merit. But the outsider’s or the elite communication designer’s opinion does not really matter. If the Hallmark card is a well functioning device in daily life that helps individuals negotiate their everyday social contracts, and if the culture agrees that greeting cards are useful communications devices with strong predictable social ramifications then greeting cards have social and cultural standing. The analyses of their merit by art or design critics may be interesting but are totally irrelevant. Today’s sociology tries to look at things as they are rather than how they are fitted into a power hierarchy.

Any monolithic “visual language” (or in fact any temporally dominating design style) depends on a great degree of isolation that is artificially introduced and cultivated as for example Hitler’s banishment of modern expressive art “degenerated art”, which did not stop the evolution of Expressionism, but gave room for a short period of time to a very stilted German fascist iconography that infiltrated all homes, even in some cases the homes of the artistic and intellectual elite.

Ideally, most citizens would prefer a socially desirable segregation between the strata of the power community and the rest of the public, looking to find or construct their own rationales for forming their identities as part of communities. But the reality is that all clans, tribes, and communities strive to define their identities and values for all through the indigenous architecture, the specific holdings and collections of museums, which are clear indications of a community’s values. Because the social codes for all cultures are defined by an elite (academic intelligentsia, embedded in journalism, publishing, education, rhetoric of church, government, and commerce) and accepted by a majority, individuals select from them, to underscore the philosophical gestalt that supports their representational identity to others in a relentless dynamic competition for status and hierarchical standing (economic class, education, professional standing, and imposed or self-imposed caste, sub-culture, and interest community).

If “sociolinguistics” offers opportunities to isolate linguistic features from the complex system of linguistic forms and opportunities to form discourse that indicate the close or distant social relationships of speaker to audience or that are used in particular formal or informal situations in which communication is taking place organically or that mark the significant elements of the situation (gravity, triviality, insignificance, etc.), then “visual communication” would find the equivalent of complexity in the visually linguistic paradigm of art and design. In modern rhetorical theory, many decades before the arts, the value of a literary contribution moved from author to the specificity of narratives and the preparedness or receptivity of audiences. A new value emerged contained in the chemistry of a synthesized experience, energized by the social material and cultural baggage that an audience brings to it. Linguists knew early that all perceptions of truths are flexible from well informed to erroneously constructed. Perceptions are sturdy, can withstand enormous assault, as any national election will bear out. They are what they are. They can be altered over time, but not instantaneously. For that the information has to be culturally relevant.

The Governance Through Metaphor Project

The Union of International Associations, Brussels, Belgium, is a century old, non-profit research organization investigating the use of metaphor as a tool to further the possibilities for a sustainable global civil society, promoting and facilitating understanding of representations of valid interests in all human activities: philosophical, religious, ideological beliefs, and scientific, artistic and trade-related activities, in response to world problems. Since the 1980s the association has been exploring the role of metaphor in relation to governance, understanding world problems, and the articulation of more appropriate and transformative organizational strategies.

Even though metaphors are a natural form of presentation in many cultures, the information gleaned from of “Governance Through Metaphor Project” points to many cultural constraints inherent in each language, social and cultural communication processes (verbal/written), and certain characteristics embedded in some languages that facilitate or hinder comprehension and are not easily overcome. In addition, there exists the dilemma of many possible views concerning the nature of sustainable human development. Prior, the use of metaphor as a vital ingredient in global negotiations has not been systematically and deliberately explored to overcome fundamental weaknesses.

The Visual Metaphor in Global Use

In its political eagerness to control, visual communication design is very proud of having persuaded institution to eliminate illustration programs all together. Before design became so powerful, a general education would celebrate the metaphoric contributions by Francisco de Goya or Leonard Baskin. Artists like Ben Shahn and Saul Steinberg were always part of the cultural discussion, and so was the work by David Stone Martin, the Einsels, Austin Briggs, Al Parker, the Provinsons, Bob Peak, Franklin McMahon, Bernie Fuchs, Fred Otnes, Tomi Ungerer, Gary Kelley, Ronald Searle, André Francois, Ralph Steadman, Edward Gorey, Geoffrey Moss, and Brad Holland. David Stone Martin was known for capturing the rhythmic energies of jazz, Ben Shahn for social and political reporting, and Saul Steinberg as an insightful cultural observer and literate critic. Ronald Searle and André Francois were contributing with great humor and cultural wisdom, and Tomi Ungerer as satirical social observer, while Geoffrey Moss, Brad Holland, and Ralph Steadman still exploit visual opportunities by inventing smart, surreal and sardonic editorial and political statements. These illustrators are known for their ability to invent provocative communication metaphors.

Designers have lost their ability and technical skills to originate images, and have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. They maybe now excellent typographers in relationship to times before type generating software came into existence, but now that everybody knows the styling codes for type, they stand exposed as incompetent visual communicators, having lost the important skill of developing visual metaphor. They have relinquished this territory totally to photographers.

A look at any annual, which supposedly presents the best and successful of visual communication projects, shows redundancy, repetition, predictability, and flatness of design metaphors. For example: the catalogue for the contributions of the most prominent American designers to a poster exhibition, commemorating the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be organized into very few categories of visual contents, signaling a dearth of metaphor development.

Poster design in Poland, especially the work by Roman Cieslewicz, Jerzy Czerniawski, Mieczyslaw Gorowski, Franciszek Starowieyski, and Leszek Wisniewski, is a good example for a rich and metaphor-laden visual language. In film one can test the contribution and collaboration of sound and movable images that support the narrative. In good films, both sound and film tracks usually can stand independently to make sense. Not so in visual communication design. In removing the type message, the images make little sense. There is visual silence, induced by visual one-liners.

The Lack of Preparedness of Audiences and Visual Communicators

a
US Census Aggregate of Diminishing Returns:

In the US, can 0.053 percent of 300 million Americans provide the intercultural visual literacy?

It is close to impossible to establish an accurate gauge for measuring the competences in visual literacy, since aesthetics are defined by professional dogma, traditional philosophies or emerging worldviews. Also the data is void of educational levels or intellectual capabilities. Design practitioners come from all walks of education; many are autodidacts, hold vocational certificates for having attended workshops, vocational courses that may or may not have introduced the complex subjects of visual literacy or hold degrees from two-year, four-year, and graduate design programs of high, medium or low standing.

Graphic designers held about 261,000 jobs in 2006. Most graphic designers worked in specialized design services; advertising and related services; printing and related support activities; or newspaper, periodical, book, and directory publishers. Other designers produced computer graphics for computer systems design firms or motion picture production firms. A small number of designers also worked in engineering services or for management, scientific, and technical consulting firms. About 25 percent of designers were self-employed. Many did freelance work – full time or part time – in addition to holding a salaried job in design or in another occupation.

Artists held about 218,000 jobs in 2006. About 62 percent were self-employed. Employment was distributed as follows:

87,000 multimedia artists and animators

78,000 art directors

30,000 fine artists, including painters, sculptors and illustrators

8,800 craft artists

14,000 artists and related workers, all other

Of the artists who were not self-employed, many worked for advertising and related services; newspaper, periodical, book, and software publishers; motion picture and video industries; specialized design services; and computer systems design and related services. Some self-employed artists offered their services to advertising agencies, design firms, publishing houses, and other businesses.

Out of 300 million American Citizens:

Visual Communication Designers
261,000 (0.087%), Aggregate
87,000 (0.029%), High Visual Literacy
87,000 to 174,000 (0.029% to 0.058%), Medium to Low Visual Literacy

Artists
218,000 (0.072%), Total Aggregate
72,667 (0.024%), High Visual Literacy
72,667 to 144,334 (0.024% to 0.048%), Medium to Low Visual Literacy

Designers/Artists
479,000 (0.159%), Total Aggregate
159,666 (0.053%), High Visual Literacy
156,66 to 319,332 (0.053% to 0,116%), Medium to Low Visual Literacy

Only approximately 0.053% of artists and designers are well educated to claim to be visually literate, and that only if they graduated at the top of their art school and liberal arts classes and seriously apply what they learned as privileged artists, designers, architects, art historians, in their field of practice. What about the rest?

b
The Public: The Audiences

General Education: Text and Verbal Discourse

Throughout the years of a young person’s maturing in western worlds, including for those who enter and complete a university education, unless they specialize in areas in which the visual literacy of images or body stance, and gesture play a role, great emphasis is given to the cognitive ability to recognize letters in written text and to process them with great efficiency, as well as to understand the language conventions like the idioms, flow and adhesion to grammar, and colloquial expressions which socialize the language culture in which the text has been developed.

In their educational development, roughly over twelve years, nearly all pupils in the western world develop from a very early age the ability to distinguish between letterforms of the alphabet, recognize the physical differences of various fonts, understand the language in which the text is prepared, and translate the text into spoken language, even if voiced silently in the reading process. Over the centuries, reading education has progressed from learning merely the code to meaning-based comprehension and retention. Reading education is supported in great depth by the disciplines of psychology, rhetorical theory, logic, and very strongly monitored language conventions. In academe, there is not a student in any of the disciplines who could survive without excellent verbal and written language skills.

General Education: Visual Language/Visual Literacy

If one compares text-based with image-based education, visual education falls far short. Although Edward T. Hall claimed that almost three quarters of human communication is mediated through the signals generated by the anatomical and mediated by the optical human apparatus, interpreted through psychological, sociological, and cultural behavior, it is perplexing that the educational systems have given short shrift to learning and understanding the visual. In the very early kindergarten years there seems to be enough curricular space for examining and experimenting with some aspects of visual literacy. In the following years the education for understanding the function of visual communication collapses totally, with some isolated experiences in art history, and some courses for students preparing to enter the various visual arts. Frequently, students graduating from high school do not have the basic skills of reading diagrams, maps, and elevation drawings. There are no courses in which painted, printed, or photographed images are examined for reading and interpreting the contents and to frame possible contexts.

c
Specialist Education

Vocational and Professional Education: Visual Language/Visual Literacy

On university levels, visual literacy is taught in great depths mostly through psychology, sociology, and occasionally through literature, linguistics, and art history, and one would think in art and design education. It is more than shocking to find how few curriculum components are dedicated to understanding human communication or the psychological and sociological aspects of visual communication. Instead art and design education focus primarily on understanding a universal styling code, namely the formal principles of image making. Even if all principles are comprehended and applied to their fullest potentials, there is no assurance that what artists and designers produce can be easily understood by members of even a same culture, unless they are privy to the code and various dogmas and rules of styling.

The multitude of misinterpretations increases exponentially with the distance of experience of a different culture. Taking one of the more benign texts, Donis A. Dondis “A Primer of Visual Literacy”, one finds lists, like “Primitive Techniques”: exaggeration, spontaneity, activeness, simplicity, distortion, flatness, irregularity, roundness, colorfulness; or “Expressionistic Techniques”: exaggeration, spontaneity, activeness, complexity, roundness, boldness, variation, distortion, irregularity, juxtaposition, and verticality; or “Functional Techniques”: simplicity, symmetry, angularity, predictability, consistency, sequentiality, unity, repetition, economy, subtlety, flatness, regularity, sharpness, monochromaticity, mechanicality. Even the discussion of perception and visual communication provides a limited list of environmental elements: line, color, shape, direction, texture, scale, dimension, and motion. It becomes quickly obvious that what is taught still today is deeply rooted in the one hundred year old legacy of “form making” and “international styling”. Art and design education take the audience for granted and think of the communication process as something that is easily understood. The audience has to learn the code; the artist/designer dictates the code. When it comes to “globalization”, supposedly a intra-cultural and not colonial communication process, practitioners are not well served with their preparation.

Affect Control Theory

The communication diagram (information, encoding, sending, receiving, decoding) that designers took from thermal dynamics allowed them to concentrate on visual encoding, but also made them neglect feelings and emotions set into motion by the response to communication. Neil J. MacKinnon, University of Guelph, Canada, suggests that communication design is a construction of socially bound interactions via symbolic means, namely as symbolic interaction and a construction of cognitive and affective processes. He offers a methodology in “Affect Control Theory” for empirical research and, most importantly for communication designers, a computational model for simulating social interaction as, for example, between a viewer/user and inanimate objects or people of diverse cultures. This theory opens a door to a perspective in social psychology, both conceptually and operationally, as an aid for communication designers, but leaves it open to them to make the relevant connections and inferential leaps in their applications of the theory in their work. In regard to affect (emotion), “Affect Control Theory: distinguishes between the global affects of cultural sentiments, transient feelings, and deflection, on the one hand, and the specific emotions (happiness, sadness, and so on), on the other. Derivations from the empirically-based attribution equations of the theory reveal that the specific emotions are a consequence of two factors: the amount of affective deflection produced by events; and the extent to which events confirm or disconfirm the situational identities of participants. Affect Control Theory proposes that: Individuals conduct themselves so as to generate feelings appropriate to the situation; that those individuals who can’t maintain appropriate feelings through actions change their views of the situation; and the individuals’ emotions signal the relationship between their experiences and their definitions of situations.

The Needs for Reexamining Communication Design

Considering that approximately one hundred years of design pedagogy, practice, and research have transpired, one has to come to the conclusion, that the enormously constricted education and preparation of communication designers today must be drastically overhauled or reconstructed from scratch to accomplish the required tasks that need to be faced if intercultural communication is to succeed. One can easily claim that educational institutions, even the elite ones, have become irresponsible, and are doing little to shore up the needs of a profession that will have to expand regional/national knowledge to effective global knowledge.

The basic four-year education that supports the greater majority of designers for a lifetime, with only few moving on to advanced education, is just not professional robust enough to support “global communication”. At this point visual language/literacy has been so compressed in favor of education in technical aspects of software applications and the business practices of accounting, project management, and office procedures. Meanwhile, institutions have fallen short in education and research of visual language/literacy and concepts of communication. In many communication design programs, the title is reference only to seriously missing communication components. At least in some the visual communication aspects are filtered through semiotics, and even that analytical aspect is just too removed from intercultural visual communication. Today’s modernists, mostly designers outside of advertising, persons steeped in Bauhaus, Ulm, and Basel traditions still believe that audiences can be treated as generic. They believe in evolving efficient problem resolutions in which one solution fits all social and ethnic groups, even though the digital tools stand ready to facilitate sensitive and individual culturally tailor-made solutions.

When design education began to form at Black Mountain, Harvard, Princeton, Yale or Chicago it was successfully grafted on a healthy intellectual ivy-league tradition, rooted in a broad liberal arts education, at that time available for mature students, and more deep and extensive than could be found at any other institutions. These important liberal arts components have been now ridiculed by technologists like Nicholas Negroponte as totally unnecessary in an attempt to support business education for a quicker development of the economy, which can be interpreted as a disregard for how cultures form, create their values and beliefs, and interact with each other.

Liberal arts education is under siege from a market-oriented conservative government. Liberal education is perceived as one in which learning is pursued for the sake of dilettantism, even if it is based on the idea that intellectual breadth prepares persons as enlightened citizens for broader decision making. However, the dissemination of liberal arts requires a learned community of scholars, not only narrow, pragmatic specialists, who are not worried about job-placement or the relevance of their work to government, industry, and commerce, but focus their efforts on the survival of cultures and the positive interrelationships between them. Each culture demands this. It cannot be considered unnecessary and dilettantish for artists to develop abilities to read and critically think, and for practitioners in science, engineering, and business to understand, and critically interpret the cultural symbols embedded in communication images and aspects of visual literacy in other cultures.

The Boston Globe reported, November 6, 2004, that technologist Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab at MIT, stood at the far end of the spectrum at a Dartmouth College conference on the state of “Liberal Education: Dead or Alive?” in relationship to contemporary education, when he offered a radical solution to the problem of liberal education: “Get over it.” He suggested one stop using the phrase, asking, “What the hell does this mean?” A university’s job, said Negroponte, is to “promote creativity.” Traditional academics delude themselves when they say that they must be cut off from practical fields like engineering and the business world to do the best work. Corporations come to places like MIT’s Media Lab to encourage “high risk” work, and that’s where universities have the potential to make real breakthroughs. While Negroponte argued in a positive way that all universities should abolish traditional departments, group scholars together, and require collaboration, as well as encourage industry relations, he missed the point that communication is not one-directional dictation, or that it can be learned quickly from a manual when needed, but a lifetime immersion in one’s own culture for understanding or collaborating with others. The fact that corporations may come about when the effectiveness of western power communication wanes and a more sensitive is urgently needed is not assuring. Visual communication programs must prepare much more diligently for the coming events. They must see their pivotal roles of bridging between cultures, and contents, and context. In this configuration business is contents and context and technology, either tool or product.

There are very promising but still underutilized potentials in the application of intellectual applications offered by modern technology. The benefits lie specifically in the speed in which massive amounts of newly incoming and finely nuanced data can be entered, correlated, and filtered through many culture-sustaining models. Shaping the dynamic cultural identity and not a static characteristics of a culture, one will not have to listen any longer to erroneous statements, like in the sixties, that the drinking water in Paris was undrinkable and polluted, based on isolated and erroneous information from nineteenth century worlds fairs or post First World-War experiences. Even today, sometimes the print publications for geographic contents frequently seem to lag behind, and render a world that has long gone by and stages far removed from a contemporary political, social or economic reality. Only the maturing digital technology has the ability to shift obsessions with European and western homogeneous design to heterogeneously diverse cultural qualities. If there are no longer general audiences, but audiences, that in their extremes, are potentially made up of completely differing individuals, and therefore reflect much more nuanced communication needs in relationship to varied gradations of social, cultural, political or economic convictions.

The Need for a New Definition

In the years of its evolution, “visual communication design” has been comfortable in being pressed into the single role of processing aesthetics through form (abstract/concrete styling of symbolic form), image (objective/nonobjective imaging of objects and environments of objects), text (transforming verbal narratives into typographic from), and time (two-dimensional/time-based forms of narratives, images, and icons). Until recently the designer’s role in generating contents was passive. The client or writer provided the intellectual material for the contents and the directives for the goals, and while marketers or indigenous wisdom defined the context. This is still much too often the case, leaving design to function as the beautification hands of the client. It is time to define “visual communication design” again to put into a more responsible role, one that would push all academic institutions that presently offer visual design programs, from vocational training to proper professional preparation because of the great shift to disciplines of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.

Since the sixties the field has had the opportunity to increase its role beyond pure aesthetic visualization and to include all critical processes for understanding behavioral, social, and cultural communication, however, neither the majority of design practice or pedagogy has followed suit. In global communication, the sole purpose is to lose as little in translation as possible and stem against cultural clashes and grave misunderstandings. The traditional responsibilities of explicating information accurately or revitalizing, updating, and refurbishing dormant information does not have to be abandoned. Education of visual communication design must move from inane and frivolous entertainment to generating responsible contents anchored in well understood cultural contexts. In globalization, anything that is not culturally useful is wasteful, because no matter how beautiful a solution, without responsible contents in relationship to a specific cultural context, it is without consequence.

Most schools teach communication design under a business and commercial umbrella, which limits its potential drastically. In reality, communication design is one of the few authoring processes (absorbing data, forming information, forming opinions, embed the new information in appropriate verbal/visual narratives), next to the preparation of poetic narratives, novels, reports, documentaries, films, music and plays. Now, that still and moving images can be manipulated with the same hardware-tools, that also can design sound and choreography, text, and three-dimensional form, it makes sense to expand the role of communication design into authorship for any of the vital cultural areas.

If the critical thinking model is expanded, then every course in visual communication design has the potential to function, in addition to its traditional technical and aesthetic training of “visual literacy” skills, and design history, as an exploration, framing, and presentation process of any social and cultural subject matter. The purpose then is to allow undergraduate students to explore sociological and cultural subject matter of importance, like international political and philosophical collisions, problems of famine, self-rule, population explosion and population control, as well as some issues that will touch them in their lives, gender politics and their ramification, minority rights, among many possibilities. Graduate education is then able to refine and accelerate understanding of inter-cultural communication. In this content-laden process, students could become social reporters as well as cultural analysts and look at the rules of art endorsed by the mega-institution and the vigorous practice by fringe groups in the diaspora. Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator made this clear some decades ago: “If the present aspirations of young people do not go any further than to be important, or be well published or financed, then schools could give in to that narrow demand or they could rise to the occasion and give them something which lets them aspire to something more far reaching.”

What could be more far reaching, but coming to a sober understanding of the major trends, problems, and concerns of globalization:

Attention to traditional and emerging industries and the progressively acceleration of industrialization and commerce; loss of agricultural and indigenous industries, and traditional industrial production, etc.; preparation for the dawn of new knowledge-based industries; positively intervening with re-engineering and outsourcing; inventing alternatives. Stemming the loss of identity; halting the endangerment of indigenous cultures; fortifying against the loss of languages, customs, lore, etc.; stabilization family and community: job scarcity, transportation, resources, etc.). Staving off worldwide, looming malnutrition; preparing for the anticipated rapid population growth (stress on social services: medicine, food, food distribution systems, transportation, etc. Stopping the depletion of nonrenewable resources (shift to sustainable industries); reducing the pressure on the deteriorating environment (fauna, flora, etc.)

These issues will not wait for next generations. It is unconscionable for institutions to delay a new tack for visual communication design, so not to find the environment depleted, cultures, languages, and customs ransacked. One thing is already crystal clear, all world citizens have the desire to survive with dignity, and to be supported by the language they are accustomed to speak to be able to express themselves through their customs and rituals. It is also clear all cultural citizens will resent when their way of life, their values and customs are being challenged and endangered, especially by another culture. Therefore, cultural alertness and social sensitivity is needed to avoid fight and flight.

 

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HYPERLINK “http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Douglas%20R.%20Hofstadter”Douglas R.
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accessed September 26, 2008.

Bureau of Labor Statistics,
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