Today we were launched on an unsuspecting city on the hunt for Rupert Murdoch. Well, actually we were to look out for ‘mediated information’, and he definitely would have been a good source.

My group tackled Melbourne Central, where the whole place was an advertisement for food and shopping. Literally, as we walked in we were ordered ‘catch a flick’, ‘grab a drink’ and ‘get a bite to eat’ by the very walls of this temple to the consumer.

Walls of the entrance to Melbourne Central

Upon entering there were examples that jumped straight out at us, store titles, giant sale signs, menus, screens displaying ads in front of stores and even hanging from the ceiling. It was once we looked past this that we realised the depth of medias involvement in our environment.idea of mediated information was any information that had been edited or designed to look a certain way in order to perform a function. Eg. fire extinguisher location labels are designed to stick out from their environment in order to be easy to find, and Condition of Entry notices like the one below are designed to be incongruous in order not to detract from the aesthetic look of a shops display windows.

Once I realised the sheer amount of mediated information that saturated this building I started to consider whether everything could be considered some form of media. The posters and billboards and mannequins all advertised their stores, and so did the ceilings apparently.

These ceiling decals led into an ice-cream shop, where the blue theme was continued, drawing the eye into their shop from well out in the hallway. While perhaps low on ‘information’ little things like this are an example of tiny ways media saturates our lives.

I found this experience similar to sound meditation, listening to silence and focussing on hearing the noises that usually escape our notice in everyday life, which was an exercise repeated in John Cage’s famous experiment, 4″33″. Once I had focussed my mind to look past the noise of the obvious I found a myriad of tiny sounds that make up our media landscape. I found myself peering closer at every tiny scrap of text or colour that caught my eye, peering at origami cranes on the ceiling, and wondering if there was anything that wasn’t media.