Photography, film, and television have changed the world more
than Gutenberg's printing press. Much of the blame for the
decline in literacy is attributed to them, especially to movies
and television. More recently, computer games and the Internet
have been added to the list of culprits. Studies have been
conducted all over the world with the aim of discovering how
film and television have changed established reading habits,
writing ability, and the use and interpretation of language.
Patterns of publishing and distribution of information,
including electronic publication and the World Wide Web (still
in its infancy), have also been analyzed on a comparative basis.
Inferences have been drawn concerning the influence of various
types of images on what is printed and why, as well as on how
writing (fiction, science, trade books, manuals, poetry, drama,
even correspondence) has changed.
In some countries, almost every home has a television set; in
others even more than one. In 1995, the number of computers sold
surpassed that of television sets. In many countries, most
children watch television and films before they learn to read. In
a few countries, children play computer games before ever
opening a book. After they start to read, the amount of time
spent in front of a TV set is far greater than the time
dedicated to books. Adults, already the fourth and fifth
generations of television viewers, are even more inclined to
images. Some images are of their choice-TV programs at home,
movies in the theater, videotapes they buy, rent, or borrow from
the library, CD-ROMs. Other images are imposed on the adult
generations by demands connected to their professions, their
health, their hobbies, and by advertisement. After
image-recording and playing equipment became widely available,
the focus on TV and video expanded. In addition to the ability
to bring home films of one's choice, to buy and rent videotapes,
laser discs, and CD-ROMs on a variety of subjects, we are also
able to produce a video archive for family, school, community,
or professional purposes. We can even avail ourselves of cable
TV to generate programs of local interest. The generalized
system of networking (cable, satellites, airwaves), through which
images can be pumped from practically any location into schools,
homes, offices, and libraries, affects even further the relation
of children and adults among themselves and the relation of both
groups to language and to literacy in contemporary life. Anyone
with access to the printing presses of the digital world can
print a CD-ROM. Access to the Internet is no more expensive than
a magazine subscription. But the Internet is much more exciting
because we are not only at the receiving end.
The subject, as almost all have perceived and analyzed it, is not
the impact of visual technology and computers on reading
patterns, or the influence of new media on how people write. At
the core of the development described so far is the fundamental
shift from one dominant sign system, called language, and its
reified form, called literacy, to several sign systems, among
which the visual plays a dominant role. We would certainly fail
to understand what is happening, what the long-lasting
consequences of the changes we face are, and what the best course
of action is, if we were to look only at the influence of
technology. Understanding the degree of necessity of the
technology in the first place is where the focus should be. The
obsession with symptoms, characteristic of industrial
pragmatics, is not limited to mechanics' shops and doctors'
offices.
New practical experiences within the scale of humankind that
result in the need for alternatives to language confirm that the
focus cannot be on television and computer screens, nor on
advertisement, electronic photography, and laser discs. The issue
is not CD-ROM, digital video, Internet and the World Wide Web,
but the need to cope with complexity. And the goal is to achieve
higher levels of efficiency corresponding to the needs and
expectations of the global scale that humankind has reached.
So far, very few of those who study the matter have resisted the
temptation to fasten blame on television watching or on the
intimidating intrusion of electronic and digital contraptions
for the decline of literacy. It is easier to count the hours
children spend watching TV-an average of 16,000 hours in
comparison to 13,000 hours for study before graduation from high
school-than to see why such patterns occur. And it is as easy to
conclude that by the time these children can be served alcohol in
a restaurant or buy it in stores, they will have seen well over
a million commercials. Yet no one ever acknowledges new
structures of work and communication, even less the
unprecedented wealth of forms of human interaction, regardless of
how shallow they are. That particular ways of working and living
have for all practical purposes disappeared, is easily
understood. Understanding why requires the will to take a fresh
look at necessary developments.
Some of today's visual sign systems originate in the civilization
of literacy: advertisement, theatrical and para-theatrical
performance, and television drama. They carry with them
efficiency expectations typical of the Machine Age. Other visual
sign systems transcend the limits of literacy: concrete poetry,
happening, animation, performance games that lead to interactive
video, hypermedia or interactive multimedia, virtual reality,
and global networks. Within such experiences, a different
dynamics and a focus on distinctions, instead of on
homogeneity, are embedded. Most of these experiences originate
in the practical requirement to extend the human being's
experiential horizon, and the need to keep pace with the dynamics
of global economy.
How many words in a look?
In a newspaper industry journal (Printers' Ink, 1921), Fred R.
Barnard launched what would become over time a powerful slogan:
"One look is worth a thousand words." To make his remark sound
more convincing, he later reformulated it as "One picture is
worth a thousand words," and called it a proverb from China. Few
slogans were repeated and paraphrased more than this one.
Barnard wanted to draw people's attention to the power of
images. It took some years until the new underlying structure of
our continuous practical self-constitution confirmed an
observation made slightly ahead of its time. It should be added
that, through the millennia, craftsmen and the forerunners of
engineering used images to design artifacts and tools, and to
plan and build cities, monuments, and bridges. They realized
through their own experience how powerful images could be,
although they did not compare them to words.
Images are more concrete than words. The concreteness of the
visual makes images inappropriate for describing other images.
However, it does not prevent human beings from associating
images with the most abstract concepts they develop in the
course of their practical or theoretical experience. Words start
by being relatively close to what they denote, and end up so far
removed from the objects or actions they name that, unless they
are generated together with an object or action (like the word
calculator, from calculae, stones for counting), they seem
arbitrary. Reminiscences of the motivation of words (especially
onomatopoeic qualities, i.e., phonetic resemblance to what the
word refers to, such as crack or whoosh) do not really affect the
abstract rules of generating statements, or even our
understanding of such language signs.
Images are more constrained, more directly determined by the
pragmatic experience in whose framework they are generated.
Red as a word (with its equivalencies in other languages:
rot in German, rouge in French, rojo in Spanish, 赤 (aka) in
Japanese, adom in Hebrew, and красный in Russian) is arbitrary in
comparison to the color it designates. Even the designation is
quite approximate. In given experiential situations, many nuances
can be distinguished, although there are no names for them.
The red in an image is a physical quality that can be measured
and standardized, hence made easier to process in photography,
printing, and synthesis of pigments. In the same experiential
framework, it can be associated with many objects or processes:
flowers, blood, a stoplight, sunset, a flag. It can be compared
to them, it can trigger new associations, or become a convention.
Once language translates a visual sign, it also loads it with
conventions characteristic of language-red as in revolution,
cardinal red, redneck, etc.-moving it from the realm of its
physical determination (wavelength, or frequency of oscillation)
to the reality of cultural conventions. These are preserved and
integrated in the symbolism of a community.
Purely pictorial signs, as in Chinese and Japanese writing,
relate to the structure of language, and are culturally
significant. No matter to which extent such pictorial signs are
refined-and indeed, characters in Chinese and Kanji are
extremely sophisticated- they maintain a relation to what they
refer to. They extend the experience of writing, especially in
calligraphic exercise, in the experience conveyed. We can impose
on images-and I do not refer only to Chinese ideograms-the logic
embodied in language. But once we do, we alter the condition of
the image and transform it into an illustration.
Language, in its embodiment in literacy, is an analytic tool and
supports analytic practice quite well. Images have a dominantly
synthetic character and make for good composite tools.
Synthesizing activities, especially designing, an object, a
message, or a course of action, imply the participation of
images, in particular powerful diagramming and drawing. Language
describes; images constitute. Language requires a context for
understanding, in which classes of distribution are defined.
Images suggest such a context. Given the individual character of
any image, the equivalent of a distributional class for a
language simply does not exist.
To look at an image, for whatever practical or theoretical
purpose, means to relate to the method of the image, not to its
components. The method of an image is an experience, not a
grammar applied to a repertory, or the instantiation of rules of
grammar. The power of language consists of its abstract nature.
Images are strong through their concreteness. The abstraction of
language results from sharing vocabulary and grammar; the
abstraction of images, from sharing visual experience, or
creating a context for new experiences.
For as long as visual experience was confined to one's limited
universe of existence, as in the case of the migrating tribes,
the visual could not serve as a medium for anything beyond this
changing universe of existence. Language resulted from the need
to surpass the limitations of space and time, to generate
choices. The only viable alternative adopted was the abstract
image of the phonetic convention, which was easier to carry from
one world to another, as, for instance, the Phoenicians did. Each
alphabet is a condensed visual testimony to experiences in the
meanwhile uncoupled from language and its concrete practical
motivations.
Writing visualizes language; reading brings the written language
back to its oral life, but in a tamed version. Whether the
Sumerian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Latin, or Slavic
alphabet, the letters are not neutral signs for abstract
phonetic language. They summarize visual experiences and encode
rules of recognition; they are related to anthropologic
experience and to cognitive processes of abstracting. The
mysticism of numbers and their meta-physical meanings, of letters
and combinations of letters and numbers, of shapes, symmetry,
etc. are all present. With alphabets and numbers the abstract
nature of visual representation took over the phonetic quality of
language. The concreteness of pictorial representation, along
with the encoded elements (what is the experience behind a
letter? a number? a certain way of writing?), simply vanished
for the average literate (or illiterate) person. This is part of
the broader process of acculturation-that is, breaking through
experiences of language. Experts in alphabets show us the levels
at which the image of each letter constituted expressive levels
significant in themselves. Nevertheless, their alphabetic
literacy is as relevant to writing as much as a good description
of the various kinds of wheels is relevant to the making and the
use of automobiles.
The current use of images results from the new exigencies of
human praxis and developments in visualization technology. In
previous chapters, some of these conditions were mentioned: 1.
the global scale of our activity and existence; 2.
the diversity made possible by the practical experiences
corresponding to this globality; 3.
the dynamics of ever faster, increasingly mediated, human
interaction; 4.
the need to optimize human interaction in order to achieve high
levels of efficiency; 5.
the need to overcome the arcane stereotypes of language; 6.
the non-linear, non-sequential, open nature of human experiences
brought to the fore through the new scale of humankind.
The list is open-ended. The more our command of images improves,
the more arguments in favor of their use. None of these
arguments should be construed as a blank and non-critical
endorsement of images. We know that we cannot pursue theoretic
work exclusively with images, or that the meta-level (language
about language) cannot be reached with images. Images are
factual, situational, and unstable. They also convey a false
sense of democracy. Moreover, they materialize the shift from a
positivist conception of facts, dominating a literacy-based
determinism, to a relativist conception of chaotic functioning,
embodied, for instance, by the market or by the new means and
methods of human interaction. However, until we learn all there
is to know about the potential of images in areas other than
art, architecture, and design, chances are that we shall not
understand their participation in thinking and in other
traditionally non-image-based forms of human praxis.
Images are very powerful agents for activities involving human
emotions and instincts. They shy away from literal truth,
insofar as the logic of images is different from the logic
inhabiting human experiences of self-constitution in language.
Imagery has a protean character. Images not only represent; they
actually shape, form, and constitute subjects. Cognitive
processes of association are better supported visually than in
language. Through images, people are effectively encultured,
i.e., given the identity which they cannot experience at the
abstract level of acculturation through language. The world of
avatars, dynamic graphic representations of a person in the
virtual universe of networks, is one of concreteness. The
individuals literally remake themselves as visual entities that
can enter a dialogue with others.
Within a given culture, images relate to each other. In the
multitude of cultures within which people identify themselves,
images translate from one experience to another. Against the
background of globality, the experience of images is one of
simultaneous distinctions and integration. Distinctions carry the
identifiers of the encultured human beings constituted in new
practical experiences. Integration is probably best exemplified
by the metaphor of the global village of teleconnections and
tele-viewing, of Internet and World Wide Web interactions.
The characteristics of images given here so far need to be
related to the perspective of changes brought about by imaging
technologies. Otherwise, we could hardly come to understand how
images constitute languages that make literacy useless, or
better yet, that result in the need for complementary partial
literacies.