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by Richard L. Weaver II
We live in a mediated blitz of images. They fill our newspapers, magazines, books, clothing, billboards, computer monitors, and television screens as never before in the history of mass communication. We are becoming a visually mediated society. For many — especially those who have been raised and nurtured in a television/Internet culture — understanding the world is being accomplished, not through reading words, but by absorbing and digesting images. Reading is losing to watching because viewing requires little mental processing.
We live in an image-hungry society with screens embedded into airplane chairs and phones doubling as cameras. Images compel us to look at them, and their message is instant, unlike text which requires some time and effort on our part. Consequently, when images and words compete, the consensus is generally to go with the image because often it’s the image people will remember the next day, the next week, and perhaps for the rest of their lives.
Media images have tremendous power. Often, they define how we see ourselves, and they can define what others think of us as well.
Why do images have such power? It is part of the human condition. We are visually oriented systems, programmed to store more pictures than text in our long-term memories. According to research cited by educational psychologist Jerome Bruner of New York University, the average person remembers only 30 percent of what is read but nearly 80 percent of what is seen.
Actually, it was Johann Gutenberg’s magic printing machine that disrupted the harmonious balance between words and images. With his machine, text-based communications had a quick and easy method of dissemination. The development of an equally efficient means of reproducing the color, depth, form, and movement of visual communication languished far behind. Words sped out of printer’s blocks and left images in a cloud of ink. In a race for cultural superiority, text crossed the finish line first, and pictures came in a distant second.
The intellectual valuing of words over images was passed on from generation to generation. It is just this history and precedent that causes educators to bemoan the pervasiveness of the visual culture. They blame TV for the decrease in analytic ability and students’ poor writing skills. It is true that the sheer weight of time students spend immersed in television, computer games, and other visual distractions keeps them from other educational activities.
The shift from words to images began with television which emphasizes the moving image over written and spoken language. Television is image-driven, image-saturated, and image-controlled. This is precisely what television does that books, recordings, and pictures cannot do; it brings us visual action. Now, television programs can be watched from direct broadcast, from cable and fibre optics, from satellites, from VCRs, from laser disks, and from hand-held receptors. On some television sets you can watch more than one program at a time. In a television commercial for Kodak’s Photo CD technology, the announcer reports, “Pictures have never been so powerful.”
But just because we are moving toward a visual orientation, does not mean we should be moving in this direction. The problem is that when the image dominates the word, rational discourse ebbs. These technologically animated images move and combine in ways unknown only a few decades ago, thus increasing their power to mesmerize.
The visionary reality of connected images doesn’t allow for critical discourse, explanation, duplication, or reflection — all rational activities required for separating truth from error. This is because images require viewers to be continually involved in the action. Images keep words in check because words strip images of their hypnotic and magical power.
When images overwhelm and subjugate words, the ability to think, write, and communicate in a linear and logical fashion is undermined. Television images have an immediate effect on us, but the effect is seldom to cause us to pursue their truth or falsity. Often television images are shorn of their overall context and meaning and are reduced to factoids (at best). That is, ideas located within historical and logical settings are replaced by impressions, emotions, and stimulations.
Images communicate narrative stories and quantitative information such as graphs and charts. Words are required for more linear, logical communication. Propositions and beliefs can be true or false; images don’t have truth value. Images are arresting, alluring, and entrancing, but because they shrink events into factoids or create outright falsehoods, viewers are manipulated by their normal way of operation and presentation. Viewers then assume that what they saw on television is something they saw with their own eyes.
What viewers don’t realize — because they are so totally consumed by images — is that every television minute is edited. Viewers don’t see events, they only see edited symbols or edited images of events. An aura and illusion of objectivity and truth is built up which cannot and does not exist. Despite that, reality becomes the image even when that image does not correspond to any objective state of affairs.
Think about the effect this can have on viewers during a political campaign. Truth and logic are socially constructed, and they can be deconstructed and reconstructed at whim.
What is the remedy? If truth is to prevail, image consumption must be replaced by word devotion. Teachers are correct: the desire to read, the ability to read and write all suffer under the ruthless regime of television, the Internet, computer games, and other image-dominated media.
Print, on the other hand, demands to be understood. Written sentences call upon readers
to know the importance of what is said. To read effectively, readers must come to print in a serious state of intellectual readiness not necessary with images. The mental act of reading is active, engages the mind and imagination, and makes truth possible and knowable. When language is the principle medium for communication, ideas, facts, and claims occupy a central place in our thoughts and require mental processing — little mental processing is required with images.
In the essay,“Wordplay: The Importance of Language,” Rochelle Siegel at The Sandspur (the oldest college newspaper in Florida - Founded in 1894) distinguishes among language, speech, and communication, and she emphasizes the importance of learning and understanding the non-linguistic properties of speech. Her essay can be found at: http://media.www.thesandspur.org/media/storage/paper623/news/2005/11/11/LifeTimes/Wordplay.The.Importance.Of.Language-1053959-page2.shtml
In this WebQuest, designed for 11th graders, entitled “Images and Influence,” designed by Carol Boehm, there is a wonderful lesson on the influence of images in advertising. Boehm discusses specific images and their influence, and then she asks critical questions to get students thinking such as, “What are the social and political implications?” This website offers important information and insights: http://eprentice.sdsu.edu/J03OW/boehm/INDEX/Images_Influence.htm
Contact Richard L. Weaver II
Thursday’s essay, “If truth is to prevail, image consumption must be replaced by word devotion,” is written to not only show the power that images have in our society but, too, how they overshadow the effect of words not only in their impact but in their pervasiveness as well. People today — because of their conditioning — will almost always prefer the image to the written word, and that presents a significant problem. It is that “problem” that Thursday’s essay confronts and discusses.
Share your And Then Some Story about image effectiveness. Are you a person who has been influenced by images? Or, do you prefer reading? How did this preference occur? In what ways has it contributed to your success in or understanding of the world? What images have been most effective in your life? We would love to hear your story. Do you have a friend, a family member, a neighbor, or someone you just know from a distance who is or has been significantly influenced by images? Can you tell his or her story? Feel free to use a pseudonym for the person’s real name. With the pervasiveness and influence of images, is there any way to promote reading and the importance of the written word?
And Then Some Essay - July 10, 2008
If truth is to prevail, image consumption must be replaced by word devotion
by Richard L. Weaver II
Excerpt:
We live in a mediated blitz of images. They fill our newspapers, magazines, books, clothing, billboards, computer monitors, and television screens as never before in the history of mass communication. We are becoming a visually mediated society. For many — especially those who have been raised and nurtured in a television/Internet culture — understanding the world is being accomplished, not through reading words, but by absorbing and digesting images. Reading is losing to watching because viewing requires little mental processing.
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And Then Some Works - see you THURSDAY!!
by Richard L. Weaver II
Scientists at the And Then Some Publishing, LLC, (ATSP) laboratories located in the prestigious residential community of Palo Alto, California, close to Stanford University, have developed a technology that will determine whether or not listeners, readers, subscribers, and others (unfortunately the technology is not refined enough to distinguish among these), have an interest in, will want to read, and will put to use material in the next book ATSP will publish.
The technology allows technicians to determine, based on an experientially situated paradigm, whether or not those studied have an interest in and can use a rule-based format.
What the scientists worked on first was fundamentals. Through a scientifically developed procedure called “Remote Information Disclosure” they discovered the role that learning fundamentals plays in people’s lives. What they uncovered was that people preferred building a solid foundation and knew that fundamentals opened alternatives and options. It surprised scientists when they realized people also knew that fundamentals supercharged creative juices, offered them strength, supplied the license, permission, and authority to act, gave confidence and security, offered a base for experimentation, and supplied a way to evaluate outcomes and assess results. Scientists were stunned by the erudition and perspicacity of their subjects.
When scientists detected the fact that most people preferred learning the basics before proceeding to higher-order thinking and doing, they knew that a rules-based, ordered presentation of ideas would be welcomed.
Scientists at the ATSP laboratories in Palo Alto then developed a series of intricate, methodical, statistically based, controlled, experimental studies that used before and after comparative populations, local central limit theorems and high-order correlations of rejective sampling and logistic likelihood asymtotics, and controlling for independent but not necessarily identically distributed random variables, in a variety of environmental settings, each with a designated control group, designed steps that would move people from a fixed beginning point to an intangible and evasive culmination whose objective would be to yield feelings of consummation and fulfillment.
Throughout the experiments, the goal of the scientists was to accurately record all of the acts, abilities, and skills demonstrated by study participants. This was accomplished through the use of MP3 VoiceRecorders, video cameras, as well as trained, paid, on-sight observers. These notes were gathered, collated, and transcribed, and the results have been preserved for public record in the United States Government Archival Records and Transmissions Office (USGART) in Washington, D.C.
After working out progressive steps, and after explicating the competence levels necessary to attain each of the prescriptions, scientists gathered in focus groups to work out specific details and record their findings in ways a lay public could comprehend. Each focus group had a designated participant to take notes, reduce jargon to understandable verbiage, and make the final report for each group.
At first scientists called their results theories, but they knew there would be people who would misinterpret these “theories” as untested suggestions that did not have proof nor universal acceptability. Axioms, maxims, and canons were other considered possibilities. One scientist wanted to use the word praxis because, for her, it represented the precision and accuracy of their work. Finally, after much discussion and debate among the various groups of scientists, the word “rules” was finally agreed upon — but only after several hours of discussion and debate. The minutes of these final discussions reflect lengthy debate and much disagreement.
To put their rules to a final test, each of the participating scientists was required to prepare a brief, formal, final public presentation. The primary requirement for this presentation was that it had to follow precisely the rules they had established, and the success of each presentation would be measured — by the other scientists, a gathering of family and friends, and a group of trained, paid, objective professional observers — by how faithfully, accurately, and literally each presentation subscribed to the requirements set forth by the rules the scientists had previously agreed upon.
For the purposes of the experiment, a standard, objective evaluation form was constructed by a paid, outside, contracted agency. This was the evaluation form used independently by each of the groups. Monitoring of the use of the form was performed by the West Lake Detective Agency. The firm was paid to make certain all judgments were independent and that no group- decision making occurred during the evaluation period.
The day arrived, presentations were made, listeners responded enthusiastically, critical evaluations took place uneventfully, results were tabulated by an independent comptroller, and the results were announced at a final banquet.
The news media were invited to the banquet, and the results were picked up by the Associated Press, and all the local television stations reported the results on their nightly newscasts. There was, at that time, wide support and strong encouragement for the results to be compiled in such a way that they could be made available to the general public. This feeling compelled one scientist during the business meeting that followed the final banquet to present a motion to this effect.
The vote on the motion was unanimous. There was loud and uproarious applause, and with the announcement of the result of the vote, all participants rose as one to not just acknowledge the results of the vote but to support the need to have the results published.
It is with great pleasure and a great deal of pride that ATSP has been given the privilege of publishing these results. The title of the book is Public Speaking Rules! All you need to give a GREAT speech, by Richard L. Weaver II, and when it becomes available it can be purchased at Amazon.com.
Happy April Fools’ Day! Everything in this essay is false except the last sentence of the paragraph above. (As of this writing, the book is in the final stages of preparation.)
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At “Museum of Hoaxes” (http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/) , “The Top 100 April Fools’ Day Hoaxes of All Time,” there are not just a numbering or listing of all the hoaxes, but there is a brief discussion of each one, and they are listed in hierarchical order as judged by notoriety, absurdity, and number of people duped.
The Wikipedia website under “April Fools’ Day” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fool's_Day) offers information on the “Origin,” “Well-Known Pranks,” “By Radio Stations,” “By Television Stations,” “By Magazines and Newspapers,” “By Game Shows,” “By Websites,” “List of April Fools’ Hoaxes,” “Real News on April Fools’ Day,” “Other Prank Days in the World,” and “April Fools’ Day in Media.” It is an impressive presentation of a wide variety of information.
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Contact Richard L. Weaver II
