[The quote below and the linked full article are old (2005 ), and cover no new ground. However, I think the author does the subject well and thoroughly. And I completely disagree with what she has to say. ]
… Americans love images. We love the democratizing power of technologies—such as digital cameras, video cameras, Photoshop, and PowerPoint—that give us the capability to make and manipulate images. What we are less eager to consider are the broader cultural effects of a society devoted to the image. Historians and anthropologists have explored the story of mankind’s movement from an oral-based culture to a written culture, and later to a printed one. But it is only in the past several decades that we have begun to assimilate the effects of the move from a culture based on the printed word to one based largely on images. In making images rather than texts our guide, are we opening up new vistas for understanding and expression, creating a form of communication that is “better than print,” as New York University communications professor Mitchell Stephens has argued? Or are we merely making a peculiar and unwelcome return to forms of communication once ascendant in preliterate societies—perhaps creating a world of hieroglyphics and ideograms (albeit technologically sophisticated ones)—and in the process becoming, as the late Daniel Boorstin argued, slavishly devoted to the enchanting and superficial image at the expense of the deeper truths that the written word alone can convey?
Two things in particular are at stake in our contemporary confrontation with an image-based culture: First, technology has considerably undermined our ability to trust what we see, yet we have not adequately grappled with the effects of this on our notions of truth. Second, if we are indeed moving from the era of the printed word to an era dominated by the image, what impact will this have on culture, broadly speaking, and its institutions? What will art, literature, and music look like in the age of the image? And will we, in the age of the image, become too easily accustomed to verisimilar rather than true things, preferring appearance to reality and in the process rejecting the demands of discipline and patience that true things often require of us if we are to understand their meaning and describe it with precision? The potential costs of moving from the printed word to the image are immense. We may find ourselves in a world where our ability to communicate is stunted, our understanding and acceptance of what we see questionable, and our desire to transmit culture from one generation to the next seriously compromised.
The two paragraphs above are from the middle of an article, The Image Culture by Christine Rosen that appeared in The New Atlantis’s Fall 2005 issue. Later in the same article, she concludes:
As its boosters suggest, it is here to stay, and likely to grow more powerful as time goes on, making all of us virtual flâneurs strolling down boulevards filled with digital images and moving pictures. We will, of course, be enormously entertained by these images, and many of them will tell us stories in new and exciting ways. At the same time, however, we will have lost something profound: the ability to marshal words to describe the ambiguities of life and the sources of our ideas; the possibility of conveying to others, with the subtlety, precision, and poetry of the written word, why particular events or people affect us as they do; and the capacity, through language, to distill the deeper meaning of common experience. We will become a society of a million pictures without much memory, a society that looks forward every second to an immediate replication of what it has just done, but one that does not sustain the difficult labor of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.
Read the full article here.
Responses in a forum discussion about the above quoted article at metafilter.com that took place when it first appeared (2005 ) closely parallel my own reaction to the piece:
… we’ve always been an image culture. It’s not like everyone was wonderfully literate before the television came. I think we’re reaching people who wouldn’t have read Pride and Prejudice, who wouldn’t have listened to classical music, who wouldn’t have paid attention to world events without this image-laden society. Is it the best of worlds? Of course not; no one can deny the easily manipulative way an image grabs the emotional brain faster than the word. But was the previous world really as awesome as she’s making it out to be? – posted by Maxson
I see that Christine Rosen is also the author of My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood, ‘a touching memoir of growing up in a household, school and town of flourishing Biblical literalism’. I think that may explain the position she takes in this essay. Having been brought up in a strongly Protestant culture where the Word was paramount, she can’t rid herself of the suspicion that any reliance on images is going to undermine the authority of the written word. – posted by verstegan
I find myself siding with the classical musician who is disturbed by people going to hear Stravinsky and watch the orchestra playing the music and then facing Jumbotron images of the bassoon player. That’s just wrong. And it comes from the phenomenon the author alludes to: the near worship of image over everything else. I like to think of myself as a body existing in space and time, not an image consumer/processor. – posted by kozad
She’s just as right when she rhetorically asks “Does every cultural trend make a culture genuinely better?” as she’s wrong when she assumes the opposite to be the case.
“It is possible, in other words, to see too much, and in the seeing lose our grasp on what is real”, she says. This could just as well be an argument against her medium of choice (or so it seems), words. Words can take you places just like images can, and words can just as easily be used for manipulation and deception. A sentence is a statement, but so is an image. If we don’t like the symbols, blame the message and not the medium. – posted by hasund
… are more people in general reachable now that imagery is all over the place? I think we have greater overall mindshare with an image culture, and not just because we have more minds to go around- people just likepictures. Regardless, the author’s willingness to make any loss of readership a death knell for literacy- something that’ll make all readers a tiny elite- remains too alarmist for me to accept. Maybe fewer people will read trashy novels, but maybe the golden prose she exalts doesn’t need those clay feet anyway. – posted by Maxson
“We will become a society of a million pictures without much memory, (…) one that does not sustain the difficult labor of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.”
I am always shocked when I discover that people don’t see the world that is just there: we have never had so much memory, and it’s expanding faster that we can use it; and we never had so many tools to search this memory, and these tools themselves evolve at an astounding pace.
Never before in the whole history of mankind so much memory has been transmitted to so many people from one generation to the next. These are hard facts. So, what is she talking about? A fantasy of doom?
I would be the first interested to read something about the present and future use of images in communications, but I’ll wait for somebody willing to use data and facts. – posted by bru
Images are usually used for vapid entertainment, just like words and music were (and still are). However, I think more people overall view images, lowbrow or not, than words, lowbrow or not, so more people are on the receiving end of this culture, even if they’re just getting bad TV shows.
I think that reaching more people in general is inherently a good thing. Others may understandably disagree, but there are other benefits to exposing people to all these images: people are losing the “omg” factor images create. We aren’t amazed/scared by scenes that dazzled/frightened us years ago. The author laments the loss of wonder; I see it as a loss of gullibility. If everyone’s seen a Worth1000 photoshop contest, fewer people will blindly believe the next photo they see.
Of course, we’ll always have more gullible people than we’d like. But more people will begin to say “that’s just a picture, prove it actually happened.” A higher standard of proof would change a lot of things for society. – posted by Maxson
A well-written, competently defended article — though I must admit I’m enjoying the discussion here more. Maybe it’s because I’m an old-fashioned academic shitkicker, and can’t stand swallowing intellectual propaganda (call off the dogs — all critical theory is propaganda of one kind or another) outside of a seminar-like environment.
Now, here comes the complaint. As I said, it was a well-written article: but far, far, FAR from original. Adorno. Barthes. McLuhan. Hell, I’ll chuck in some Derrida, ‘cos all the kids seem to love him so much. Another postmodern critique of a postmodern phenomena that means very little to those us — no, I won’t say that. The truth is, to me: a good ol’ fashioned materialist who doesn’t have much time for debating Katrina’s meaning re: “The Image Culture” when, really, we should STILL be debating Katrina’s meaning re: race and class in our country. [Rosen's article begins with a reference to images of the devastation of hurricane Katrina. ]
Appropriation of tragedy for academic exercises is a well-worn technique. Elicit strong emotions, put the reader in a doubting state of mind, and use this state of mind to plant the seed of your thesis. I find it distasteful. – posted by ford and the prefects
Find the full forum discussion here.
-Julie
