Each of us is confronted with more images every day than a person living in the Middle Ages would have seen in their whole life. If you open a 100-year-old newspaper you will be amazed by the amount of text and the total lack of pictures. How different things are today: the moment you’re born, covered in placenta, not yet dressed or showered, your parents are already there with the digital camera, ready to take your picture to publish on the family blog for showing the world. Interactivity between people has become an interactivity of screens. We are visual creatures, living amid image layers.
Some intellectuals tell us that the loss of the text culture involves a decay of our civilization. But what exactly is the role of the doom-mongers in this scenario? After all intellectuals are the most prominent representatives of the text-led culture. The same intellectuals who think we should treat texts with critical detachment, are the ones who warn us that we’re dumbing down by the images we watch. Why do we use the terms ‘critical detachment’ for texts and ‘dumbing down’ for images? It is time to liberate the image as a mature medium of intellectual communication.
Sitting at his or her computer, today’s human beings spend their days keeping track of everything that’s going on. They form an overview through blogging, googling and gaming. New possibilities for creative expression are growing like wildfire. Many images are citations of citations of citations. We live amid a flood of superficial images whose original points of reference have disappeared.
For centuries, artists tried to capture the beauty of landscapes and skies because that was what they saw around them. Nowadays, artist and poets work with secondhand images, media icons and corporate slogans because that is what surrounds them. Does anyone still remember the days when a computer was a complex machine that could only be operated by a highly trained expert using obscure commands? Only when the graphical user interface was introduced did computers become everyday appliances; suddenly anyone could use them. All over the world, people from various cultures use the same icons, folders, buttons and trash cans.
Every architect dreams of designing an icon. Exceptional architecture often wins prizes before the building is finished. Its iconic quality is recognized on the basis of computer models.
You would expect that this surfeit of images would drown us. It is now difficult to deny that a certain visual rot is present, and yet our ceaseless hunger for more persists. We humans are extremely visual animals after all. From cave paintings to computers, the visual image has helped the human race to describe, classify, order, analyse and, finally, achieve an increasing understanding of the world around us.
There is an important difference between pictures and pictures (it is indeed awkward that we use the same word for two different things). On the one hand, there are pictures we see with our eyes. On the other, there are mental pictures we have in our heads – as in ‘I’m trying to picture it.’ We are increasingly coming to realise that ‘thinking’ is fundamentally connected to sensory experience. In their book 'Metaphors we live by', Lakoff and Johnson argue that human thought works in a fundamentally metaphorical way. Metaphors allow us to use physical and social experiences to understand countless other subjects. The world we live in has become so abstract that we are continuously searching for images and experiences to show us ways of seeing things. Thus politicians speak in clear soundbites. Athletic shoe companies don’t sell shoes, they sell image. Thoracic surgeons wander around in patients’ lungs like rangers walking through the forest, courtesy of head-mounted virtual-reality displays.
Image and visual recognizability have surpassed the system of alphabetical order. The extraordinary thing about visual culture is not the number of pictures being produced but our deep need to visualise everything that could possibly be significant. Visualisations are an indispensable part of our meaning-making cycle. Without visualisation, there is no reality.
