Living Life In a Visual World

Alex Lasota
Dr. Farman
DTC 375: Language, Texts & Technology
18 February, 2009
Word Count: 800

       A wise woman once said “When you think something, you think in picture. You don’t think a thought in words. You think a picture that expresses your thought. Working with this picture will produce it into your experience” (Speare 27).  So often in society today, do we correlate pictures to substantiate a meaning behind our thoughts and ideas.  When you read a book and then watch the film, which do you remember?  The textual images, or the scenes the director imprinted in your mind? Because of recent technologies such a film, computers, tv…ect, our cultural is in the process of a macro revolution.  No longer does society rely on textile communication to relay information, but has instead transferred back to what McLuhan calls the “Prehistoric” age, that depended solely on oral and pictographic communication.             Emoticons, Pictograms, Photographs, Billboards, Films…are all various forms of visual communication.  With the rapid fluctuation of communicative technologies and our societies ever growing need for communicating instantly, our form of communication must simultaneously parallel that of its cultures demands.  In other words, because our society has become such a fast paced culture, our communication must live up to the same standards.  When we pass a billboard and see a picture of a restaurant, a message is communicated instantly.  In merely seconds the consumer is well aware of what he is trying to be sold.  In present day Western society, it is atypical to see a billboard overflowing with text.  Why is this? The answer is simple; text fails to communicate messages in an instant.  As we are driving down the freeway, we do not have time to glance up and read a paragraph of reasons why say Pepsi is better than Coke.  With a simple picture of a Pepsi bottle, we are able to quickly receive and process the information, all why driving.  To some degree I guess one can claim that Western culture for the message will fail in communicating to its audience, for it fails in meetings the requirements of our fast paced culture.           With modern technologies on the rise, we have now become a global entity.  Western cultures like America no longer encompass a particular ethnicity, but instead embody a mass influx of various cultures and ethnicities worldwide.  So how exactly are these inhabitants able to communicate with such a diverse widespread of languages?  Simply by the use of pictographs.  Don’t believe me? Go into an international airport.  Everywhere you look there are pictographic signs, all tempting to bridge together the language gap across cultures.  How can a woman from France whom is visiting America, understand a form of textile communication when she has never been taught English?  She simply cannot. Therefore it is essential that she depend on visual elements in order to process information.   With billions of individuals traveling across borderlines each and every day, the only successful mediums are those that embody the visual and oral qualities.        When we sit back and watch the news, we are continually flooded with reports regarding the ever-growing expansion of gang violence.  As we are aware, many individuals involved with gangs lack a form of literacy, which in turn causes them to feel inferior and threatened.   This feeling of inferiority leads these individuals to lash out and retort to violent methods in order to substantiate their own ‘authorative’ identity. In his article A is For Ox, Barry Sander touches upon this issue regarding the massive advancement in gang violence.  He states that “The problem in American culture is that children have abandoned the book but enjoy none of the advantages of pre-literates” (75). And with the gang community continually on the rise, how can we not say that our mediated ‘visual’ culture is not a result of this?   If gang members did not throw away the book, but instead strived to be literate, they would by no means feel inferior.  And if these individuals did not feel threatened, they would not retort to violence in order to claim their identity.  So obviously the cause of this up rise in the gang community, is due to the lack of literacy, and the increase of orality.            With Western societies continual increase of ‘visual’ mediums, the perpetuent influx of globalization, as well as a rise of gang violence, it is safe to conclude that our culture has become solely dependent upon visual and oral communication as the primary source of communication.  Society today focuses more on community, rather than the individual (Facebook, Myspace are excellent examples of this).  We are gradually moving away from an individualist perspective…and  are paralleling more towards the prehistoric age, where orality was the dominant form of communication.
Work CitedSanders, Barry. A is for ox. Vitage Books Oct. 1995: 155-86. 18 Feb. 2009Spear, Grace. Thoughts: Webster’s Quotations, Facts and Phrases. Icon Group International. 18 Feb. 2009