Taking into Account the History of Visuals
At first glance, it appears that the decline in textual modes of representation is a result of a rise of visual modes of representation. But upon deeper reflection, visual representations have long traditions going back to early prehistoric times. Some of the very first illustrations of man appeared in cave art thousands of years ago such as the hunter holding a bow found in a Sahara cave dating back 6000BC. The fact that similar art work is found throughout the world and at different times in history show that it is inherent human nature to communicate visually. Although starting off as artwork for cave men, these visual representations now play an important role in all levels of development for human civilization as they are intimately connected with the storage and communication of information essential to the physical and spiritual well-being of a community. As such, they became vital to the development of writing and had always had a place within religion. For example, all written text started from a pictorial representation before transforming into a symbolic or logographic one and churches have used visuals through different mediums like reliefs, stained glass and statues to communicate religious texts to the masses.
I believe the textual representation grew due to the invention of the printing press which made it more efficient and easier to mass produce text. After the invention of digital technology, the rise in images amongst text is the visual representation catching up to the textual representation. Now that technology has made it easier and inexpensive to create and immerge images amongst text, there appears to be a growing domination of visuals in the printed medium. But if one compares the rise in the number of books produced since the invention of the printing press to the number of images produced since the digital age, one would find that they are similar. This is to no surprise as digital photos are easily taken and published with a simple click of a button and even garnished with special effects applications like Photoshop to give it a professional touch. Even graphs and charts can be created with little training in common word processing programs like Microsoft Word. However, unlike the past, images now accompany text in order to further clarify, decorate, break up, bring attention to or even liven up the text. So society is currently adjusting to a world where textual representations are no longer the center of the printed medium and this spot light is replaced by the visual representation, just like in the past. This is also seen in the educational books where pages in textbooks are covered in graphics of different colors and arrangements. Each graphic can have a special meaning (like extra practice, hints, puzzles, applications, etc.) that is specific to the book. As Kress stated, such visual representation can have “an infinitely large potential of depictions” and as such, would need the textual representation to clarify any ambiguity since words are learnt and agreed through convention, which leaves little room for interpretation. At the same time, visual representations offer spatial relationships simultaneously which cannot be achieved by textual representations since they are constrained by a fixed sequence. For this reason, they are both necessary and complement each other.
Reference:
Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Kress, G. (2004). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 22, 5-22.
The visual is certainly catching up with the textual in most of the ways that we communicate however contrary to what some people believe I don’t think text will disappear from our repertoire of tools any time soon. When I did the Rip. Mix. Feed activity I tried to use only images. I realized when I had finished that a significant number of the images contained text in one form or another. I think text and visual have a synergistic effect.
As Gombrich (in Bolter, 2001) claims ” [o] urs is a visual age. We are bombarded with pictures from morning till night… No wonder it has been asserted that we are entering a historical epoch in which the image will take over from the written word” (p. 137). I disagree with this. I think we have always been in a visual age, or rather a visual culture. The only difference now is that we have the technology to reproduce the visual, or our visions, and share them with others. I think the primary reason that text dominated for so long was due to the difficulty of reproducing visual images satisfactorily, if at all.
Text supports this idea of the visual because we need to ‘see’ text in order to read it. The primary difference is that text is a series of smaller visuals that we have learned to string together to create or derive meaning. A recent invention, emoticons are a creation that sits between the visual and the textual as they are a type of image generated speechless text (logographics), similar to the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians. Each image represents or is associated with a particular idea that can be strung together to convey meaning.
I don’t see text disappearing as I stated earlier. In the healthcare field there is no way that we could get by without text, but less of it would certainly be nice! In my teaching experience most people like text and images together. And they seem to be tightly bound together. Have you ever looked at an image without reading the caption? Though I don’t know how things will change in the future; maybe I’m naive (old-fashioned, deluded, stubborn) in thinking that text and images make a nice couple.
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
I agree with Susan. The thought of text disappearing is impossible to fathom. We are too expressive with our words to move beyond this. To illustrate this, I started to think about rain…how many words do we have to represent this weather pattern? Downpour, drizzle, shower, monsoon, precipitation, sprinkling, pouring, deluge, torrent….how do we represent that in imagery? Visually speaking, a downpour to one person may be showers to the next. While thinking about this, I came across an article from BBC entitled, Fifty words for rain. The author suggested colloquial English is very vibrant, colourful and expressive, and takes many terms to represent one idea. This varied vocabulary is one that is richly woven into the culture of any society.
According to Brad Hargreaves, culture is vocabulary. Although he was referring to starting up a company and the word choices used. I think the idea is interesting and could be thought of on a larger scale. For example, we as Canadians are renowned for say things like, ‘eh’ or ‘sorry’. These choices of words build a fabric of identity for us. We connect with these words and we bond instantly with other people who use these words when travelling in foreign places. There is an underlying understanding of who we are and what we represent. We even sell tourists, Canad-eh t-shirts. So how to we take a rich language and replace it with visuals? I’m very skeptical this can be done. In the process we would lose meaning, understanding and our culture. Thoughts?
BBC Magazine. (2012, June 18). Fifty words for rain. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18461189
Hargreaves, B. (n.d.). Culture is vocabulary. Retrieved from http://bhargreaves.com/2011/04/culture-vocabulary/