 |
 |
|
 |
World & I School | World & I Homeschool | World & I College | World & I Library | |
 |
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
World & I School | World & I Homeschool | World & I College | World & I Library | |
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
The last 160 years has seen the rise of a culture centered on the visual rather than the verbal, a culture in conflict with the older, literary-verbal culture.
Lloyd Eby is assistant senior editor of the Currents in Modern Thought section of The World & I. Besides publishing numerous reviews and articles on film, he has worked professionally in film and television production as well as being an experienced still photographer. On January 7, 1839, after more than a decade of work, French painter Louis Daguerre announced to the French Academy of Sciences the discovery of what would come to be called photography. As a newspaper report of the time put it, "M. Daguerre has found the way to fix the images which paint themselves within a camera obscura, so that these images are no longer transient reflections of objects, but their fixed and everlasting impress which, like a painting or engraving, can be taken away from the presence of objects." When William Henry Fox Talbot, an English scientist and scholar, heard the news of Daguerre's achievement, he was astonished because he had independently invented a technique that seemed to be the same as Daguerre's. And that same year, English astronomer and scientist Sir John Herschel found the means of fixing the photographic image using what photographers today call "hypo." Herschel also proposed the term photography instead of Talbot's phrase photogenic drawing and the terms positive and negative instead of reversed copy and re-reversed copy. Great industries quickly arose based on Daguerre's and Talbot's discoveries. Technological Change Photography was the first of three technological developments that would bring about a profound change in human culture at the end of the second millennium, taking us from a literary culture, based primarily on words and printing, to an increasingly image-based, or visual, culture. The second technological innovation came with Thomas Edison's invention of motion picture apparatus--he called it the kinetoscope--in the early 1890s. By now the history of motion pictures, as well as the enormous industry and art form built on this technological innovation, is so well known as to scarcely need description. We should note, however, that Edison did not foresee the use of motion pictures for entertainment--he thought movies would be used for education. We must also remember that, in the beginning, motion pictures were silent, so the form of expression was purely visual. Not until about 1930 did sound recording appear; the marriage of sound and motion pictures produced a hybrid medium that combined both visual and verbal cultures. The third technological innovation leading to a visual culture was television. Work had begun on this as early as the 1890s, but the actual invention of television came about in the period between World Wars I and II, and some broadcasting of television programs in the United States, England, and Germany occurred then. With the coming of the war, however, this activity nearly ceased, and TV did not come into full prominence until the years following World War II. Each of these three technological innovations spawned an enormous industry, and each had a profound effect on human thinking and behavior. Technological determinism is the view that the existence of a technology determines what will happen through its use--that humans are not in control of the technology, but the technology controls them. The most popular and influential theorist about the media and an exponent of at least a form of technological determinism was the late media guru Marshall McLuhan, known for his slogan "The medium is the message." This means that no strict separation can be made between a medium and the message that this medium conveys, the medium itself being a kind of message. The coming of the automobile at the beginning of the twentieth century and television in the second half are important examples of the ways technology imposed itself on human culture, resulting in enormous cultural transformations, so much so that it is almost impossible to think of anything in human life that remained unchanged by them. Whether Henry Ford set out to change the world or realized he was doing so, that was the result. The advent of TV broadcasting and having a TV set in one's home did not mean that the pre-television situation continued as before, with just a new means of propagating the messages of that pre-TV world. Instead, TV itself created and continues to create a new world culture, at least partly, without regard to the wishes of the viewers. McLuhan noted in Understanding Media: "The personal and social consequences of any medium--that is, of any extension of ourselves--result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology." Further on he says, "The 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." Even if we do not accept total technological determinism--if we hold that people retain at least some control over the technology that they allow into their lives--McLuhan was right in pointing out that media are not simply neutral conveyors of messages, that they tend to impose a message of their own on their users. David Sarnoff, the founder of NBC, once declared in a speech at Notre Dame University: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." McLuhan responded scathingly: "That is the voice of the current somnambulism. ... There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technological form." Even if we think McLuhan has gone too far and that there is some truth in Sarnoff's declaration, it is nevertheless abundantly clear that there is also some in McLuhan's rejoinder, that technology at least partly determines and imposes itself on our thinking and behavior. Written vs. Visual Culture Humans existed before the invention of writing some 5,000 years ago. In fact, tens of thousands of years ago, the earliest attempts to record messages depended on making pictures. Thus, visual culture preceded written culture. Oral culture also came before written culture. In preliterate societies, the ancient lore and legends, as well as the knowledge necessary for carrying on human life and affairs, were passed on orally. In these societies, the most important roles, next to the king's or leader's at least, were those of the storytellers and those who passed on the lore of the culture through dance and picture making. Speech itself is a kind of code, a way of expressing perceived experience in sounds that have conventional meanings. All the forerunners of writing were based on pictures--what is called "pictographic," or writing that is pictorial in character. Eventually, words came to be expressed in conventional signs, and what is called logographic writing, or writing in which individual signs represent individual words, was developed. Chinese is the best example of such writing today. In other places phonetization--the division of words into phonetic parts--occurred, and this eventually made possible the development of alphabets, or signs for phonetic parts. From this came the development of writing based on alphabets, or a system of about thirty or fewer letters or characters. Written language is a code too, a second-level code, if we consider speech to be first-level. The development of alphabetic writing removed writing and literacy from any necessary ties to pictographic culture. Although many of us are usually unaware of this, written language is also a form of technology, with its own technological determinations. In The Alphabet Effect, author Robert Logan described it this way: "A medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information, but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities. A person who is literate has a different worldview than one who receives information exclusively through oral communication. The alphabet, independent of the spoken languages it transcribes or the information it makes available, has its own intrinsic impacts." The development of writing and written language had its shortcomings and did not please everyone. Socrates and Plato, for example, expressed a definite preference for oral communication and strong reservations about the ability of the written word to convey the true and complete understanding of what they wished to say. In addition, because writing was difficult and depended on laborious hand-copying, written materials were scarce and reserved for the few. For that reason, until much later, cultural gatekeepers--kings and princes, priests, scribes, the educated few--could and did control the messages that were delivered to the many. Indeed, literacy itself was held by the few. In the Middle Ages, for example, the Roman Catholic Church used many nonwritten means--stained glass windows, paintings, dance, and other visual and oral communications--to convey its messages to the common people. From neurological investigations done in this century, we now know that there is an asymmetry in the human brain. The left brain controls the right side of the body, and the right brain controls the left. Moreover, at least in right-handed persons--meaning about 90 percent of us--studies of split-brain patients have shown that the left brain controls speech and abstract thinking, willing, analysis, logic, discrimination, and numeracy (our ability to calculate and work with numbers). In contrast, the right brain deals with spatial perception, facial recognition, and music appreciation. The right brain seems to be more visually oriented, "synthesizing multiple converging determinants so that the mind can grasp the senses' input all-at-once [italics in original]," as Leonard Shlain puts it in his new book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. He continues, "The right brain is nonverbal. ... It comprehends the language of cries, gestures, grimaces, cuddling, sucking, touching, and body stance. Its emotional states are under little volitional control and betray true feelings through fidgeting, blushing, or smirking." If that account of the differences in the brain is anywhere near accurate, then the development of speech and especially literacy--the ability to read and to work with written language--came to favor one aspect of the human brain and human personality over the other. In writing and literacy, we use and emphasize will, speech, abstraction, analysis, logic, discrimination, and numeracy. Thus, the use of writing has tended to crowd out of human life those aspects of personality that were emphasized with preliterate, more visual culture: spacial and gestalt perception, music creation and appreciation, image recognition, perception of the form or style of speech over content, aesthetic appreciation, and visual-pattern recognition. Literary culture, therefore, tends to emphasize the left-brain aspects and to neglect or even denigrate the right-brain aspects. In fact, the thesis of Shlain's book is that preliterate cultures were more female-and goddess-centered, while the coming of writing made them patriarchal, shutting out the goddess. The work of Gutenberg further cemented and expanded the role of writing, literacy, and word-based culture. Gutenberg made books and printing cheap, plentiful, and accessible to common people. It has been argued that Gutenberg's invention was a major factor in the demise of feudalism and the monarchy system, the coming of the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of the Enlightenment and political democracy. The Coming of Visual Culture The development of photography meant that an image-based culture could begin to emerge. To be sure, many innovations in drawing and painting had been achieved, and images had figured widely in the prephotographic age; but they depended on the skill and perception of the image-maker. Paintings were also expensive--only the wealthy could afford to have pictures made of themselves. Moreover, this took a great deal of time and work, so it could be done only rarely. Photography did not depend on drafting or painting skill but on learning the technical craft of photography. Lenses cast finer lines and finer discriminations than could be made by the most skilled draftsman. Photography was quick and relatively cheap. Moreover, important advances in lens making and in the processes introduced by Daguerre and Fox Talbot were made by the end of the 1840s. Soon photography had spread throughout Europe, Russia, America, South America, and as far east as Tokyo. In the first two or three decades most daguerreotypes were portraits of people, but views of cities, architectural studies, panoramas, news events, and travel pictures were also taken. In addition to its use as an artistic medium, photography quickly became recognized as a new form of communication. The first extensive war photography was undertaken by the Englishman Roger Fenton in the Crimean War in 1855. The best-known early use of photography in war was by Mathew Brady and others in the American Civil War. Before the invention of photography, war could be thought of as a romantic adventure. But photographs of the brutality and dullness of war made people aware of its reality, so much so that photographs and newsreels were mostly banned from World War I because the political and military leaders knew that allowing the war to be seen would lead to loss of support for their war efforts. During World War II and subsequent wars, what came to be called photojournalism--journalism done with camera instead of in words--gained importance. Visual perception is multichanneled in the human mind, while verbal perception is single-channeled. If you hear several voices simultaneously, unless you attend to only one the result is cacophony--you are unable to perceive anything but noise. Visual perception is different. In 1968 a not especially good movie called The Thomas Crown Affair was released. Directed by Norman Jewison, it tells the story of a a rich Boston tycoon (Steve McQueen) who, because he is bored, masterminds the perfect bank robbery, and the insurance company investigator (Faye Dunaway) works to catch him. The noteworthy thing about this film is that it uses a split screen to show multiple actions taking place simultaneously. Although not the first film to use this technique, it was the first commercial Hollywood film to do so. As Jewison has written, "I realized that the eye is able to take in more than one image at a time as long as the viewer is not distracted by dialogue." He explains further, "The technique enables you to convey a tremendous amount of information very quickly--we were able to tell five different stories simultaneously." The Centrality of TV Television is by far the most important of the technological and cultural innovations leading toward visual culture. TV is based on photography. It has moving images along with sound, like talking motion pictures. It appeals to the visual, intuitive, logic-Œavoiding right brain and bypasses the critical, evaluative, logical, and linguistic processing of the left brain. TV has considerably more power and influence than any other visual media. Photographs do not move. To go to the movies we have to dress up and leave our homes. We also have to buy tickets. And at the movies, we have only a few choices, and we have to enter and leave according to the theater's schedule. With TV in our homes, we do not need to dress up and go out, buy a ticket, and mingle with strangers. At home, we can turn the TV on or off as we like and can talk during viewing without disturbing strangers. TV also brings the outer world--news, entertainment, sports, travelogues, movies--into our immediate space and makes it all domestic. The outer becomes the inner. When motion picture newsreels were shown in a theater along with the featured movie, the outer world of news and events remained outside, at least to some extent. A sea change in the culture occurred in the presidential election of 1960, with the televised debates between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Most people who heard these debates on the radio (verbal culture) thought Nixon had won. Nixon's performance in the debate corresponded to linguistic, left-brain rules. But Kennedy, either intuitively or knowingly, realized that the rules of TV were different, and his performance corresponded to the nonlinguistic, right-brain rules. He looked better than Nixon on TV, and looking better meant that, by the standards of visual communication, he had won the TV interchange with Nixon. Since the country had by then entered the TV age, this meant that, after all, Kennedy had won. The Kennedy-Nixon debates were just one in a long series of changes that would be brought about by TV. Before that time, although TV may have existed, it was a small force in political and public affairs. But now it became increasingly dominant. TV coverage or exposure began to be the criterion of existence and value. To be on TV meant to exist. To fail to be on TV meant oblivion, no matter how much ink was devoted to the person or event. I have sometimes worked in the film industry in New York City, and on numerous occasions, I have gone out into the streets with a professional movie camera. Each time, children would run up to me and ask, "What station are you with? Put me on TV!" I quickly realized that these children were saying, in effect, "Make me exist!" Even though I was not working for TV--I was working on films--these children thought only in terms of TV, associating motion pictures solely with TV. Moreover, they saw TV as being the medium that conferred meaningful or important existence. Beyond political and public affairs, TV has had other far-reaching effects. It has brought the world of commerce into our homes and has influenced children tremendously. Now children typically spend much more time watching TV than they spend on their homework. This may be good or bad, depending on whether one thinks that left-or right-brain interests should prevail. The late Abbie Hoffman, one of the leaders of the sixties youth movement in America, commented in one of his books on the importance of TV to the sensibilities and interests of his generation. It was the first generation to grow up watching TV. Hoffman advocated many hours of TV viewing, saying that this would lead a person to become a radical like him. And more than one commentator has noted that TV coverage of the Vietnam War and the antiwar protests, brought into people's homes every evening, was perhaps the dominant factor leading to loss of public support for the war. Literacy and TV Since the coming of written language, education has been essentially synonymous with literacy; to say that a person is literate has been practically equal to saying that he is educated. Conversely, a person who is illiterate is considered more than simply someone who is unable to read--he is denigrated as being less than what he ought to be as a human. Thus, written language made possible--and frequently required--the severing of the previous tie that had existed between human culture and knowledge and the visual. Although for sighted people there remained the tie between sight and reading, the existence of Braille writing for the blind shows that even this tie was not a necessary one. A serious conflict exists between those whose model or paradigm for education is literacy and those interested in visual culture. More than one person steeped in literary culture has declared that if one wants well-educated and well-behaved children, the first thing to do is ban TV from the home. Many educators decry the large amount of time that children spend watching TV and the small amount of time they spend reading. With literacy, we have two millennia or more of development of criteria for relevance, criticism, logic, adequacy, judgment, and so on. In fact, those criteria themselves are part of literary culture--part of the left-brain processing mechanism that creates and uses language and writing. But visual culture bypasses all that--it is based on those holistic, gestalt, uncritical, intuitive faculties and processing mechanisms that we are calling right-brain. Thus, there is an inevitable conflict between literary and visual culture. Those who think that word-based literary culture is or should be the norm--intellectually, morally, educationally, politically--will tend to see visual culture, and especially its rise to dominance, as a threat to everything that they perceive as being true and good. Those immersed in visual culture do not have words and concepts to criticize the other side--words, concepts, and criticism being more or less foreign to the right-brain experience and mode of being--so they tend to ignore their linguistic-culture-based critics and go on their way as creators and receptors of visual culture. Critics tend to see them, especially the nonverbal ones, as vegetative receptors. But visually oriented people have their own reply; in a photography magazine a photographer once referred to word people as "print-oriented bastards." Visually oriented people could just as well say that their linguistic critics are one-sided, logocentric, patriarchal, unseeing, unfeeling, and otherwise deficient. The Advent of the Computer Screen There is actually a fourth technological development in the rise of visual culture: the computer, along with the computer screen and computer-based video games. Computers were invented as early as the mid 1940s but came to full prominence with the development of the digital personal computer in the 1970s and '80s and reached ubiquity in the '90s. As before, an enormous industry has arisen based on this technology. Computers and computer screens are actually a hybrid that combines visual-and word-based cultures. The computer uses a screen, and in that it is like television. Although much of computer use is for computer games and other visual applications, computers are even more widely used for linguistic-centered applications: word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and so on. The Internet is an especially interesting case: It is highly visual and yet requires literacy and word skill for use. Perhaps, at the end of the twentieth century, the computer culture has brought a convergence of the written and visual cultures, meaning a convergence of the left-and right-brain aspects of human beings, or of the masculine and the feminine. It also means that education in both literary skills and something for which we have no adequate words--visual or screen-using skills--is where we must go for the future.n Additional Reading Additional Reading: Norman Jewison, "Chess With Sex," Sight and Sound, May 1999, 58--9. Robert Logan, The Alphabet Effect, Morrow, New York, 1986. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1964. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, distributed by New York Graphic Society Books, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1982. Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, Viking, New York, 1998. Part of the World & I Millennium Series |
| Copyright © 2003 The World & I. All rights reserved. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy |
