August 15, 2004
text versus image
In Friday's Australian Financial Review John Quiggin has an article called The myth of convergence (subscription only) which addresses some of the themes that have been raised and explored here.
This criticizes the view of the early 1990s that text is on the way out and will be replaced by multimedia, by which is meant the reworking of McLuhan's thesis of the convergence of TV, telephones and computers into a single package. Quiggin's argument is two fold. He says that:
"... contrary to the predictions of Negroponte and others [eg. Camille Paglia], the rise of the internet has done almost nothing for video or multimedia, and is unlikely to do much any time soon."
Though John mentions pornography and file-trading he seems to imply that the internet is a text-based medium. He treats images in terms of video.
He then goes on to argue that the internet has made a huge difference to the distribution to text, by liberating it from the confines of print. He mentions academic databases, online government, online newpapers, magazines and blogs.
John concludes by saying "that we are entering the golden age of text."
Are we? Is this not also happening:
Tracey Moffat, Untitled Adventure Series 5, 2003-2004
What John says is fair enough as far as it goes. John does overlook the pictorial turn, and the development of a visual (consumer) culture (the spectacle of the Olympics and television adverts) that we live within:
What is displaced by this overlooking is the rise of visual literacy and the extent of the visual images on the internet and weblogs.
In our visual culture meaning is produced and conveyed in messages that are primarily visual, with the meanings relying almost exclusively on visual communication cues.
Olympics, Atlanta, 25 July 1996. Alexander POPOV (RUS).
Most signs operate on several levels--iconic (looks like what it represents) as well as symbolic (the Olympic rings, whose meaning is determined by convention) and indexical (links or connects things) Because of the essentially nonverbal nature of images they are particularly rich in complex visual signification.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 15, 2004 04:13 PM | TrackBack