Benjamin R. Barber is uneasy about pictures and the influential effects of images. He understands our world in terms of the conflict between tribalism and globalism, with both posing threats to democracy.
A quote from Benjamin Barber about the internet and democracy:
"There is considerable ambiguity surrounding the use of pictures and text in the new technologies. In its early incarnation, the web has been a word-based technology (scrolling text) that has actually countered the pictorial leanings of television. I have argued elsewhere that by returning us to 'the word' the web is an apt medium for politics, law, deliberation and contracts. Reason and promising are the products of the word and for all its technological progress, this remains a civilization based on the Word. The word-centered character of the technology is good for democratic politics, good for participation and good for deliberation (only plebiscitory democracy benefits from manipulated images). Yet, this focus on the word is but a matter of technological lag-time. The Net is faster and getting faster. Streaming video is the wave of the future, allowing moving pictures to displace text. Moreover, the generation being trained incomputers today is a television educated, picture-inundated generation that prefers 'moving pictures.'"
"In as much as democracy is the politics of reason and of promising, and reasoning and promising demand the currency of words, democracy will rely on words rather than pictures and streaming video will not be a welcome development. It maybe that the transition from a civilization of the word to a civilization of moving pictures will inaugurate new political institutions rather than eroding democratic institutions. Yet such a civilization may be less able to sustain promising and the social contract, or the kinds of discourse that make democracy possible."
Barber has overlooked the power of the still image in his discourse. The web is also a domain where text and image are combined, this site being a good example.The moving image will have an increased presence but it will never render the 'older forms' obsolete.
Posted by: Julie Shiels on July 18, 2005 11:17 AMJulie,
yes.
But I also think that he is afraid of the image, whether moving or still. He doesn't understand that it is a way of knowing just like words.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on July 20, 2005 07:39 PMSo are you saying he is visually illiterate or would you say that he is only willing to communicate in one language - his own? Doesn't bode well for democracy.
Posted by: Julie Shiels on July 21, 2005 08:36 PMJulia,
Barber is not visually illiterate. He fears the power of the image. Consider this quote:
"No one will quickly forget how American foreign policy in the Horn of Africa was powerfully influenced by a single image, the picture of a dead American soldier in Somalia, being dragged naked across the ground after his helicopter had been shot down by a local warlord. This single photograph led to America?s withdrawal from military commitments in Africa and in time around the world (in 2000, George Bush,Jr. won in the Presidency in part on the basis of a promise to intervene less in world affairs than the busybody Democrats!) What Steven Spielberg may do at his "Magic" reengineering studios can increasingly be done by any modestly competent user on the Net. We know that the Net has today already become a source of rumor and gossip and misinformation: with contrived images and manipulate and morphed pictures, things are unlikely to improve."
Ther was a similar image of a naked young girl running down the road burning from being napalmed by the Americas in the Vietnam war. That changed people's perceptions of the war.
My interpretation is that it is more a case of words over images. You can trust words but not images.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on July 21, 2005 09:47 PMI think he is saying democratic access to web publishing is frightening because there is no controlling what people put out there. The examples he gives take the events out of their historical context. I'd say the cumalitive effect of body bags and a mass protest movement ended the Vietnam War. Has he also forgotten that the US was being seriously thrashed.
The powerful thing for me about an image is, it stays in my head long after the words from a story have dropped out. Maybe that feeds his argument but I wouldn't underestimate the growing sophistication of the audience to question anything that is posted on the web.
Julie,
we could rub John Hartley against Benjamin Barber so they scrap up against one another. Hartley, in 'The Politics of Pictures' says:
"The aim of understanding media retains its utility, in seeking to analyze the media in the here and now, in their current dispositions of power, their social reach, their diffusion and uses....What is implicit in the politics of popular reality...is a new, fragmented politics of knowledge...a sensitivity to the relations between popular reality and intellectual culture ...and a sense of distinction between different lefts."
It is a phobia.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on July 26, 2005 05:35 PM