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The dangers of visual culture: the power to control and manipulate images is democratizing, but it may also undermine trust Author: Christine Rosen Date: March-April 2007 From: The Futurist(Vol. 41, Issue 2) Publisher: World Future Society Document Type: Article Length: 1,189 words

Full Text: The average person sees tens of thousands of images in the course of a day--images on television, in newspapers and magazines, on Web sites, and on the sides of buses. Images also grace soda cans, T-shirts, and billboards, and Internet search engines can instantly procure images for practically any word you type.

On Flickr.com, a photo-sharing Web site, you can type in a word such as "love" and find amateur digital photos of couples in steamy embrace or parents hugging their children. Type in "terror," and among the results is a photograph of the World Trade Center towers burning. "Remember when this was a shocking image?" asks the person who posted the picture.

The question is not merely rhetorical. It points to something important about images in our culture: They have, by their sheer number and ease of replication, become less magical and less shocking--a situation unknown until fairly recently in human history. Until the development of mass reproduction, images carried more power and evoked more fear. The second of the Ten Commandments listed in Exodus 20 warns against idolizing, or even making, graven images: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

During the English Reformation, Henry VIII's advisor Thomas Cromwell led the effort to destroy religious images and icons in the country's churches and monasteries, and was successful enough that few survive to this day. The 2001 decision by the Taliban government in Afghanistan to destroy images throughout the country--including the two towering stone Buddhas carved into the cliffs of Bamiyan--is only the most recent example of this impulse. Political leaders have long feared images and taken extreme measures to control and manipulate them. The anonymous minions of manipulators who sanitized photographs at the behest of Stalin (a man who seemingly never met an enemy he didn't murder and then airbrush from history) are perhaps the best known example. Control of images has long been a preoccupation of the powerful.

Today, anyone with a digital camera and a personal computer can produce and alter an image. As a result, the power of the image has been diluted in one sense, but strengthened in another. It has been diluted by the ubiquity of images and the many populist technologies (like inexpensive cameras and picture-editing software) that give almost everyone the power to create, distort, and transmit images. But it has been strengthened by the gradual capitulation of the printed word to pictures, particularly moving pictures. Text ceded to image might be likened to an articulate person being rendered mute, forced to communicate via gesture and expression rather than language.

People love images. We love the democratizing power of technologies--such as digital cameras, video cameras, Photoshop, and PowerPoint--that give us the capability to make and manipulate images. What we are less eager to consider are the broader cultural effects of a society devoted to the image. Historians and anthropologists have explored the story of mankind's movement from an oral-based culture to a written culture, and later to a printed one. But it is only in the past several decades that we have begun to assimilate the effects of the move from a culture based on the printed word to one based largely on images.

In making images rather than texts our guide, are we opening up new vistas for understanding and expression, creating a form of communication that is "better than print," as New York University communications professor Mitchell Stephens has argued? Or are we merely making a peculiar and unwelcome return to forms of communication once ascendant in preliterate societies--perhaps creating a world of hieroglyphics and ideograms (albeit technologically sophisticated ones)--and in the process becoming, as the late Daniel Boorstin argued, slavishly devoted to the enchanting and superficial image at the expense of the deeper truths that the written word alone can convey?

Two things in particular are at stake in our contemporary confrontation with an image-based culture. First, technology has considerably undermined our ability to trust what we see, yet we have not adequately grappled with the effects of this on our notions of truth. Second, if we are indeed moving from the era of the printed word to an era dominated by the image, what impact will this have on culture, broadly speaking, and its institutions? What will art, literature, and music look like in the age of the image? And will we, in the age of the image, become too easily accustomed to verisimilar rather than true things, preferring appearance to reality and in the process rejecting the demands of discipline and patience that true things often require of us if we are to understand their meaning and describe it with precision?

The potential costs of moving from the printed word to the image are immense. We may find ourselves in a world where our ability to communicate is stunted, our understanding and acceptance of what we see questionable, and our desire to transmit culture from one generation to the next seriously compromised.

About the Author

Christine Rosen is the author of several books, including, most recently, My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of Divine Girlhood (Public Affairs, 2006). She is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and senior editor at The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society. A longer version of her article is available at www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/10/rosen.htm).