From the dawn of the written alphabet and on through the Reign of the Printed Word our species has tended to be hyper-visual. Written words ARE pictures. Very dense, concentrated images which require a profound extension of the brain's eye-power in order to follow and grasp these pictures -- and convert them almost directly into meaningful concepts.
So it has been.
When we say today "culture is becoming more visually-oriented" we actually mean exactly the opposite. The neuro-ocular specialization is slipping, being scaled back. People are today less comfortable with ultra-visual efforts and more interested in cruder images, simpler symbols, and political "colours." We prefer was is easier to see because we are becoming less visual.
Why?
Electronic worlds are vibratory, wave-like, echoing, resonant, chattering, beeping & streaming through stereophonic space.
I call the acoustic nature of electricity by the name aurality.
We see news upon the Internet and then claim that we "heard" this or that story. News behaves like village gossip. We can hear about things that are too far away to see. Our ears have become thirsty for Walkmans, iPods and personal sountracks. MTV was NOT the visual takeover of music but the sonic takeover of video.
In stereophonic space, in the great theatrical echo chamber of the digital world, we are devotees of reverberating sound-bites, rhythmic moods, and the all-at-once feeling that we experience when listening deeply with closed eyes. As electronics came upon in the 19th century we witnessed a dramatic effect on the visual arts -- a move to impression, blurs, abstract color chunks replaced the hyper-detailed realism of previous centuries. The eye is losing ground to the ear. The "focal point" is less interesting than the "resonant field."
The simplistic observation that we are getting more visual (as opposed to wordy) is a confession that we are getting less visual, simpler in our visual processing. This "more" is really the aurality that is subverting imagery.
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Also bear in mind that human visual processing evolved in an extreme survival context- it was not uncommon for our ancestors to be something's dinner. As we have developed culturally, there has been less and less selective pressure for maintaining our visual hyper-acuity, instead there has been a shift inwards, an appropriation of visual processing circuits for abstract imaging. There are some theorists who speculate that our very self-awareness is a co-opting of our keenly developed pattern-recognition, ie. the patterns of electrical brain activity in the neocortex begin recognizing and responding to their own patterning, giving rise to consciousness.
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