Visual media rules! The lost war against forgetting

One of the best examples of an organising principle is the Google search engine. It organises searches on what is most popular and not necessarily on what is most applicable or even what is verifiable or accurate.

Google doesn’t search for the best information. It searches for websites with the most amount of links or hits on specified terms. Google produces an avalanche of information. Any sort of information and instantaneously.

The organising principle behind TV news is different but the result is the same. It gathers information from all over the world via syndicates, edits across time zones and then broadcasts it. If you ever wonder why you’re watching Taiwanese politicians fight in their parliament, it’s not because it contains core news values such as conflict, impact, proximity or timeliness. It’s simply because the networks have the pictures.

Watching a squirrel drive a small-motorised boat around a swimming pool is news. So is the fact that the 100th US soldier was killed in Afghanistan. Yet the squirrel will rank higher on Youtube. So the more serious the content, the closer we drift towards Dadaism.

“For technological change is neither additive nor subtractive, but ecological. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given environment, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival,” Gideon Haigh said in The Monthly.

What does this say about exposition - how we have traditionally examined and critiqued information? For my generation (boomers) and those who came before, most of our modern ideas about the uses of the intellect were formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about education, knowledge, truth and information. This was the age of exposition as defined by the primacy of the written word.

Exposition is more than a type of analysis. It is a mode of thought. It’s a method of learning and a means of expression. Exposition leads us to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially. It places a high valuation on reason and order.

It has a large capacity for detachment and objectivity and a tolerance for delayed response. It forgoes the gratification of replying now for time spent considering a position.

The image has no respect for time and space. Its natural tendency is to compress everything in to now, this very instant.

It has everything to do with the speed at which information is delivered. TV and the Internet are masters of speed. It’s live or as my young niece used to say, it’s alive, because it produces a phantasmagoria of instant friends and melodious jingles.

Allow me to digress. Students have worked and played with computers for one full generation. We know a great deal about how they “interface” with text on the screen. They race across the surface, dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking what they already want and shunning the rest.

This is a kind of literacy but it breaks down in the face of dense argument, a modernist poem, a long political tract and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention.