“WE LIVE IN A VISUAL CULTURE”
There exists a silly cliché that says “we live in a visual culture”. In fact, this is a loosely veiled insult. It’s heard mostly in academic circles and from others suggesting that the poor common folk, especially “the youth”, are unreasonably consumed by popular culture. They tell us visual media such as movies, videos, video games, graphic novels, and the like are all inferior, anti-intellectual incarnations of low-culture. They would have us believe that a society focused on literature and high-culture is ideal and that anything else is a silly distraction and a form of unlearning. You've seen this.
The notion is so deeply ingrained that we can even see it in our language. The term "well-read", for example, describes someone intelligent and educated. Similarly, having been published carries connotations that other endeavours do not and suggest one's intellectual potency, credibility, and even social status. So debased are these ideas you’ll note there's little care for the actual content of the work, never mind the significance of its contribution, just as being labelled well-read is merely an assumption rather than direct knowledge of someone’s experience or learning. And it certainly never has anything to do with a person's reading habits.
IN PRACTICE
If there’s any doubt the academy cares little for the visual we need look no further than how visuals are treated at universities and even in academic journals. I can assure you that as a student I could easily use a thousand images in a single PowerPoint presentation, and do so while making no reference to creators or sources of those images. And this is done weekly by countless students, instructors, and administrators – none of whom have ever had a high pressure conversation about ethics and academic integrity or worried about a single wayward .jpg potentially ending their academic career. The same is not true for mere words on a page. Right?
But why the discrepancy? It seems to me that a photograph, say, is much more discrete and precious a thing than a paragraph. Many photographs are fleeting and irreproducible moments that are not easily traceable back to their creator and should, as a result, take priority over and receive more concern and care that the mere re-arrangement of ubiquitous words. No?
But I'd like to go further still. I'd like to argue here that not only is the visual domain not a lesser form than the written but also that it’s not, in fact, dominant. Not in the least.
WE LIVE IN AN ACOUSTIC CULTURE
If anything, it seems to me that we live in an acoustic culture. Ask yourself how powerful our connection is to the dimension of sound and to music? I think these are our most potent mediums. Is sound not our dominant pedagogical tool?
Don't we teach our children by speaking and reading to them and through rhyme and song? And prior to literacy, don't most folks need an acoustic-based grounding in language which forms a scaffolding upon which they build reading and writing skills? And don't most children learn to read or write by first acquiring the alphabet building blocks of language? And how do we drive those into memory? By way of song. Right.
If we were a visual culture or species would we not ground all this in the visual? Would we not highlight essential concepts like shape, line, and edge; colour, contrast, and texture; size, scale, and space? And yet we do not do this. Because virtually none of that matters. By contrast, don't we fix the sounds associated with word components? And don't we ascribe the visual representation of language with only the most loose visual association? Doesn't the visual component of language come in upper and lower case as well as an endless number of alternative physical forms, due to personal variation in one's printing and writing styles as well as an ever-growing myriad of physical and electronic typefaces. Right. The visual changes a great deal from setting to setting and across time, but what remains critical and relatively unchanging is the sound. Right.
Moving up from language representation and acquisition, you also know that, for a so-called visual culture, we hardly pay any attention and ascribe little value generally to visual work. In our culture, we don’t try to inspire our youth to become sculptors, cartographers, or abstract expressionist painters. Even within our popular visual media, like film and television, when we talk about ubiquitous childhood experiences we don’t get nostalgic and think back to being twelve years old and of our dreams of casting that first sculpture or designing a aesthetically appealing bridge. Isn't that what you'd expect of a visual culture?
Consider that effectively no child has ever aspired to be the next Robert Capa, Kevin Carter, Carol Guzy, Gyula Halasz, Dorothea Lange, Steve McCurry, or James Nechtwey. In fact, to nearly everyone the aforementioned names could be a random selection of names pulled from a phone book. Would anyone reading this recognize a list of the most famous, influential, critically-acclaimed, award-winning photographers of the 20th century? Did you recognize even two of them? And could you helplessly link the name to a photograph of theirs? Seems unlikely and yet I'm pretty sure many would recognize their work. I think this inability to put a name or face to that work makes my point.
Now interrogate the musical domain in the same way. Doing so we find a dramatically different situation. The names, faces, persona, and even life story of the artist comes as a total package without even having to hear the music. For instance, from the title “Hound Dog” alone most people who have absorbed even a relatively small amount of Western culture will immediately want to curl their lip, pull an imaginary microphone at their face, and shimmy their hips and shoulders while helplessly recalling Elvis’ lyrics: “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time…” This works with every popular song going back three generations. (“What a Wonderful World,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Respect,” “Stop in the Name of Love,” “Dancing Queen,” “Piano Man,” “Another Brick in the Wall,” “Billy Jean,” “Fight for Your Right [to Party],” “U Can’t Touch This”). Almost anyone with a radio could probably name the artists behind these songs and roughly when the song was published; and even offer a litany of information about the artist’s entire body of work, their significant albums or concerts; and you’re even likely to get personal anecdotes, like recollections of the first time they heard the song or saw the artist in concert or how their sister used to dress up and dance to the song in the living room.
Is the same true for anyone in this "visual culture", so-called, with regard to the world’s photographers, glassblowers, architects, typographers, and graphic designers? No. And why is that? Well, quite simply, because we don’t live in a visual culture.
If we lived in a visual culture surely my list of photographer names would at least be recognizable. We would also all be fetishizing, trying to get our hands on the latest version or the earliest printing. We might also expect choreographers, sculptors, and typeface designers to have legions of lawyers, journalists, and policy-makers frothing at the mouth over unauthorized reproductions. This army would hail their intellectual property as sacrosanct, a pillar of our cultural identity and a cornerstone of our economy, a national treasure to be defended at virtually any cost. And they would do so with much greater political and legal venom than is done in defence of even our most precious forests or life-giving waters, as is done with even the worst music by the most detested “artist” today.
If we lived in a visual culture the work of visual artists would probably be seen as a threat. Parent groups, talk show hosts, and senators would talk about banning selections of their work due to their powerful, wrongfully-political, and potentially radicalizing content. However, this heavy-handed rhetoric and the censorship that follows it is far more commonly reserved for music and musicians. For instance, you may recall Eddie Vedder being censored in 2007, or the Dixie Chicks before him. These musicians were publicly attacked, and for years across all media, for merely having a political opinion. These musicians did nothing at all radical. Their crime was to suggest that scaling up U.S. military intervention around the globe and engaging much of the world, directly or indirectly, in multiple wars was bad news. These were ideas that most people in the U.S. and around the globe understood as fact and simple common sense by this time. Yet, wide condemnation and censorship was still deemed necessary. While this attack on free speech seems absurd, here in the West in the 21st century, it shows just how important and influential music and its producers are in our culture.
Further still, it’s interesting to note that even what we think of as dominantly visual domains (such as film, video, television, and theatre) are inextricably infused with music and sound. So much so in fact that sound seems, in many respects, to be the most important element. For instance, I can easily listen to a two hour podcast or radio show (and this was a dominant form of entertainment for a whole generation), but does anyone watch four sitcoms back-to-back with the sound off, or regularly sit through silent play. Interestingly, even in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a play in which essentially nothing happens, the narrative is nevertheless driven by conversation, not visuals. And even 4’33”, the famous “silent” piano piece by Philip Glass, in which no notes are played, is an exercise demonstrating the essential and unavoidable nature of sound. The acoustic dimension conveys so much important information for us and is so closely tied to our emotions that even so-called “silent films” were always enriched by some form of live or recorded music or sound effect accompaniment. Further, you’ll also note that so long as we’ve been able to embed sound into film there has been a noticeable absence of silent actors. Silent acting was a very different craft than what is practised today, and one admired by millions. If we live in a highly visual culture, where are all the would-be Charlie Chaplains?
So significant is sound and voice that we seem to prefer it over our many other forms of communication. Despite its broad availability, for instance, nobody seems to care very much about making video calls; this despite its popularity in many of our most loved science fiction visions of the future and the technology being around for more than forty years now. We see the video-phone in popular films as far back as 1927, in Metropolis, and throughout the 20th century with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Aliens, Back to the Future, Johnny Mnemonic, and various Star Trek films (some of the most popular films of all time.) It’s also worth mentioning that video calling has been a common feature of other popular visual media such as comic books and cartoons throughout the twentieth century and into the present as well; whether it’s Dick Tracy’s “two-way wrist TV” or the Jetsons’ home video-phone, or regular sightings of similar devices on cartoons like the Simpsons and Futurama. Indeed, the video phone has to be one of the most resilient ideas in popular science fiction.
Now you might think of Skype as a counterargument. To this I would point out that, while Skype is certainly popular, the visual component of a Skype call is not requisite: calls to phones or other computers can be made without video. Significantly, and to my point I think, can you remember a time when you made a Skype call using only video and no sound? This almost never happens.
Further, Skype and similar services are primarily VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services that function for most users as a free long-distance phone service. This, I would argue, is their primary function and the reason for its popular uptake, not because they are a visual communication tool.
Similarly, texting is extremely popular and, importantly, a strictly visual form of communication. Yet texting is hugely problematic, as we all know. Even simple messages in text prove to be easily convoluted and misconstrued – and in ways that are simply impossible with verbal communication. (Let’s not even bring in that pesky autocorrect technology, designed to improve communication but that actually manages to mangle even simple messages beyond imagination.) The same, of course, is also true of email. As anyone who has sent an important personal message via email knows, a tremendous amount of information, critical to our perception and understanding, is simply lost when visual text is used instead of sound. This is true even when words are carefully chosen by the sender and meticulously translated on the other end by the receiver. As such, still today, even when text is so quick and easy to send, for fear of misinterpretations critical information is still shared verbally rather than through visual text.
You’re still not convinced? Then let’s look somewhere else. As a consumer society, one that likes to put a dollar value on things (whether they be products, places, or even other organisms), we tend to place a higher price tag on those things we consider to be of greater value. (Taking into account notions such as supply and demand, we can also assume that higher prices suggest greater demand or limited availability.) With this premise, I conducted a casual survey of home audio and visual options for sale. If somewhat anecdotal, this is one clear way to quantify the value and priority we as a society place on acoustic and visual objects. I looked at a wide spectrum of outlets selling such equipment, such as wholesalers, discount stores, big-box electronics chains, high-end specialty shops, and online retailers. In the visual realm, the highest priced options, and therefore presumably the most cutting-edge and coveted, were a $15,000 television and a $18,000 video projector. To this one may also be inclined add to that a $1000 DVD player, or a similarly priced wireless digital streaming device, as an essential visual accoutrement. As these and similar items are found in multiple stores, are everywhere online, and are produced by international electronics companies, we can rule out scarcity as a reason for such high price tags.
So, to compare, within the audio domain there was no discernable upper limit to the amount of money one could spend. For instance, it would not be difficult to spent over $20,000 on a single speaker, nevermind a complete home audio package including receiver, pre-amp, media player, turntable, etcetera. In the world of audio one could very easily spend a hundred thousand dollars, without entering the savagely pricey world of custom-made electronics with high-end fittings and finishes. And I think it’s also interesting to note that people don’t spend serious money on a television or projector without having a complimentary sound system. And, to my point, you will note this is not the case in reverse: you can and often do find people with an exquisite sound system who have no intention of ever adding a screen to the mix. To me these examples suggest a clear and common priority placed on sound.
In fact, I’m reminded that even in noisy public spaces we are far more sensitive to sound and critical of even mild auditory violations. I’m thinking of our city busses and the fact that they all display special signage in defence of public acoustic space. These signs implore people to refrain from playing loud or even audible music – lest it offend the delicate acoustic sensibilities of other riders. Just imagine for a moment what would happen if someone tried to get on the bus with a boom-box on their shoulder, 80s style – even if they were very quietly playing beloved patriotic tunes that no one one the bus is likely to hear, nevermind object to – they would be refused entry at the door unless they could quickly turn the music off and convince the driver that it wouldn’t come back on. By contrast, you’ll notice there is no such signage cautioning against even highly offensive visuals. None. Someone can happily march onto any bus with the most loud and hateful symbols, words, or images on their clothing, or tattooed across their face – and visible to, and understood by, everyone on the bus regardless of language or background – and no one will say a thing.
For another example, the first major task of every prime minister or president, after winning a series of public debates and then the election, is the inaugural address. In this requisite speech the new leader lays out their plan for the coming term. Now if we lived in visual culture we might expect such a significant message to be imparted in the form of a hand-written essay or a PowerPoint presentation, or perhaps as a film or even some elaborate choreography. If this was a visual culture we might expect a sketch, a collage, a diorama, or at least some reliance at all on visuals – whether they be graphs, flow charts, or cute little info-graphics incorporating all of the above – but these forms are seen as unnecessary and somehow beneath the leader’s rank. Even suggesting the use of such visuals would seem absurd to most people (which, of course, is precisely my argument.) Now you’d be right to notice that the inauguration is in many ways a visual spectacle. This is true, yet it is the address itself, the oratory, that everyone turned up and tuned in for. The speech is the bit that is replayed, analyzed, interpreted and critiqued ad nauseam. It is not the text, it’s the words they say and how they say them, it’s what was heard that matters. Similarly, presidents, even our own prime minister, often use musical ability to win public approval, whether that’s Clinton on his saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show, Obama singing Al Green in Harlem, or Harper behind the piano doing the Beatles. While such musical acts are almost common, expected now due to their popular appeal, we don’t see our leaders pulling out their watercolours, showing off their skills in the darkroom, or taking pains to offer evidence of their Photoshop prowess.
Visual culture is not dominant. Even where visual forms are most popular and significant they often employ music and sound as a vehicle to get there. So, yeah, I think all this noise about visual culture is just that.
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