Brothel Without Walls
How will history, literature, and art be passed down to the next generation asks CHRISTNE ROSEN, who chronicles the decline of the written word and likens Photoshop to the arming of toddlers with dynamite.
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 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 — the ceding of text to image, which might be likened not to a defeated political candidate ceding to his opponent, but to an articulate person being rendered mute, forced to communicate via gesture and expression rather than language.
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.
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 - 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?
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.
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.
The Mirror With a Memory
In her elegant extended essay, On Photography, the late Susan Sontag argues that images — particularly photographs — carry the risk of undermining true things and genuine experiences, as well as the danger of upending our understanding of art. “Knowing a great deal about what is in the world (art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature) through photographic images,” Sontag notes, “people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when they see the real thing.” This is not a new problem, of course; it plagued the art world when the printing process allowed the mass reproduction of great works of art, and its effects can still be seen whenever one overhears a museum-goer express disappointment that the Van Gogh he sees hanging on the wall is nowhere near as vibrant as the one on his coffee mug.
Images do not necessarily lead to meaning; the information they convey does not always lead to knowledge. This is due in part to the fact that photographic images must constantly be refreshed . “Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel,” Sontag argues. “Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised — partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror.”
Marshall McLuhan, the Sixties media guru, offered perhaps the most blunt and apt metaphor for photography: he called it “the brothel-without-walls.” After all, he noted, the images of celebrities whose behavior we so avidly track “can be bought and hugged and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes”— and all for a greatly reduced price.
Bloodthirsty Presidents
One of the most successful mass manipulators of the photographic image was Stalin. “The physical eradication of Stalin’s political opponents at the hands of the secret police was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence,” David King writes. Airbrush, India ink, and scalpel were all marshaled to remove enemies such as Trotsky from photographs. “There is hardly a publication from the Stalinist period that does not bear the scars of this political vandalism.”
Even in non-authoritarian societies, early photo falsification was commonly used to dupe the masses. Photographs from the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century purported to show ghosts, levitating mediums, and a motley array of other emanations that were proffered as evidence of the spirit world by devotees of the spiritualism movement popular at the time.
But it was the debut of a computer program called Photoshop in 1990 that allowed the masses, inexpensively and easily, to begin rewriting visual history. “It’s the inevitable consequence of the democratization of technology,” John Knoll, the inventor of Photoshop, told Salon.com. “You give people a tool, but you can’t really control what they do with it.”
For some people, of course, offering Photoshop as a tool is akin to giving a stick of dynamite to a toddler. It has introduced a new fecklessness into our relationship with the image. We tend to lose respect for things we can manipulate. And when we can so readily manipulate images — even images of presidents or loved ones — we contribute to the decline of respect for what the image represents.
Photoshop is popular not only because it allows us visually to settle scores, but also because it appeals to our desire for the incongruous (and the ribald). “Photoshop contests” such as those found on the website Fark.com offer people the opportunity to create wacky and fantastic images that are then judged by others in cyberspace. The Bush-Cheney campaign was pilloried for using a Photoshopped image of a crowd of soldiers in the recent presidential election; the photo duplicated groups of soldiers to make the crowd appear larger than it actually was. Similarly, a Seventies-era image of Jane Fonda addressing an anti-war crowd with a young and raptly admiring John Kerry looking on was also created with Photoshop sorcery but circulated widely on the Internet during the last presidential election as evidence of Kerry’s extreme views. Photoshop, in effect, democratizes the ability to commit fraud.
According to enthusiasts of television, the speed and sophistication of moving images allows new and improved forms of oral storytelling that can and should replace staler vehicles like the novel. Video game and television apologist Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You, dreams of a world of “DVD cases lining living room shelves like so many triple-decker novels.” In fact, television doesn’t really “tell stories.” It constructs fantasy worlds through a combination of images and words, relying more on our visual and aural senses and leaving less to the imagination than oral storytelling does.
It is precisely those hidden stories in the moving image that excite critics like NYU professor Mitchell Stephens. In The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word, Stephens argues that the moving image offers a potential cure for the “crisis of the spirit” that afflicts our society, and he is enthusiastic about the fact that “the image is replacing the word as the predominant means of mental transport.” He quotes approvingly the prediction of movie director Ridley Scott, who declares: “Film is twentieth-century theater, and it will become twenty-first-century writing.”
Perhaps it will. But Stephens, like other boosters of the image, fails to acknowledge what we will lose as well as gain if this revolution succeeds. He says, for example, “our descendants undoubtedly will still learn to read and write, but they undoubtedly will read and write less often and, therefore, less well.” Language, too, will be “less precise, less subtle,” and books “will maintain a small, elite audience.” This, then, is the future that prompts celebration: a world where, after a century’s effort to make literacy as broadly accessible as possible — to make it a tool for the masses — the ability to read and write is once again returned to the elite. Reading and writing either become what they were before widespread education — a mark of privilege — or else antiquarian preoccupations or mere hobbies, like coin collecting.
Such a deficit will pose a unique challenge for cultural transmission from one generation to the next. How, in Stephens’s future world of the moving image, will history, literature, and art be passed down to the next generation? He might envision classrooms where children watch the History Channel rather than pore over dull textbooks. But no matter how much one might enjoy the BBC’s televised version of Pride and Prejudice, it is no substitute for actually reading Austen’s prose.
Brain Candy
Concern about the long-term effects of being saturated by moving images is not merely the expression of quasi-Luddite angst or cultural conservatism. It has a basis in what the neurosciences are teaching us about the brain and how it processes images. Images can have a profound physiological impact on those who view them. Dr. Steven Most, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, recently found that graphic images can “blind” us by briefly impairing the brain, often for as long as one-fifth of a second. As his fellow researcher explained to Discovery News: “Brain mechanisms that help us to attend to things become tied up by the provocative image, unable to orient to other stimuli.” These kinds of findings have led to warnings about the long-term negative impact of moving images on young minds.
By elevating image over substance and form over content, Daniel Boorstin argued that society was at risk of substituting “pseudo-events” for real life and personal image-making for real virtue. Real events are now compared to those of sitcom characters; real tragedies or accidents are described as being “just like a movie”. Even the imagination is often crippled by our image-based culture. For every creative artist (like Gursky) using Photoshop there is a plethora of posturing and shallow artists like Damien Hirst, who once proudly told an interviewer that he spent more time “watching TV than ever I did in the galleries.”
Techno-enthusiasts are fond of reminding us, as if relating a quaint tale of reason’s triumph over superstition, that new technologies have always stirred controversy. But contemporary critics who question the proliferation of images in culture and who fear that the sheer number of images will undermine the sensibility that creates readers of the written word (replacing them with clever but shallow interpreters of the image) aren’t worried about being usurped by image-makers. They are motivated largely by the hope of preserving what is left of their craft. They are more like the conservationist who has made the forest his home only to discover, to his surprise, that the animals with which he shares it are rapidly dwindling in number. What he wants to know, in his perplexed state, is not “how do I retreat deeper into the forest?” but “how might I preserve the few survivors before all record of them is lost?”
So it is with those who resist an image-based culture. As its boosters suggest, it is here to stay, and likely to grow more powerful as time goes on, making all of us virtual flâneurs strolling down boulevards filled with digital images and moving pictures. We will, of course, be enormously entertained by these images, and many of them will tell us stories in new and exciting ways. At the same time, however, we will have lost something profound: the ability to marshal words to describe the ambiguities of life and the sources of our ideas; the possibility of conveying to others, with the subtlety, precision, and poetry of the written word, why particular events or people affect us as they do; and the capacity, through language, to distill the deeper meaning of common experience. We will become a society of a million pictures without much memory, a society that looks forward every second to an immediate replication of what it has just done, but one that does not sustain the difficult labor of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.
Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Brothel Without Walls is an edited version of her essay, The Image Culture, published in The New Atlantis,
