Visually illiterate

Watch music videos, car commercials, commercials for medications, action movies, fashion ads, the body language of news reporters, the clothing and makeup of celebrities. We live large portions of our lives staring at screens. We absorb this stuff and act on it. We live in a visual world. Written language is less and less a component of our daily lives, our intellectual lives.

We are seduced, educated, manipulated and entertained by visual media. We become consumers, voyeurs and celebrities on the social media of others.

But intentionally or by default, we are visually illiterate. In the absence of any real understanding of or education in the visual language, we are left to our own devices to interpret the visual messages we get. We don’t know how to deconstruct the images that come to us. We can’t figure out how they were constructed, why they were constructed and what the motives behind them are. That has political, social, cultural and economic consequences for all of us.