The Power of Visual Arguments

Even in everyday situations, images — from T-shirts to billboards to animated films and computer screens — influence us. Media analyst Kevin Kelly ponders the role screens and their images now play in our lives:

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places — like ATM machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.

— Kevin Kelly, “Becoming Screen Literate”

Of course, visual arguments weren’t invented by YouTube, and their power isn’t novel either. The pharaohs of Egypt lined the banks of the Nile River with statues of themselves to assert their authority, and there is no shortage of monumental effigies in Washington, D.C., today.

Still, the ease with which all of us make and share images is unprecedented: people are uploading a billion shots a day to Snapchat, a photo-messaging application that deletes items after only a brief viewing. And most of us have easily adjusted to instantaneous multichannel, multimedia connectivity (see Chapter 16). We expect it to be seamless too. The prophet of this era was Marshall McLuhan, who nearly fifty years ago proclaimed that “the medium is the massage,” with the play on message and massage intentional. As McLuhan says, “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us. . . . All media works us over completely.”