Why Write 1000 Words When One Image Will Suffice?

 

Why Write 1000 Words When One Image Will Suffice?

Figure 1: 1000 words or one picture? (LavenderTowne, 2020).

        As I scroll through Facebook, I notice that most posts I see are images.  In my 10 years of using Facebook the way people post and share information about their lives has changed.  What used to be status updates in the form of written text has transformed to be information transmission by images.  These images include photographs, videos, drawings and the fun phenomenon of internet memes.  Tuan (1991) believed that ‘world-making’ required the use of “speech rather than image – what one says, hears, and reads rather than what one draws and sees” (p. 665).  It would appear that there has been a paradigm shift in world-making, especially on the internet from written text to images. 

 

        World-making is the human interaction we have with the current world.  It involves shaping the world in various ways, through language, art or physically manipulating the land (Clark, Finlay & Kelly, 2017).  Fairy tales, historical recounts, and the news are all examples of world-making communicated using speech, aligning with Tuan’s (1991) beliefs of world-making.  However, the way we communicate has changed, it has transformed and evolved (Coban, 2016). 

 

        The evolution of communication can be seen through social media platforms (Coban, 2016).  Most of us use social media platforms to communicate with others, but this communication is done with a specific purpose in mind, influenced by our online identity.  Our online identities are designed to highlight our positives and minimise our flaws (Raynor, 2012), we use them, through our activity, to create a world.  Instead of sharing the story of ourselves and our lives through text we share images which represent who we are (Pittman & Reich, 2016).  Our personal world we exist in and share with others is told through the images of our interests, significant events, connections to others through images.   

 

        The shift from text to images has been linked to the increase in ease of communication (Pittman & Reich, 2016), as supported by the picture superiority effect.  Images can make shared content be more memorable, they are able to be received and interacted with immediately, whilst promoting intimacy through a snapshot into a person’s life (Pittman & Reich, 2016).  The immediacy and intimacy of image sharing allows users to feel more connected to others online, and this connectedness underpins the paradigm shift from text to images (Coban, 2016).

 

        Whilst this shift to images has occurred due to the ease of communication by social media users, speech will still play a role in world-making.  Speech, including language, are crucial for being able to organise our ideas such as self and identity (Kuttainen, 2020).  Whilst images make transmitting our online identity easier, language will still be used to express other parts of ourselves which images cannot, as Tuan (1991) observes language makes visible and real things which were previously non-existent or invisible (p.685). 

 

        As we move forward on social media, I expect that I will continue seeing more images whilst scrolling through Facebook because images enhance the communication experience promoting connectedness, immediacy and intimacy.  However, speech will still be present because despite the paradigm shift, language is, and will remain, a vital component of our identities and ability to communicate. 

References

Clark, T., Finlay, E., & Kelly, P. (2017). Worldmaking: An Introduction. In T. Clark, E. Finlay, & P. Kelly (Eds.), Worldmaking: Literature, language and culture (pp. 1-14). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Coban, B. (2016). Social Media R/evolution: An Introduction. In B. Coban (Ed.), Social Media and Social Movements: The Transformation of Communication Patterns (pp. vii-xix). Lexington Books.

Kuttainen, V. (2020). BA1002: Week 5 Narrative and Communication [PowerPoint slides]. LearnJCU. https://learn.jcu.edu.au

LavenderTowne, H. (2020). Is a picture really worth 1000 words?. Twitter. https://twitter.com/lavendertowne/status/1244343901118291968

Pittman, M., & Reich, B. (2016). Social media and loneliness: Why an Instagram picture may be worth more than a thousand Twitter words. Computer in Human Behaviour, 62, 155-167.

Tuan, Y. (1991). Language and the making of place: A narrative-description approach. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81(4), 684-696.

Raynor, T. (2012). Foucault and social media: I tweet, therefore I become. Philosophy for change: Ideas that make a difference. https://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/foucault-and-social-media-i-tweet-therefore-i-become/