Rise of the Image

Photo-sharing apps are, well, insanely popular. But I never thought of them the way Ali Eteraz described them in his article titled The War on Wordsmiths:

“I submit that Instagram and its cousins represent an undeclared war on writing. On words.”

How’s that?

“(They give the) user the ability to speak in the most important language of our so-called post-literate society. The image.”

So much so that:

“The image is the new word. Don’t send a message expressing your emotion, send an image representing the idea.”

So who is unhappy with this trend?

“We are the wordsmiths. The poets. The short story writers. The memoirists. The novelists. The journalists. Call us anachronistic. Call us conservative. Call us backward.”

Yup, those folks are definitely swimming against the tide. Even text itself is increasingly getting truncated to tweet sized chunks!

“Most realists among the wordsmiths already know that short of some massive cataclysm that lays to waste the electronic grid that makes the delivery of images so easy, we are pretty much done for.”

And besides isn’t it true that:

“Language has only one use, which is to tell a story, and a story can be told in a thousand different ways.”

Eteraz gloomily ends with the feeling that:

“Maybe the wordsmith now must traverse in those subterranean places that the image dares not go because it is simply too dark to take pictures there.”

Or maybe he should accept this trend as a case of going back to the future!

“After all, we are descendants of cavemen that told their stories upon stone walls by way of images. And we are descended of societies where the primary language was the hieroglyph, which is nothing more than words represented in imagistic forms.”

We are back to square one, I guess: Image über alles!