Oooo Picture!

When I was a young lass one of my favorite activities was coloring. My sister, dad and I would lie on our living room carpet after dinner with our freshly sharpened box of Crayola crayons coloring pictures of Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus and puppy dogs with ribbons in their mouths. To this day I still enjoy coloring and, after giving it some thought, I realized it's primarily because I love a book with pictures - I mean who doesn't really? (I'm about to turn this into a bigger picture but it might be a stretch so bear with me). That's a fairly obvious statement considering every elementary school library is filled with nothing but picture books (with the small exception of that chapter book section in the back left corner in the library that only the nerdy kids with polo shirts and well groomed hair in 3rd grade venture into). But the picture book is a stepping stone - at some point you graduate to chapter books and (hopefully) by middle school you've traded the Berenstein Bears in for Judy Blume.* And as you grow older you move on to Dostoevsky, USA Today and Stephen Hawking's blog...at least that would be the natural assumption. But I've noticed lately that this isn't the case. Sure most people don't hang out at Starbucks paging ecstatically through War & Peace but I'm talking about communication on the most basic, every day level. Online news posts, magazines, commercials, TEXTING (tolerating this form of communication alone is like experiencing a slow death such as burning at the stake or eating too many pancakes). I've noticed that our written world has become littered...okay more like suffocated by pictures. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with pictures. Everybody loves a good picture. I'm saying that there's a wee excess of pictures. Picturemania. Picture preoccupation. Picture frenzy. Pictures pictures pictures.


Evidentiary Support Numero Uno: iPhone


First of all, this contraption is amazing. The zoom function on this bad boy never ceases to amaze me. Secondly, what happened to using words to describe a function, a file folder, an application, a phone book? Yes, the pictures are pretty. Yes, it's easy to tell which button does what. But words accomplish the same thing and that's what they're there for - communicating to result in understanding. You can interpret pictures, you can't interpret words! For instance, what does that photo of a sunflower indicate? Maybe it's a crop rotation reminder application. Maybe it's the weather forecast. Maybe it's just photos of flowers in season. (Okay okay, it says the button's function underneath the picture but you can barely see it).


It seems harmless to put pictures on a phone instead of groady black and white written material. But this is just one more contributing factor to the regression of society's reading habits and, inevitably, the reduction of intellectual capacity in humans. (Basically we're on our way chimp-dom, which is unfortunate because I hate bananas).


Evidentiary Support #2: TV


Okay okay, TV IS a series of pictures and you're meant to look at it so shame on me for even bringing it into the argument. But if you look at the progression of tv over the last twenty years - or even over the last ten or FIVE years - you'll notice a distinct escalation in how quickly the storyline, the dialogue, the scenes, EVERYTHING moves. Back in the day you had Ozzie & Harriet, who, in one half hour episode, would tackle the big problem of why the milkman was late one day. By the 80's it was the Keaton family arguing about Reaganomics vs. free love. Even Seinfeld moved at a normal pace. But now everything is "reality" tv or "news" shows covering "reality," when in actuality you have comedians commenting on a series of snapshots from pop culture stories of the week. I realize this isn't your grandmother's evening news with Walter Conkrite, but the fact that it's out in the universe waiting for some young, dumb youth to discover, only to have it be the main cause of his or her own short circuit / anxiety attack / aneurysm at the tender age of 19, is just upsetting.



With the programs that dominate TV now you have scene after scene after scene of just, well, stuff. I primarily blame Ryan Seacrest and the E! Network (although I will shamefully admit that I'm slightly obsessed with The Soup). But in the last two years these "news" shows have been sprouting up all over the place faster than bunnies on a farm. My problem isn't necessarily what they're "reporting" - it's how they're reporting it. The viewer spends more time looking at pictures of people on a red carpet or Tyra saying something inane on her talk show than they do actually listening to the host. And when you do listen to the host you realize they're saying next to nothing in far too many words. And that's when you realize they NEED these pictures because they have little (if not nothing) to actually contribute or say to the general populus. What is going on?!




Evidentiary Support #3: The Movie Industry


Two words: Michael Bay.




Movies today have become a barrage of ostentatious, CGI-animated, explosive-loaded scenes made by filmmakers who seem like they're overcompensating for...something. It's like they have action filmmaking diarrhea. You know what I'm talking about - it's scene after scene of something enormous exploding and watching the leading duo narrowly escape the raining fireballs of napalm. Michael Bay, in particular, seems to have perfected this - and I'm not saying he's a terrible filmmaker. Once again, that's not it. It's the over-the-top, in-your-face, biggest, baddest action scenes EVER. It's little dialogue (and storyline, for that matter) and a LOT of...well, stuff. You leave movies feeling exhausted and slightly retarded because of the ridiculous amount of images your eyes and brain were forced to process for the last two hours. I don't think there was ever a time when I watched the original Star Wars from 1977 and felt tired. Or Jaws. Or Total Recall. Or Last of the Mohicans. Somewhere in the late 90's filmmakers took a major wrong turn and ended up in one-upmanshipville (what?) trying to prove who had the bigger "idea"...and, seemingly, even bigger ego.




The only thing that is giving me hope is that people seem to be aware of this regression. Praise Allah for conscious human beings. Perhaps this is the reason I cry every time I watch Wall-E (or maybe it's those giant eyes on that danged robot - I hope I have a child that looks like that tin can). Unless there is John Connor-style revolution, I don't think technology will slow down or regress any time soon so the only thing we can do is remain conscious, aware and take everything in stride.



Good Lord. Did I really just say that?


- Libby


P.S. This post has taken far too long to write (approximately 3 months - yikes) and hence I will avoid trying to tackle such intense subject matter in the future.