A recent post over at Chicago Boyz echoes some of the themes of my recent post, The Visual Imagery Society:
I don’t think, though, that the sensorial interface provides insulation against people like those who “turned the centruy into an abattoirâ€â€¦indeed, it increases vulnerability to such people, since it allows them to present their appeals in ways not directly subject to logical refutation. I also think the Eloi-Morlock distinction may show some changes over time. The first generation of “Tunnel of Oppression†designers may be highly literate and text-oriented, basing their ideas on the reading of people like Foucault–but ten years later, the Tunnels of Oppression may well be designed by people whose own ideas were formed by earlier Tunnels of Oppression, films, and other sensial interfaces.
While the educational profession has tended too often to surrender to the sensorial interface, the emergence of blogging–essentially a text-based medium–has created a trend in the opposite direction. But the number of blog-writers and blog-readers remains small as a proportion of the population, and the failures of K-12 education have arguably created a large segment of people who will never be able to deal easily and naturally with text.
Not only are the arguments not subject to logical refutation, logical refutation may not be comprehended by those for whom visualcy is the primary communication modality.
