New Media Literacies...or is it Visualities?

Kevin Kelly's statement in his article Becoming Screen Literate claiming that our generation and more is in the midst of a second Gutenberg shift--that is the change from book fluency to screen fluency--could not be more true. Society is growing more heavily drawn to visual distribution of information, ideas, and entertainment. Information is ready to bombard us via the Screen nearly everywhere we go. Phones, televisions, in cars, planes or trains, airports, waiting rooms, along the city street, computers, and more dazzle our minds with a flash of color and noise.

Still, there are particular aspects of society that may never be replaced by the visual media, unless technological developments are made to make archiving, referencing, and citing of digital frames or media more easily done. Documentation of information for judicial reasons may never be replaced by video or photography, due to the great depth of information and the intricacy and precision of the written word. The word is objective, like the word of the law. Visual media is subjective and may convey a lot more subliminal information, rather than blatant factual data. Kelly's article stated these same ideas, saying that one cannot browse a film like a book, or have the ability to pinpoint a specific artifact within the film with the same amount of ease.

To reference Billout's article, Is Google Making us Stoopid, reading is not instinctive to human nature. It requires a great deal of training to understand the shapes and figures that form meaning and language. Visual distribution of data is readily understandable, and it is changing how we perceive information and how we deal with it. The author mentioned how this new form of technology has shaped the way he researches, and consequently, the way it has shortened his attention span for reading. I can relate to the author, because for me it takes a great deal of willpower to plow through a few seven-page articles and still absorb the information. I am apparently victim to this technological shaping of the mind, as well.

As an architecture student, I must learn to manipulate this visual form of media, may it be through strictly stagnant imagery or a video presentation, to convey my idea or convince the review board that my design is infallible. Here is a link to an example of a video presentation that expresses architectural process and design, by Bjork Ingels Group: click here.

As the rest of my generation embraces the rising of the Screen, I must too, maybe for differing reasons than they.