Page 190 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

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VISUAL CULTURE

Paul Messaris

One need not be a technological determinist to recognize that the globalizing,
mass-mediated, commercially driven visual culture that so much of the world
lives in today – a culture embodied in movies, television, advertising, and other
pictorial media – is in part the product of technological developments in those
media. Whereas one can conceive of complex verbal cultures based only on
rudimentary means for the dissemination of the written word, contemporary
visual culture would be inconceivable without the technologies that make it
possible to produce automatic images of the visual world, to manipulate, copy,
and store those images, to make them seem to move, and to transmit them
instantaneously across vast spaces. This overview of visual culture will focus on
four visual technologies, and on the implications of each. In order of the
chronology of their invention, these four technologies are: print-making,
photography, cinematography, and television. In connection with these tech-
nologies, this discussion will examine the relationship between visual culture
and cognition; the nature of photographic truth and falsehood; the impact of
visual fiction and fantasy on viewers’ evaluations of their own lives; and visual
culture’s increasingly international character.

Print-making and cognition
The roots of contemporary visual culture lie in the centuries-old technology of
print-making. As William Ivins has pointed out, the development of printing,
which seems to have originated in China, made it possible for the first time to
create ‘exactly repeatable pictorial statements’ (Ivins 1953). In this sense, printed
copies of images were the first pictorial mass media. Ivins’s seminal analysis of
the social consequences of early print-making places major emphasis on the
scientific and cognitive implications of this mass medium. Following his lead,
an examination of cognitive consequences may be an appropriate starting point
for considering the nature and ramifications of visual culture.
Writing primarily about the development of woodblock printing, engrav-
ing, and etching in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe, Ivins argued that

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