Page 191 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

PAUL MESSARIS

the new-found ability to produce exact replicas of pictorial information pro-
vided a tremendous boost to all intellectual endeavors that deal with spatial
structures, ranging from architecture and engineering to such disparate fields as
geography, anatomy, and botany. Much of Ivins’s account deals with specific
applications of print-making in such tasks as the construction of blueprints or
the illustration of textbooks in herbal pharmacology. However, going beyond
such particulars, Ivins also believed that the spread of pictorial mass media was
responsible for a more general shift in human cognitive capabilities, away from
the verbal abstractions of the ancient world and towards types of reasoning that
were more directly attuned to the forms of material reality.
Ivins’s conjectures about the broader cognitive concomitants of a cultural
shift towards visual media are as pertinent to the present state of visual com-
munication as they were to the historical period that his book was about.
Among contemporary cultural critics, it has become commonplace to argue
that the increasing societal shift towards visual media is responsible for a large-
scale impoverishment of people’s cognitive capacities. As the editors of a
volume on American cultural decline have pointed out, the term ‘dumbing
down’ appears to have been first used in reaction to the intellectual level of
Hollywood movies (Washburn and Thornton 1996: 12). In contrast to such
indictments of movies or other visual media, Ivins’s work points to the pos-
sibility that, far from dumbing viewers down, visual culture may actually entail
important cognitive benefits.
Ivins’s optimistic view of the cognitive dimensions of visual culture is shared
by more recent authors such as Edgerton (1991), who argues that Renaissance
artists’ discovery of linear perspective made a significant contribution to
architecture and engineering, and Tufte (1983, 1990, 1997), whose books on
informational graphics contain abundant testimony to the intellectual sophis-
tication that goes into the creation of such taken-for-granted visuals as maps or
temperature charts. Still, all of these writers deal with visual media that are
directly linked to scientific or technological activities. As far as the broad
public’s reactions to visual communication are concerned, it may be more
appropriate to focus on entertainment media such as movies or television.
The familiar argument that television is responsible for a decline in young
people’s intellectual abilities has been examined in research reported by
Neuman (1995). The findings indicated that there does indeed appear to be a
negative correlation between amount of television viewing and some aspects of
children’s school performance. However, even if this correlation is due to an
underlying causal link, we need to be cautious in drawing any broader conclu-
sions from these results. Because measures of school performance tend over-
whelmingly to be verbal, the data reported by Neuman could indeed be a sign
that television depresses verbal skills by displacing some amount of leisure-time
reading. However, unless one believes that verbal skills are the only, or the
predominant, component of cognitive ability, these data cannot be taken as a
more general indictment of the cognitive effects of visual media. Instead, they

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