Page 193 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

PAUL MESSARIS

surprising that this continual mental challenge should serve to extend our
cognitive abilities.
Furthermore, although previous discussion of these issues has focused largely
on spatial intelligence, it seems more than likely that other aspects of cognitive
functioning also receive a beneficial boost from the experience of visual syntax.
Much editing – or, more broadly, montage – is based on the principle of
analogy (for example, in the realm of advertising, the ubiquitous juxtapositions
of products with images that metaphorically mirror the products’ attributes),
and analogical constructions are prevalent in conventions of visual composition
and camerawork as well (Messaris 1996). It may well be, then, that analogical
thinking is another area of cognitive functioning in which visual media play an
activating role. More generally, the arguments that we have just reviewed con-
verge on the notion that the evolving visual culture of the mass media is not
only a system of social representation but also a distinctive blueprint for
cognition.

Truth and falsehood in photography
If the technologies of print-making had remained the only methods for pro-
ducing pictorial mass media, some facets of contemporary visual culture would
not look very different from the way they do today. Comic books would be
largely unaffected, and so would a certain fraction of such media as magazine
ads, billboards, or greeting cards, among others. However, the bulk of the
imagery in today’s visual media is based on the major successor to print-
making, namely, photography. The nineteenth-century invention of photo-
graphy brought into being for the first time a series of mass media (including
cinema, television, and video) that could lay claim to reproducing certain
features of human perceptual experience directly, that is, without the inter-
vention of the artist’s hand. In the well-known semiotic terminology of C. S.
Peirce (1991), photographs are ‘indexical’ representations, meaning that they
are actually the physical products of the things they represent. Traditional
photography is the result of the action of light rays on photosensitive chemicals,
while television, video, and digital images arise from the effects of light on
electrical circuits. Hence the notion that photographic images are ‘objective’
records of reality.
Much of the character of contemporary visual culture is colored indelibly
by this ‘indexicality’ of photographic images. The importance of indexicality is
most obvious in cases in which our interaction with a certain medium is
explicitly premised on the medium’s putative capacity to deliver the visual
truth. News imagery and some forms of advertising are perhaps the two most
prominent examples of this phenomenon, and it is not surprising that much
scholarly and critical writing about these media has dealt explicitly with the
potential deceptions that lurk behind the façade of photographic truth.
As far as television news imagery is concerned, the foundational study on this

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