The image as text: When pictures replace logic

Posted on 13. Feb, 2010 by Melanie in content strategy

It’s the rare blog post that stays with you.

But sometimes it happens to me. Like today. A couple months ago, Dustin Curtis’s blog featured a guest post consisting of an extended metaphor for the current American health care crisis.

The health care topic isn’t the reason that I keep thinking about the post. Instead, it was the metaphor: the author compared health care to fried chicken.

Yep. Fried chicken.

While fanciful, this analogy hardly bears serious consideration. It’s not that the author is necessarily wrong in his views on health care. To be honest, I have no clue whether he’s wrong or a hundred percent right.

It’s just that the analogy is absurd. Health care has absolutely no similarity to fried chicken.

And yet, several well considered responses populate the comments section. I wondered why.

It may be important to note that Dustin Curtis’s site is really less of a blog and more of a vehicle for its designer author to showcase his artistic chops. Honestly? The fried chicken article is gorgeous.

Then I remembered an article by Ken Myers, editor of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. He wrote:

In print, with words, one makes proposi­tions. With propositions, one makes arguments and draws conclusions…. One of television’s effects is the subtle inculcation of the assumption that it’s not very important to be able to work with words. Working with words requires working with logic. It requires habits of reason…

Image-based communication is not so much irrational as a-rational…. Image-domi­nated forms of communication are nonlinear, nonpropositional, and hence inconclusive; they do not move from propositions to conclusion.

Since 1993 when this article was written, a post-television world has emerged. But the Internet is no less image-driven than television and movies are. Rather, it incorporates text and images into an interactive experience in which the user/viewer/reader plays a more active role than ever.

While we’re not quite the passive consumers of images that Myers wrote about, we still do more than reason by propositions. We bolster propositions with images, and substantiate images with text — more thoroughly than ever in history.

In my post about Twitviewer, I noted that subpar content uncovered a shoddy hack masquerading as a legitimate app. The chicken article is Twitviewer 2.0: an a-rational argument validated by downright beautiful design. It’s the visual as rhetoric.

I don’t believe that the new a-rational, image-based approach is “bad” … even though I’m a writer who loves words and logic. But we need to recognize the rise of the image as logic, so that we can use visuals and text hand in hand to make reasoned, truthful arguments.

And so that we can tell when our judgment is being hijacked by the high gloss of well executed art.

Tags: content strategy