Are images taking precedence over words?

Last week on my birthday, a ‘friend’ of mine had posted this on my Facebook wall: “This is a very special day/ Your friendship has filled my life far beyond what words can say/ I give thanks to the Lord for sending you my way/ That’s why we celebrate today/Happy Birthday!”

It was a bit surprising given the fact that this was our first interaction. There were other messages from many known and unknown ‘friends’.

As I went through these messages to thank them, I noticed most of these messages were sent from mobiles phones.

This I figured was so, as a person accessing Facebook from a mobile phone would unwittingly see the profile picture of the celebrator the moment he or she logs-in, and subsequently would greet him or her with an innocent “Happy Birthday”. But dedicated laptop or desktop users would generally miss the image-less birthday notification that appears on the right side of the home screen, and thus the occasion.

In fact, most of our digital devices function through images. In our digital messages we now convey emotions with graphic smileys and emojis and not words. Even the alphanumeric locks with which we locked our digital devices until recently are now obsolete, we now “swipe” or draw gestures to unlock them.

Today, we do not want to merely hear songs, we desire to see them. Thus TV channels play music videos without respite.

Cast in icons

Coming back to Facebook, it is a sorry state that people have to align attractive photographs to good articles in order to make them visible.

When Rituparno Ghosh passed away, I had written an obituary in a cultural blog.

When I shared it on Facebook, I put on a dashing epicene image of the diseased director impulsively. Within a day, more than 60 people liked my post.

I felt satisfied until a disturbing thought stung me; did they like my article or did they simply respond to the image?

While discussing the assumed superiority of speech over the written word, in the western schools of thought, Derrida had introduced the concept of “phonocentrism”.

Derrida died in 2004, the year Facebook was born; had it been otherwise, with an account in Facebook, and lots of friends over there, he would have probably thought of some analogous term, like “opticentrism”.

But as I said before, this dependence is in a sense fatal as we don’t recognise life without visuals.

Lure of visuals

We are helpless when images are not there to guide us. But perhaps the most dangerous assumption would be to believe in all the visuals we encounter.

I remember coming across a post in Facebook on Gujarat. The post extolled Narendra Modi for initiating the Ahmedabad Bus Rapid Transit. A glossy image accompanied the statement to justify the claim.

A few thousand proud Indians instinctively liked the post in complete agreement. But nobody noticed how the digital display boards of the buses flashed Chinese letters. A Google image search revealed that it was actually Guangzhou Bus Rapid Transit.

We can be misled by words, but our blind faith in images conceals the embedded texts within the very image.

After a screening of Ang Lee’s Life of Pi , my classmates pointed out how “unrealistic” and “dreamlike” the visuals of the film were.

This is precisely the point. The film is laden with hyper-realistic visuals, apart from being infiltrated by a few factual inconsistencies, but as if by predisposition we keep believing in it.

As a final blow, Ang Lee shatters our confidence in the visuals as the film ends with the possibility that whatever we had seen may have never taken place!

In a world like ours, where we divide our time between actual and the virtual world, it is indeed necessary to be cautious and see things as they are.

(Siddharth is a third-year student of English (Honours) at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan.)

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