Tuesday, March 22, 2005

"A word wrapped in light"

It remains a concern that coming generations are not reading as deeply and widely as we thought we should. They spend hours idly absorbing from images and reacting with images. It was a pleasure, then to read this article, though it may have had a commercial prompting. So eloquently written ....
"It is true that the written word has been pushed to the periphery by the advance of new media over the past few decades. Certainly we read less, and read less challenging material, than we used to. Medieval learners, with their Latin studies and familiarity with the works of antiquity, strike us as either masochistic — or simply alien — today…. We disagree with the notion that images cannot be as cognitive as written words. In our work, we have found that images have a tremendous capacity for conveying content. We wonder if there mightn’t be a visual avenue of expression — a visual language — which does force the brain to translate symbols into concepts. Which does require one to engage his or her faculties of reasoning and analytical thought.Read the whole article

No comments: