Print and Visual Media: A 21st Century Revolution of the Mind

 

Words and pictures are both powerful mediums of communicating virtually anything we desire. They’re a beautiful way to translate thoughts and ideas, and by many people that translation is artfully done. Pictures and written language can also be used together to achieve other effects. Especially in the 21st century, media of a variety of sorts is being incorporated into rhetorical and entertainment functions.

Let’s start with a book. A good book brings its reader into another world, a separate dimension of time and space. With words alone, an author can guide a reader through a fantastic tale, and change the way they see the world. Books can incite ideologies, start a following, and create social revolutions. Movies can act in the same way. Film actors and directors can shepherd an audience through a riveting, thought provoking plot. In fact, there are many movies that are adaptations of books, translations from a print to a film medium. Harry Potter is a wonderful testament to film adaptations. I first entered the wizarding world through the books, but I also fell in love with the saga on screen. Both mediums served to entertain and delight me in differing ways. Reading the books is a process. You have to sit down for hours on end in order to digest the whole story. It’s a commitment. That commitment is a large part of why reading is so satisfying. Once you’ve finished reading a book, it’s an accomplishment, it’s a small sort of accolade. Movies, on the other hand, are ephemeral, exciting works of art. They have depth, but not nearly to the same extent of books. Moreover, films can display visuals that novels simply cannot hope to compete with.

Together, in a digital space, photos and writing can be used for a multitude of means. Social media is ripe with amalgamations of media and print. Sites like Vine and Instagram are mostly picture and video based, with captioning, commenting, and a profile infrastructure as well, so there is writing on some level. Sites like Tumblr and Facebook are more of an even split of writing and pictures. There are statuses, comments, profiles, extensive about sections. At the same time there are photo and video albums and sharing, and the same captioning and commenting system of Vine and Instagram. Lastly, Twitter is a mostly text based social media platform. There is some picture and video media involved, but the majority of the information is in writing.

There is a wide spectrum of mediums for the combined use of media and text, and denizens of the 21st century have capitalized on those mediums to broadcast their personal image. The internet is a broad, endless canvas, with no rules or regulations on how to use it. We are the authors of our existence, the composers of our individual symphonies. We are witnesses and participants to a revolution of the mind hosted in a vast digital environment.