http://www.google.com.co/imgres?q=manuel
Arguably, images have always played, and will always play, an important role in communication. Both as a species, and individually, humans learned to create lasting communications first through images, then through words. Compare the estimated age of the oldest known cave paintings with that of what is considered to be the oldest known alphabet in the world.
Paul Martin Lester, Ph.D., of California State University, in the paper "Syntactic Theory of Visual Communication," reminds us, “Before children learn to read and write, they do not know the difference between a line drawing and a letter. When an adult writes an 'A,' it is simply another drawing.” Children have to learn to associate these images with sounds, a task that is often aided by pairing these meaningless images with others that have meaning, as in the example, “A is for apple.”
The subordination of image to text
“Early on, however, we are taught to make distinctions between words and pictures and to not think of them in the same way.” Lester argues that pictures, because of the way children are taught to focus on their mastery of the written word, quickly take on a subordinate role to text. “We are taught that although we can gain meaning from each, reading words is valued more than reading pictures. We are taught that pictures play a separate and subservient role to the words.”
Despite the old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” until recently, visual social communication (communication intended for public consumption rather than undertaken in private), with the exception on television, has been largely conducted through the medium of text. The majority of books contain more words than pictures, and the Internet from its inception was essentially a text-based medium due to the smaller file sizes required to communicate using words rather than images.
The rise of the photograph
With the advent of digital photography, which has made image transfer and storage much simpler, and that of faster computers and broadband connections, the photograph has enjoyed a boom in popularity as a social communication medium. Smartphones equipped with high-resolution digital cameras and the facility to upload photos directly to social networking websites have made it easy to share images almost as easily as text-based messages.
This has led some to speculate on the growing importance of images, and particularly photographs. "Of course, the picture is more important. It's the picture that addresses us directly, with its emotions, its meaningfulness. The word works via intellect. And there are so many events where we only remember the picture and not the word,” says Herlinde Koelbl, news photographer.
The continued importance of text
However emotive or immediate the message communicated by the image, though, it is still our use of text that creates the context and conversation surrounding the photograph, a point Koelbl nods at with the comment that “nevertheless many of my works wouldn't be conceivable without text.”
More often than not, the most effective photographs are the ones that spark text-based communication between users. Captions may be required to explain the intended message.
Perhaps more important, without text-based tags and keywords, the images may feed into the never-ending stream of updates to the social communication “river” and sink without a trace. Just as a search engine crawler or “bot” would be unable to read or “spider” a website whose navigation consisted of images with no explanatory text tags, or better yet a text-based link, so untagged images are unlikely to resurface since there is to date no way to input an image into a search engine and return visually similar images. Thus, although the photograph is a vital and effective means of social communication, it may be somewhat overstating the point to claim that it has become as important as text. In one sense, imagery has always been as important, if not more so, yet on the other hand, text remains the glue that holds other forms of communication together.
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