The Language of Images in Technologically Modified Environments

Abstract

Each technology amplifies human functions, with photographs and videos enhancing vision and memory. The appeal of photography results from the fact that the stationary single eye is technologically extended. The technology of photography exceeds the limits of the eye, as the camera is a total stationary light catcher without the blurred edges of human vision. Photographs are “magical” and  appealing because they suddenly offer an improved eye, another more powerful and extended recorder of visual events for eternity outside our memory. Recorded events are felt to have more reality than the original, while a photograph as an experience translated into a new medium “bestows a delightful playback of earlier awareness.”1 These are therefore ideal means of communication for the platforms of the digital environment of social media and esports. The rapid development of digital photography has had the effect of returning the user to the content of historical technologies, with video clips flipping back to mediaeval performances, social media communicating with images and symbols of the non-literacy environment of the Middle Ages, and 3D imaging flipping back to sculpting. Non-print perceptual learning is becoming more prevalent, with literate cultures rendered obsolete by the inclusive and instantaneous digital environment.