Images and Persuasion

We’re a pretty advanced society, relatively speaking. Technology wise, we kick other culture’s butt. Medicine, entertainment, culture, knowledge – these are all fairly advanced because we have been able to collect our understanding and leech off other cultures. The only sign of our ‘primitiveness’ if you can call it that, is our disgusting weakness for images.

Andrew Wheatcroft’s “Infidels: the Conflict between Chirstendom and Islam 638-2002” is largely able to account for this conflict because of the great weight symbols and images carry and have carried. “Images,” Wheatcroft writes, “on the page or on the screen, are another form of language, whose rules are completely different from the written word.”
these rules are still true today as the were in the dark ages. with words, i think, philosophy has done a great deal to debunk the illusion that they can present. we have learned to look past the highly charged words and vagueness presented in reports, essays, books, etc. we know how to play the word game. images, i think, still have control.

the recent war is a perfect example. sadamm existed with his image everywhere, projecting the idea of an omnipotent god-like ruler. the biggest point in the war was the taking down of that stupid statue. america had to celebrate by having the president land a plane on iraqi soil. we’ve got symbolism coming out the ying-yang! but the ultimate effect is the same. it looks like america did defeat a powerful ruler. whereas if we had read simply reports about this war, i’m certain we could have gotten a much different picture.

this idea can be spread into all different areas. i’m going to mention david freedberg’s power of images and berger’s ways of seeing. overall, the images are too powerful. do you think that this can ever diminish? can philosophy really help to defuse this power?

rousseau wrote that the difference between a man and a philosopher is that a man, seeing another man being killed by an animal, will cry out in pain and feel the agony his fellow man must be going through. a philosopher, rousseau reasoned, would just have to shut his eyes and reason with himself, and the philosopher would then feel nothing.

is the only way to deal with the power of images is by shutting our eyes and reasoning? what does this say about us?

I do have to admit, you have a very good point.

It is said that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. And it is.
Especially a very detailed one.

But people use this to exploit other people. The best example is the way people fake photos with different things to obtain profit or fame. Usually UFO sightings.

This is because our main rule is “Seing is Believing”. But that is not true. The real ruel we should live by is “Believing is Seing”. As we do not “see” God, but we believe in Him, thus He exists.

By being so “addicted” to the value of pictures and images we show our weaknesses and can easily be exploited with different means.

— Our eyes take in more information faster than any other sense organ. Some of the other senses have a considerable temporal lag; One has to remain in a room for some time, for example, before the sounds start to make sense.
— We keep requiring ever greater shows to captivate our attention spans, witness the typical farce in the theatre, where the special effects proliferate, and the previews are generally the zenith of those effects, or again, mainly uninteresting TV punctuated at 3 minute intervals by advertisements which again are designed to captivate and hold our attention. We are enthralled and held captive by our Soma eyecandy. What are we trying to escape from?

— But you Trix were probably specifically referring to symbolism where 270,000,000 necks can be chopped at once.

This is a interesting post for me as one who has been performing magic & illusions (on & off) for many years. The use of manipulating images is of paramount importance when designing stage illusions.

I can say this from experience; A individual’s response to a image is mostly influenced by the accumulation & culmination of past images. This is seen by the difficulty I have in fooling children with some things that adults fall for all the time. Vice versa some things that are clearly impossible are quickly accepted as “amazing” by children but scoffed at by most adults. With adults all that is needed is to lead them down the garden path with inference (big stuff is heavy – if a hoop passes over it there are no wires etc.) Example: When something vanishes the kids are looking around to see “where” it went. If the object was visibly substantial in some way (say big=heavy tough to move/hide quickly) an adult is instantly dazzled. If I chop off my head or hand children freak but adults though they may experience a short minor shock (depending on gullibility or how well they “saw it coming”) quickly realize the impossibility of it all & if entertained find it sort of comical.

From what I have seen our response to images is almost (or maybe totally) automatic.
This is a leftover of a important survival mechanism I suspect. To this end I am careful with my children about what they see on TV/movies etc, not in censoring but in encouraging them “think” about what they see & asking them to judge it from many angles & on different levels. By pushing them to make this a habit I hope to help them avoid taking such things as a dictator’s portrait, at face value (I couldn’t resist :^)

My father use to always say believe none of what you see & only half of what you hear.

Regards,

— Fascinating, magic illusions are definitely a very useful perspective.

— Association, intensity, and repetition, repetition, repetition, and did i say repetition? I expect that is why adults are sometimes easily fooled by illusions and easily indoctrinated by the TV in the US by leaders who would rather project than be rejected. If a lie is repeated often enough it is easily believed. I am glad that you ask children to think about what they have seen, but i have rarely witnessed people seriously discuss what they have seen on the telly.

much love goes out to all you guys who’ve brought some very interesting insights to this lil’ topic. some comments;

Nomad wrote,

very good point, especially the how you later relate this to believing is seeing. here is my porblem, people exploit people all the time (if, by exploit, we mean to deliberilty mislead or induce a desired action for another’s personal benifit). but if this is done through the verbal or written arguement, i think that philosophy has been able to construct a rigourous system (i.e. logic) that can weed out the hype. philosophy seems unable to do this with images? why?

the suggestion seems to be that images are stronger than words. Nomad wrote,

this exploitation, i would argue, proves that humans think not with words but with images. there is another topic in this forum, about how language induces reason, but i would say that the power images have prove that we think with images. language is constructed, a product of reason (not vice versa).

Marshall wrote,

his mere statement suggests that images do have power – some have power that we cannot deny. doesn’t really answer my first question of why…

hey ashortt,

good point:

the same can probably be said for a society/culture/civilization. the idea you are proposing, that ultimatly a sub-conscious drive is luring us into the power of images, can be true. but why have we not broken from it? magicians have been around since ancient times, why are we still found of fooling our eyes? in contrast, why have we tried desperatly to debunk the written word?

Symbols are important…useful…good.

A symbol can explain an idea better than any number of words ever could.

A symbol can give one something to strive for when all hope for his cause seems lost.

A symbol can be a mark of identification, of belonging, of importance.

Symbols are necessary.

— In addition to our eyes being able to process information faster than any other sense organ, they are also fairly close to and fairly well connected to the brain, this is a purely physiological explanation of why images have so much power, but i would say that it is also due to our long mythological past and archetypal symbols that still enthrall us to this day. How many people are seduced by the image of a cross, for example, which is a symbol that predates Christianity. Snakes were one of the first symbols. The similarity to a phallus is undeniable and Joseph Campbell indicates that in it’s ability to swallow it is also the symbol of a vagina, nevertheless, the snake has been a symbol of fertility and immortality for thousands of years across many geographical areas. As humans we anthropomorphize everything. Leaders know about those symbols and make use of them, religion is usually the mother of such images, it would be hard to imagine the recent unprovoked invasion of Iraq being possible without the images which religion has had to offer. One of the things that irritated me was the constant reference (on the magical mysterious image machine invented in 1948) to how bad the Islamic peoples treat their women. This is something that has absolutely nothing to do with the issues. Anyway where images leave off leaders invoke ideologies, they will use any means to procure their ends.
— Symbols may be necessary, but they are still extremely volatile.

applause Excellent post Marshall.

— Thanks Magius.

But why is it that we seem to react more violently to odor than images? I certainly don’t mean to deny the power of images (though clearly I think Trix’s conclusions are backwards – language is the basis of thought, we don’t think in images, we react to them).

Why do we spend most of the time covering up odors?

Brad stated:

I think the word ‘violent’ may be a bit of an exageration, but you still have a point about odors having a greater negative affect on us than imagery. This is, in my opinion, due to the overwhelming usage of our eyes. We depend on them in almost all aspects of life, they’re overworked if you ask me. Odor on the other hand, isn’t focused on as often or relied upon for quick and accurate sense perception as vision is. This lack of experience with odor results in a lack of being able to turn the sense off, or atleast disconnect emotion from the sensation. A classy person may walk through the dumps of town and carry on thinking about whatever it is they think about, without being affected. But when we smell something unappealing, the sense impinges on us strongly and we are unable to turn it off, or to just try to think about something else. Furthermore, smelling is different from vision in that we are not necessarily affected by what we see. If I see a dead wolf 200 metres away, I am not in fear of being infected by the wolf. But when we smell an odor, we feel as though it is infecting us, often this is very much the case. When one smells a dead animal, we fear that there may be an airborn disease coming off the animal, but seeing in an of itself doesn’t harm us (generally). Hence, I think it is an instinctual reaction that answers your question of why we are more sensitive to odor rather then imagery.

Brad stated:

Language is not the basis of thought. We react to both language and images. The point here being is that we were thinking before we had language. There is more weight to the argument that we think in images then there is in arguing that we think in language. For example, when I am thinking about getting a job I will not think of the words, nor will I talk to myself about the job, what I may very well do is actually PICTURE the situation of the interview, my first day, etc.

What’s your take?

— Smell may be more acute due to it’s more primal place in the realm of man, thus the need to react to smells. It would be interesting to see which senses stimulate which areas of the brain, but that topic is probably more in line with the psychology forum. Magius stated:

I think that that is probably right. Marshall Mcluhan wrote a book called the Gutenberg Galaxy in which he contrasted the senses and the different media that take advantage of those senses. He goes so far as to suggest that excessive consumption of visual media like literature can create solitary, individualistic, possibly even schizophrenic or nationalistic people. He argues that the consciousness is bombarded and then it rejects the material, which of course goes to the subconscious; the subconscious then hypertrophies. I don’t know if all of this is correct, but the man is absolutely brilliant and his arguments rank among the most original i have seen.

Magius stated:

I stated in the thread, “Language, thinking, intelligence” that language is a tool of thought, i don’t think at this point that i would go as far as to say , “language is the BASIS of thought”. One could IMAGine a species capable of sending images to each other via telepathy, and future computers may even model this. Language and thought necessarily arose concomitantly, but is the representation necessarily the basis?; and as Magius aptly stated, the representation (language) is not even equivalent to what actually happens.

I think this is probably true. You know, at first glance, I thought Magius and Marshall were contradicting each other, but they’re both right on target. Smelling is primal (My daughter spent the week with her grandparents and upon our return, she smelled us. ), and it may well be that precisely because it is an underdeveloped sense (when compared to sight) that we often overlook its power over us – except of course in the strongest instances. There’s a great Calvin and Hobbes strip that imagines what kind of language a tiger might speak given its much superior abilities in that area.

On language and thought, I’ll have to start another thread on that one, but, briefly, what most people call unstated thought, is really nothing more than habitual adaptation and the process is then projected back into the action itself (I must have been thinking about . . .). As long as we keep our definitions clear, I think I can make a pretty strong case for thought’s basis in language. However, you also have to accept that thought is one aspect of brain functioning, not simply another word for brain functioning.

— Language as the basis of thought…interesting question… Im getting ready to read a book entitled The Symbolic species by Terrence W. Deacon and subtitled the co-evolution of language and the brain. It should prove interesting reading.
— Very adept of you to say that thought is only “one aspect of brain functioning.” It is the our latest major biological development and therefore our most fragile. One might also mention instincts, the subconscious, etc., but such tangents are more germane to the psychology forum.
— One could very well argue that thought is impossible without language.
Thought requires the outside World in order to make itself aware of something. An awareness that is aware of nothing but itself is not truly aware. There would be no “frame of reference” from which to venture forth. Imagine a disembodied brain kept alive in a jar with no senses connecting it to anything.
If you then accept that thought requires the outside world in order to function, You are faced with identifying and incorporating all of those other entities in the world into your consciousness. If you and your tribe are to survive you must communicate dangers of predators and such. You do this at first with hand signals (Native Americans used to marry from other tribes with different languages and used hand signals almost exclusively) and facial expressions. (We still do this when we look someone with whom we are talking in the face). You discover that other members of your tribe have different names for the birds, so you come up with one name to symbolize all birds, thus universals are born. This one simple name frees up the mind for a host of other activities.
— I have only made the argument here from a metaphysical/teleological aspect, but the aforementioned book goes into the biology.

Brad wrote:

which is something that i am not to keen to agree with. thought is the output, the cumulative action of brain functioning. unless you accept theories of the sub-conscience into your argument, then thought is the orgasm of brain functioning – a part, but a rather large one.

images will appeal to the most base kinds, and language will evolve from there. images still hold control, i theorise, because they are at such a primitive level. you can’t deconstruct one’s gut reaction to why one is aroused by porno, but you can (perhaps) deconstruct why you are in love with a person. the more evolved an idea is, the easier it is to rationalised images are the exact opposite language, and other forms of higher thought.

The bigger point in all of this is, i think, that we are creatures of images first, language second. yet we seem to have a greater intellectual respect for language.

— Images are certainly older than language, and yet they are more mythical, more archetypal. There will still be those who require a reasoned argument communicated articulately through language. We are stranded twixt creature and creator in so many ways.