Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Being a Writer in a World of Images

Everything changes.  That's the nature of life.  Nothing stays the same forever.

I knew an encyclopedia salesman who had a very hard time changing with the times as encyclopedias went digital. His world would never be the same.

As a writer, that's how I feel sometimes about the increasing focus on images over words in communication, particularly within social media. I was at a workshop yesterday where the presenter said, "Use as few words as possible.  Say it all with the images." I understood exactly what he was saying.  Still, it made me sad.

Yes, I know that the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and in this fast-paced world people are scanning rather than reading. A picture paints a thousand words. I get it.

But sometimes the language used to communicate the message is part of the message itself. Can the full message contained in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet How Do I Love Thee? be communicated in a series of images or an infographic? I don't think so.

There are times when I feel like that encyclopedia salesman. Words are becoming merely the captions for images. Real writing, with punctuation and vowels, that expresses complex ideas is slowly becoming a lost art.

How can we keep it from going away completely?