Image-First Society

Living Make-Belief, Chapter 6

I’m spending a few months analyzing the ideas in Jim Dator’s new book Living Make-Belief, along with related works. The introduction to this project can be found here. All entries are listed here.

Dator’s sixth chapter traces how over the last few decades, images have overtaken written language as the dominant vehicle of meaning for society. It’s really short - about 6 pages, including a full-page poem about how literacy itself seems like the death of culture to people in an oral tradition¹. So of course this will be my opportunity to introduce a general theory of technological progress, and its corollary for expertise. Now you know what happens when my mind wanders².

Dator identifies, as do many others, that America and similarly-developed nations are entering an age of post-literacy, where the ability to read and parse text is on the decline³. Unlike most of these sources, however, who come from literary academic backgrounds and see the written word as one of the chief cultural attainments of humanity, Dator doesn’t seem concerned. In fact, he marks the US experiment in written constitutionalism, which is now taken for granted across the world almost without exception, as a “tragedy” (p. 41).

This is considered a tragic development because maintaining the authority of static text creates a need for an entire fictional layer of “magical language”, in this case law and the lawyers/judges who traffic in it, to simultaneously decide on the rules in a changing world while vigorously proclaiming that nothing is changing. This, Dator points out, is the same underlying crisis of legitimacy faced by text-based religions (most notably evangelical Christianity, which by embracing the doctrine of sola scriptura claims to be 100% derived from text), which are frequently seen as bending the text to identity markers and power dynamics, rather than the other way around.

How Technologies Change

There’s a kind of meta-pattern unfolding in this story as presented in the last few chapters. Capturing images, like capturing language, is invented as an idea (figurative art/writing), then mechanized (photography/printing press), then consumerized (home photography/word processors, self-publishing, and blogs), and then automated (AI generation). Each of these is the story of hundreds of little improvements to what Dator calls hardware, software, and orgware — innovations in tools, social forms, etc — that drove down the cost of reproducing existing works and creating new works (so production and reproduction are two dimensions of this effect, if you wanted to drill down another level).

This pattern is tidy because economic incentives and normal human optimization efforts are sufficient to explain this across a wide variety of types of goods, though some goods have natural limits to this process because they are more material and not purely information (for example, mahogany furniture requires trees to grow for decades, and even the cheapest imitation has to be built out of something).

So essentially, the story of the rise of the image over text is really just about the relative position of each medium along the efficiency track described above. Where previous advances like the telegram and the word processor have given text a distinct edge, we're reaching a stage where high-speed internet and cheap data storage has made images (and video) similarly inexpensive. This is bringing us back to a balance of power similar to when the printing press was invented, which led to an explosion of not just words but also images across Europe; now, of course, there’s more of it then ever, and increasingly fragmented to narrower and narrower audiences. Less an end of text and of literacy than an end to their dominance. As Rolf Jensen points out in The Dream Society, the invention of television⁴ marked the beginning of a decades-long increase in prominence of images to become a critical raw material surpassing words and data, alongside myth and story.

The Place of Experts

The ability to reproduce an existing work and then distribute it to the masses — radio for audio, printmaking for art, etc — has the effect of professionalizing art, by vastly increasing the quality gap between what the average individual can produce and what’s easily available (the world’s best). This means fewer people actually producing for themselves — singing as a family around the piano, painting about the hunt onto the wall of the family cave, etc.

However, once technology develops further, it re-democratizes the activities by narrowing the gap between what high- and low-skill producers can make; this is essentially the growth (or re-emergence?) of the “prosumer”, as Alvin Toffler put it. We’ve gone from “it’s so expensive to have this done professionally, so we’ll do it ourselves” to “it’s so affordable to have this done professionally, why would we do it ourselves?” to “it’s so cheap and easy to make this, so why wouldn’t we do it ourselves?” Readers, this has to be some kind of economic theory already, but my brief search efforts turned up nothing, so feel free to point to the relevant literature in the comments.

We’re not new in complaining about this phenomenon and worrying about the ill effect on society; most recently, we’re in the middle of a great experiment about mechanizing/automating sexual and now emotional intimacy at scale for huge swathes of our population. Who knows, maybe it will end up being to traditional ideas about family and relationships what the printing press was to the Catholic Church’s authority. You should probably call your mother and tell her you love her.

1. I don’t know if the metacommentary of having a poem about the death of culture from literacy quoted in an academic book about the death of literacy from image/performance culture was intentional, but it does inspire a measurable amount of vertigo.

2. Prior drafts also connected in my framework about intelligence as a way to classify intelligence, so consider yourself lucky.

3. There’s the direct evidence of this in reading behavior, but also consider how writers are much less likely to be cultural icons than in prior decades.

4. Dator shares his personal experience with the rollout word processor, which he credits with buying the text-based world another 50 years of supremacy even after television started transforming the world (p. 40).