Image Domination-food For Thought *long nonsensical rant. We live in an IMAGE BASED CULTURE. ‘’I saw it with my own two eyes I did’’ (Some random drunk guy everyone knows) I’m leaned back in a wobbly chair playing with fate and half hoping I’ll fall over. Across from me are a few of my acquaintances, all with their heads down staring at their phones. My phone, is in my pocket. It’s dead (like my hopes and dreams). So I twiddle my thumbs instead and yawn exaggeratedly hoping someone will look up at me and say something interesting. Maybe they’ll comment on my thumb twiddling? I’ve been practicing. ‘’Did you hear about BB King?’’ Someone asks me. ‘’Yea, I read abou…’’ I’m not allowed to finish my sentence. A phone is shoved in my face. I see a picture of BB King under a headline that read something like ‘’Legend dies aged 89’’. I’m sad. Not long after, someone else shoves a screen in my face. There’s apparently something amazing I have to see. I’m more interested in the fingers holding the screen… How did they manage to paint all those little stripes on her fingernails? I look around the room that we are all procrastinating in. There are a few screens on the walls. On one of them a man seems to be suffering from some sort of seizure after chewing ‘’5gum’’, on the other what appears to be a 10 year old named Ariana Grande (sounds like a type of coffee) is singing about something I can’t make sense of. There are a few posters on the wall, a black cat, a revolutionary under a ubiquitous #quote about capitalism, coca cola, Tanya Chalkin’s kiss, et cetera. I’m being bombarded with images. An old lecturer stopped me once and said ‘’we live in an image based culture’’. I thought he was referring to personal image and that he was likely making a passive aggressive remark about my freshly polished shoes and my vanity. I know now he was talking about something else. I know this because some months later I sent him an email and asked ‘’image based culture?’’. And like any educator worth their pay, he directed me to where I could find answers… That is, google (other search engines are available). Undoubtedly, we all live and have been brought up in an image based culture. If you bother to keep up with the news it’s usually what you see on the tellybox or online where graphics, charts, photographs and videos are on display. Or perhaps you’re someone who likes to get their daily news from facebook? In which case you should self flagellate with a selfie stick. Most of our news is visual. Indeed even education is visual to a great extent… Textbooks aside, go to any uni campus and there is without a doubt someone looking like a moron trying to get powerpoint to work. Ok, so that all seems perfectly normal to me. Though I do wonder about people who lived before our image based culture. Before images dominated our lives, you either read about current events in a newspaper or you heard about it. If you were educated, it was through reading or some sort of verbal discourse. Sounds bloody boring. Without getting into conspiracy theories about subliminal advertising, surely there’s nothing wrong with an image based culture? The only obvious one I can think of is language. I’ve moaned about the decline of language before so all I’ll say is this… If we are dominated by images instead of words, it is no surprise that there will be an inevitable decline in the quality of language. You get me fam? Some of you will no doubt be thinking I’m painting images in a negative light (pun intended). In fact images have been around for most of history and they’ve helped us to understand things when words were not present. But language is still dying. People like, don’t like, talk like they used to talk like. Most of you have heard of Marx and Feuerbach. Two German philosophers who if alive today would likely have been modern day hipsters residing in Shoreditch. They both had something interesting to say about essence (no not the new Armani fragrance). They make the assumption that the essence of something is what it is inherently made up of. On the other hand, its image or appearance is simply a reflection of its essence. Make sense? I went to a new bar recently. Buckets of ice were on silver tables, on the walls were retro neon signs shaped into words like ‘’drink’’ and ‘’shots’’, in case anybody was confused as to where they were. I asked the bartender for a whiskey ‘’We only have pilsner and cocktails, would you like a drinks menu?’’ He asked? ‘’Are you taking the fucking piss?’’ My eloquent response before I was politely asked to leave. ^ The bars essence was one thing and its image was something else. Nick Clyde of refine the mind has a better example. After the Charlie Hebdo killings, crowds of French citizens lining the streets appeared to show a strong stand against twisted ideology and the killings of innocent people. Yet nobody paid much attention when France banned rallies against the murdering of innocent people in Gaza… or in fact when the 12 innocent people on their way to a wedding were killed in a drone attack in Yemen. Whilst each incident shared a similar essence, their images portrayed something completely different. What if we had just read about each story? Would our reactions have been the same? In schools, test scores give us the appearance of intelligence or lack thereof, it’s there to see in numbers, letters and charts… Until we grow up and realise that most of us are as clueless as each other. Another likely consequence of an image based culture is alienation. Why should I bother checking on my friend John when I can see from the photo of him he uploaded to the interwebs that he is having a great time. I don’t game, but if I did I could escape into a virtual world with ‘’insane graphics’’ for hours on end… If I wanted to. I’m not even going to mention virtual reality. Most of us are attracted to people who display the traits of those we are told/shown are conventionally attractive. Models plaster photos of themselves and their happy lives online as they jet from one city to the next. The deplorable and immutable truth being that nobody gives a shit about what they have to say, and if you know models you’d know that most of them are incredibly lonely. Men hit the gym to build up some sort of image of strength or masculinity… Most people don’t give a shit about what they have to say either. Not when people such as I, were less interested in Ed Miliband’s speech as we were in him almost falling over. I guess, after saying all of that... Image dominance has caused a decline in culture as a whole. Maybe I'm wrong? Well there’s some food for thought. Rant over.