We live in an image-drenched world in which the era of text is increasingly giving way to the era of the image. We no longer tweet about a beautiful sunset or a protest breaking out downtown, we share a photograph or a movie of it. Yet, we don’t just share photographs anymore, we enrich them with hashtags to allow them to be found and witty captions that tell others how we want them to understand or feel about those images. Social media is creating a textually-mediated understanding of imagery in which younger generations may no longer even be able to conceptualize the idea of an image standing by itself. Indeed, the reaction to one of my recent talks drove home just how much social media has changed how we think about the image.
Half a decade ago I embarked upon a project to “reimagine the book” by thinking of our world’s vast literary treasures not as the collections of words they had always been seen as in the digital era, but rather as the world’s greatest art collection. Since the dawn of computers, the focus on digitizing books had always been on their text, converting scanned books to searchable fulltext collections, while discarding their images as useless decorative elements. What if we turned that idea on its head and extracted all of the images from our digitized books, while discarding their text?
The end result, which debuted in 2014, entailed extracting the images of 600 million pages of public domain books dating back 500 years from over 1,000 libraries worldwide, together with their captions and publication metadata and creating a massive public dataset that was uploaded to Flickr.
The images can be keyword searched by their captions, filtered by their publication metadata, sifted by Flickr’s own AI-powered tagging or simply browsed through serendipitous discovery. Each image is provided with a link that connects it back to the page from which it came, allowing searchers to find an image that intrigues them and use it to jump directly to its broader context.
After a recent presentation about the collection, several millennial audience members commented afterwards that they viewed the very idea of images without textual descriptions to be antithetical to the entire nature of what an image is. As they put it, images cannot be understood without hashtags and textual descriptions telling us what the image depicts, how it was created and what emotion we should feel when viewing it.
As one put it, the very idea of an image by itself without paragraphs of text telling us every detail about the image, what it depicts and its entire creation process and what emotions we should feel when viewing the image is simply ludicrous and reflected a failure to understand what images are.
To put it even more succinctly, the person noted this would be as absurd as having a room full of images hanging on the wall without a lengthy guide beside each explaining every detail about them. How can one possibly understand or experience an image just by looking at it?
Yet, as any art lover will recognize, this is precisely what art has been through the centuries preceding the digital revolution. Art is as much about the creation process and its reflection of the artist as it is the process of experience and the way in which the same work of art can be experienced in so many different ways and yield so many different emotions and understandings by those who are in its presence. Much as an artist may have intended one experience, audiences over the centuries may reinterpret the image through the lenses of their own backgrounds to interpret it differently. Art scholars themselves may argue and debate the meaning of a particular detail, reminding us that there is no singular “right” interpretation of art. So much of the experience of art lies in the beholder.
Walk through any of the Smithsonian art galleries in Washington, DC and you will not find pages of text glued to the wall next to each painting telling visitors how to think about the painting and what emotions they should be feeling when viewing it. Most have only a small placard with the work’s title, artist and accession details. Many works have rich interpretations online and some come with centuries of debate over their meaning, but in the museum context those paintings really do hang on a wall without descriptive words, intended to be consumed by themselves.
Hashtags have become a particularly central modality for locating and understanding images in the social era, to the point that one commentator was aghast at the very idea of experiencing a work of art without the accompanying hashtags that help explain it.
How could one find an image without hashtags, this commentator asked?
In many respects, that commentator has a point. In the digital era, we still search for images using text. An image posted without hashtags is one that will never be found.
In my remarks, I had noted that in our increasingly visual-first digital world, we no longer send a textual tweet about a beautiful sunset, we post an image of it.
Yet, the reality is that we don’t just post an image by itself. We attach hashtags, captions, narratives and emotional descriptions to the image, ranging from what filters we used to create it to the emotions we hope it will inspire in others.
For centuries images were experienced on their own, evoking a personalized experience in each who saw them.
They were used to communicate complex topics across languages and to illiterate societies.
Today it seems an entire generation cannot fathom the idea of seeing an image that doesn’t include a textual cheat sheet telling them what their takeaway should be and how they should feel about it.
Have we lost our ability to experience art in the digital era?
Moreover, speaking with others in the visual arts community about these comments, it appears this perspective that images cannot appear without text is not unique to the individuals I encountered. Several Instagrammers noted that hashtags have become both about the discovery of art and a way of contextualizing them for viewers.
In many ways, hashtags have become almost a modern incarnation of the “frame,” influencing how we experience an image.
Frames themselves appear to have been redefined for this younger generation. Another commentator argued that picture frames have never held any artistic meaning nor have they ever had any influence on how we understand art. After all, as this person noted, social media discarded with the idea of traditional “frames,” displaying images without decorative adornments surrounding them and would not have done so if frames were anything more than a historical relic used to attach pictures to walls.
The idea that a younger generation would see frames as obsolete because they are not present in the same explicit form in the social media era shows how much our younger generations understand information through the lens of technology.
Rather than recognizing webpages themselves as “frames” and the way in which the colors and design of a page influence how we see the images within, this born-digital generation apparently sees frames as useless physical artifacts whose sole purpose was to attach a painting to a wall, rather than an intrinsic part of how we experience art. In short, as we transition from the physical to the virtual, our younger generations lack the ability to bridge those two worlds and to perform the abstractions necessary to understand concepts in their historical contexts.
Several attendees also vehemently disagreed with the idea that images and especially color images were once rare, citing the fact that there are plenty of color paintings in museums that are hundreds of years old. As one put it, it is “fake news” to claim that color imagery was once rare.
It is amazing that the story of the image and the once-rarity of color has been so forgotten in a world in which the image has come to define so powerfully how we capture and experience the world around us. It was just over a century and a half ago that large-scale war was first documented through the realism of photography and through World War II most of our imagery of conflict was seen through the monochromatic lens of greyscale. In our world of 4K television, we forget that half a century ago television and movies were largely greyscale, forcing us to imagine their vibrant landscapes. Even within my own lifespan, digital cameras, monitors and printers have evolved from primarily monochrome to almost exclusively color.
Putting this all together, a decade ago we spoke of how the iPad had forever changed how children saw the printed world. The now-famous video “A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work” taught us that for a toddler of the era, “Steve Jobs has coded a part of her OS.”
It seems the rise of social media into every facet of our lives has continued that transition, with a younger generation that increasingly cannot imagine images without text, frames as anything more than a wall hanger or that imagery and especially color imagery was ever something rare.
The very concept of what an image is has been redefined by the metaphors needed to access them in our digital era, from the hashtags required to search for images to the creative captions needed to make them go viral.
If Steve Jobs redefined how we saw the printed word, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow social titans will be remembered for redefining how we see the image itself.
