Seeing is Believing

December 13, 2012

Seeing is Believing

So 154 photos and 5 days later I think I have learnt a few things about this guy in my ceramics class that I met last Thursday. I told him about my Marco Polo post where a friend and I communicated via photo's taken on your cell phone of what you are currently doing or where you are, sending and receiving these was so much fun!

So on Friday I sent him the first photo and then I received a photo back...and we just kept on going. It was quite challenging at some times to not reply with: 'WOW that looks good' or 'That's such a cool picture'. Which is a normal reaction to receiving a photo message. Today I am seeing him in my ceramic class again and it will be weird to actually speak to him and not send him a photo haha!

The funny thing is that I didn't really know this guy from a bar of soap, but I actually got to learn quite a bit about him through this photo communication. I know he likes to drink beer, coffee and red or white wine. He likes riding his bike and is quite an enthusiast. He wears Ray Ban sunglasses. He likes going to restaurants, pizza, the movies and appreciate a good view. I was also quite impressed that he doesn't have a duvet cover with Chinese signs prints, as most guys usually does and I find it quite amusing to ask guys what print they have on their duvet cover. I think you can tell quite a lot by knowing this info, but let me not get into my theory about that now. Another post for another day.

I thought that I would Google communication through pictures and came across this very interesting article called, The power of visual communication. (The article has been removed since) These paragraphs was quite fascinating to me:

We process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Further studies find that the human brain deciphers image elements simultaneously, while language is decoded in a linear, sequential manner taking more time to process.

Relatively speaking, in terms of communication, textual ubiquity is brand new. Thanks to millions of years of evolution, we are genetically wired to respond differently to visuals than text. For example, humans have an innate fondness for images of wide, open landscapes, which evoke an instant sense of well-being and contentment. Psychologists hypothesize that this almost universal response stems from the years our ancestors spent on the savannas in Africa.(1)

People think using pictures. John Berger, media theorist, writes in his bookWays of Seeing (Penguin Books, 1972), "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." Dr. Lynell Burmark, Ph.D. Associate at the Thornburg Center for Professional Development and writer of several books and papers on visual literacy, said, "...unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about 7 bits of information (plus or minus 2). This is why, by the way, that we have 7-digit phone numbers. Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched."

So here are the picture communication in sequence, I have just chosen my favourite ones.

Friday night: