Two weeks after the event, we have all but forgotten about the murder of a news reporter and her cameraman during an interview on live television. The apparent shooter, Vester Flanagan, was a former coworker who had previously been fired from the station. ABC News said it was faxed a 23-page manifesto from someone claiming to be the shooter, writing that he was motivated by Dylann Roof, who allegedly shot 9 people in Charleston last June.
If Flanagan is the shooter (as is now widely believed), he did so in a revolutionary way. He maximized his media exposure by committing the act on live television and later uploaded a cell phone video of him firing on the reporter. He even live-tweeted his escape, writing, “I filmed the shooting see Facebook.” It may be the first ever post-modern murder, where the reality of the act is secondary to its broadcasted image. Murder is no longer a strictly personal act. Through images, it can animate emotions around the world.
This reminds me of a stereotype about Japanese tourists who take pictures of everything when they visit America. I’ve witnessed this behavior myself. I’ve even seen them take pictures of trashcans, never stopping to set the camera down before continuing with pictures of intersections, sidewalks, even the grass. Do they take these photos home to look at again later? To Americans, this is utterly baffling behavior, but to the Japanese the image is reality. Rather than living in the moment and enjoying it, images are as real, or maybe even more real than actually being in the present.
Here in the United States, we like to think we have a firmer grip on reality, but really we are just as enthralled by images as the Japanese. As this act of murder was transmuted by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, photos in newspapers and TV broadcasts, the visual interpretation has taken precedence over the reality. For everyone who wasn’t actually there, the image is reality — but of course, images can be doctored. In a healthy society, reality is experienced first hand, but in an image based culture, reality is filtered through a lens.
Umberto Eco once wrote, “Mass media do not transmit ideologies; they are themselves an ideology.” Images are so widespread, they dominate and eventually replace individual experience.
In our personal lives, the possibility of a race war in the United States seems preposterous, but through corporate control of the media, it no longer seems so impossible. The evidence is right there in front of your eyes. Intentionally or unintentionally, images have created a new reality.
Practically, the image is a powerful tool for control. Consider President Obama, who’s image is one of a measured, smart, and well-intentioned leader. Who he actually is isn’t relevant to the image based society. The image conveyed through media is the accepted reality. If you are a political opponent of Obama, attacking him and his policies are only effective if they target his image. If you said, the president is a child-murderer and war criminal — the reality — it’s totally ineffective because those facts don’t correlate with his image. Obama’s image protects him from the consequences of who he really is. In this way, the image is the establishment’s most powerful defense.
Myth and the New Universal Language
Let’s step away from the practical for a moment and consider how language empowers us.
If you are reading this, your language is in decay. Words are inherently “low context” compared to spoken language. This means they do not carry meaning as easily. The vocal inflections of your voice, your physical mannerisms, and the speed of your expression, all have an enormous impact on how you are understood by other people. When words are written down, understanding suffers as written words can be easily misunderstood.
Even though misunderstandings happen, the written word is far more efficient at communicating quickly and disseminating that information to large numbers of people. Without written words, we could not have courts of law or intrusive national governments. Written words are essential for creating complex bureaucracies.
But even more low context is the image. Images communicate extremely quickly, but without depth. This enables centralized power to control people very effectively. Images delivered through the internet or television are not benign pieces of information, but instructions.
Consider the story of Babylon told in the Book of Genesis. According to the legend, a unified humanity, speaking the same Adamic language, was able to create a structure tall enough to pierce the heavens, the Tower of Babel. Lead by the tyrant Nimrod, a grandson of Noah and a king of Shinar, mankind launched this ambitious project to protect them from God’s floods.
Nimrod is quoted in Isaiah 14:13:
“I shall scale the heavens; higher than the stars of God I shall set my throne. I shall sit on the Mount of Assembly far away to the north. I shall climb high above the clouds, I shall rival the Most High.”
Empowered by a large city and a single language, Nimrod conquer nearby territories and enslaved it’s local population. God, angered by this display, dispersed humanity and gave it many languages, assuring no such power could be reassembled.
When everyone speaks the same language, leaders like Nimrod are able to organize people in the creation of massive construction projects. By dispersing humanity and creating many languages, God made it much more difficult for humans to organize, but if the human race could ever return to a unified language, we could once again become powerful — and potentially enslaved.
Today, the image is the new “global language,” capable of both unifying and enslaving humanity. It has fulfilled the prophecy that one day we would create a new language that could once again ascend to heaven and challenge God. The image is an extension of civilization’s hubris. It does not empower us, but instead enslaves us as we construct new towers to kill God.
Through the image, our rulers have effectively changed our perception of reality to more effectively control us. As community and personal experience breaks down, the individual becomes what Lewis Mumford called the “mass man,” incapable of thinking on his own, utterly dominated by the world he believes to be reality.
Few of us really understand the power of images. Images are literally a new language, universally understood by everyone with little or no education required to understand the message. However, images are very poor at communicating the kind of depth necessary for a democracy. As we transition away from a verbal and print based society, we are slowly losing the ability to resist the image’s powerful messages. Indeed, Obama’s unquestioned popularity is evidence we are nearly there.
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