The power of image

“One picture is worth a thousand words.” We have all heard this and variations of the same theme many times. Good advertising thrives on images, more than words. In the ‘70s we use to gauge TV programs by how well we understood the story without the dialogue. Mission Impossible was an exemplary program in this regard. Great movies, as opposed to staged plays turned into movies, are judged best by the hue of its cinematography before the crispness of its dialogue.

Our educational systems in the last 500 years, ushered by the Guttenburg printing press revolution, remain overwhelmingly printed-word dependent. The Christian Johannine Gospel’s opening chapter declaring the preeminence of the Word (“In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was God.”), an inadequate translation of the dynamic Greek ŒLogos‚ into the staid English Œword‚, spawned religious fanatics dependent on sacred texts for their self-understanding. The doctrine of the inerrancy of the Scriptures held by fundamentalists of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, has proven to be a scourge to a diverse world of competing understandings.

The late economist Kenneth E. Boulding of the University of Colorado wrote of an organic view of knowledge that centers in the human activity of creating images. He promoted the task of educating the image-creating brain, discerning that people live out of images. People hold pictures of themselves and their world. Images determine behavior. Daily decisions and actions are guided by our operating images. Images are transmitted through pictures, dramas, banners, signs, rituals, sculptures, slogans, and songs.

In a technological age of gadgets, nothing is more irritating than to get a manual of operations from a manufacturer with printed instructions in poor ESL. Among decision-makers, nothing is more divisive than the failure to understand that the meaning of a word is not a one-to-one correspondence to an aspect of reality. Contentious rhetoric can be avoided if we heed what linguistics affirm, that a word is understood in context, and at best, refers to a field of meaning rather than a singular meaning. Entries in the Oxford Dictionary of the English language attest to this. German allows for endless modifiers and qualifiers to clarify meaning but it is cumbersome, and hardly ever successful. Early Chinese writings lumped pictographs together to attain precision of meaning. The pictographs got abstracted into characters, and even with 10,000 characters required of an educated Chinese to recognize, communications within the language faces the same dilemma as other language forms.

Studies of the mind point to one side of the brain as word-cognizant while the other side recognizes images. The PC-Mac debate on computer operating systems used to be couched in the dichotomy between word and images. Obviously, a well-rounded education of the human brain must involve both.

Yet, when Johnny and Joanna are bored reading their textbooks, and he starts drawing his dragons and swords, and she, her power puff girl models, teachers tend to castigate them for the effort and issue demerits for not paying attention to the word-dependent nature of most classroom learning settings.

Image words are potent. Exclamatory words are forceful not because of the words used but the accompanying emotions in their utterances. In most communications, attitudes are transmitted before meaning. Images energize as they inform. The Nazi Swastika moved a nation, albeit, in a not too humane direction, and continues to empower ethnic hate mongers around the globe. The Star of David keeps Israel’s resolve in place. The broken bread and the spilled-out wine in a chalice unite a dispersed and fragmented faithful. The late Joseph Campbell stated that the Earthrise symbol, the photo of the earth rising over the lunar horizon, was going to be the icon of the late 20th Century. It was, and continues to remain so in our century, especially among those engaged in the conserving, preserving and maintaining the health and well being of the biosphere.

Image-makers are sorely needed in the policy-making domain. Pacific leaders talk stories first as a prelude to making important decisions. Kava-drinking rituals precede serious deliberations. Just think how different the deliberations would be if the U.S. Congress sang a regional folk song first as a part of their agenda. How about a Carolinian chant before the Legislators get down to law-making business? Meals precede every Chinese business meeting. Storybooks are drawn before movies are filmed. Micronesian sculpted story panels grace community houses. The decision of NMC to create a Film and TV program is futuric. Whether it is a fledgling and floundering academic program, in spite of a great output from the WIA-funded 60th Anniversary of the Battle of Saipan coverage is beside the point. From a commercial and academic perspective, the art and discipline of image making for TV and movies serve a growth industry that is talent rather than material resource based. There is no shortage of image-making talents in the islands.

The Commonwealth Council of the Arts‚ decision to initiate a film festival during the Flame Tree Arts Festival’s 25th anniversary, and henceforth, to become a permanent feature of the assembly is right on target. The Council’s two-week amateur filmmaking workshop this month is putting substance to the vision. This effort deserves the support of both the business and humanities sectors.

PSS has unleashed a powerful picture of every child with a laptop in the classroom to run CD-based text materials. Notwithstanding cynicism over the Southern High laptops, especially since some teachers have yet to have a computer, the promise of image-generated teaching materials, and the capability to keep generating them, captivates the imagination. Teaching needs to recapture the use of images to enrich the communication method. In one of his State of the Union addresses, JFK Jr. projected an American in the moon within a decade. A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, and a boy and girl with their own room in every house, built the suburban dream. A politician this election with a futuric, compelling image gets my vote.

The enterprising picture of every child with a laptop grabs my fancy. (Apple i-books are now down to less than $500!) I expect all good school administrators to respond with: “Yes! Now, let’s hanker down to work out the “How!”

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School