Visual Literacy: Image, Mind and Reality by Paul Messaris (review)

ANNOUNCEMENT DESIGNING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN THE POSTMODERN AGE: FROM METHOD TO METAPHOR by Richard Coyne.ALeonardo Book. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA02142, U.S.A., 1995. 399 pp., illus.Trade. ISBN: 0-262-03228-7. With this work, author Richard Coyne puts the theoretical discussion of computer systems and information technology on a new footing. Shifting the discourse from its usual rationalistic framework, Richard Coyne shows how the conception, development and application of computer systems is challenged and enhanced by postmodern philosophical thought. He places particular emphasis on the theory of metaphor , showing how it has more to offer than notions of method and models appropriated from science. Coyne examines the entire range of contemporary philosophical thinkingincluding logical positivism, analytic philosophy, pragmatism, phenomenology , critical theory, hermeneutics and deconstruction-comparing them and showing how they differ in their consequences for design and development issues in electronic communication, compute representation, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and multimedia. He also probes the claims made of information technology, including its presumptions of control, its so-called radicality, even its ability to make virtual worlds, and shows that many of these claims are poorly founded. BOOKS VISUAL LITERACY: IMAGE, MIND AND REALITY byPaul Messaris. Westview Press, Boulder, CO, U.S.A., 1994. 208 pp. ISBN: 0-81331667 -7; 0-8133-1937-44 (paperback). REVIEWS Reviewed fJy RudolfArnheim, 1200 Earhart Road #537, Ann Arbor, MI 48105, U.S.A. Paul Messaris, who teaches at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has given us the most complete and systematic description to date of the ways in which the visual media-mostly film, video, and television-convey their information and meaning. The book is well written, and every page is animated by examples taken from actual production or from experiments in the scientific literature and Messaris's own observations in his teaching. Nobody looking for a guide to how such images work could ask for a better resource. Messaris states that "the particular aim of this book is not so much to review what others have said or found as it is to develop a theoretical perspective , one that goes against certain widely held views on the nature ofvisual communication" (p. 39). In this spirit, I shall devote the following review to the clarification of some general psychological issues, where Messaris has been limited by insufficient traditional approaches. The term ''Visual Literacy" does not convey the most valuable contribution of this work, because literacy refers to verballanguage , that is, to the learning of a set of conventional signs. To apply it to visual media suggests that they also can be understood only as a set of conventional signs. Although Messaris gives in to the present, misleading habit of speaking of "cues," from which the meaning of images is "inferred," his main thesis is that much of what we comprehend when looking at images is not derived from a specific "language" of the media, but is an application of everyday sensory experience, which he often calls "unmediated" and which he rightly considers universal in human experience. Messaris faces a problem familiar to anybody who has dealt with early art forms, such as children's art, namely, that the simplest forms of pictorial representation , such as outline drawings, are the earliest to be produced spontaneously and often the easiest to understand . This is true even though the primary sensory data meeting the eyes are the complex optical projections of the physical world. To account for the puzzle, Messaris relies on the theories of psychologist David Marr, who assumes that perception proceeds by a kind of stepwise filtration, leading from the most detailed image to ever simpler ones. It is by no means clear how, without begging the question, one could account for such a process. A reference to "a catalogue of structural models in memory" (p. 57) simply postpones the question: memory of what? It is amazing to me that such reasoning is being done without reference to the universal tendency of organic, physical and mental life to create shapes. Is it not the counteraction of this form-building momentum that subjects the optic raw material to the shapes characteristic of perception and then also of representation? Visual...