I agree that there is an oversaturation of digital images in the modern day. Information undoubtedly comes in different forms now than it did in the past. I even remember having to watch Animusic 1 on DVD by inserting it into the bulky black box below my TV, which contrasts so differently to the idea of just typing those characters into a Google search bar and seeing a hundred different variations of the video pop up, free to access, in a fraction of a second.
I do disagree with the idea that people growing up around more screens doesn’t necessitate a greater sense of how to interact with those mediums. It’s clear to me from my personal experiences (having parents that did not grow up in the digital age and having, myself, been raised near a lot of TVs and computers and phones). The intuition I have when it comes to playing video games is completely lost on my mom, who isn’t even that old compared to the parents of many of my peers. One day I tried to get her to play Geometry Dash, one of my favorite games which is controlled only by tapping a screen, and she couldn’t figure out that tapping the screen at different intensities didn’t affect the game—all you had to do was tap it. What was a simple instinct to me was a completely alien concept to my mom who did not grow up surrounded by mobile games and tablets.
For this reason, I think that trying to teach VL in schools is about as useful as trying to teach social skills in a classroom setting. Nobody ever learns how to act around others because they got a good grade in a class on social skills, but because they spent time around other people and developed subconscious ideas about the topic.
I think that younger people nowadays are well equipped to handle the digital world since they are so used to being around it, BUT I do not think that the adaptations people are making to the digital world are healthy in other aspects of human life, like increased levels of screen dependency (particularly regarding social media). I do think it’s a problem how much digital images have penetrated every aspect of the world, but doing something about those problems, I think, has nothing to do with Visual Literacy.
Comments