A picture is worth a thousand words.
I for one am an adherent believer of this statement.However, there are some limitations to it as well & the conflict erupts whena picture is used to overpower the strength of the written word. This I feel ishappening a lot more these days. It feels that the attention span of people isreducing by the day, something that for me does not really indicate the resultof a higher evolution.
A few days back, while discussing ideas for how toget maximum traffic for the Pakistan Sustainability Network, a fact that cameacross was that a simple random picture of a spoon got around three hundredhits & if any of our blog posts get these many hits we might just hit theroof ourselves. (And NO, we don’t do boring stuff). This episode instantly tookme back to Gary Shteyngart’s novel ‘Super Sad True Love Story’. A story portrayingthe future ultra technology oriented world, where the main character LennyAbramov, is being looked down because he reads real books & has a ‘wall of books’in his apartment; instead of just streaming the stuff & covering the mainpoints. In one of the chapters when he is on a flight & opens his book, thepassenger sitting next to him tells him that the book has an awful smell!!!
Not really a bright picture.
The point is not to state as to which way ofexpression is better because there are things which can’t be compared &this is one such point, where comparison is pointless. The concentration pointis the loss of balance. Skimming through material can work at times but for in-depthunderstanding one needs to get in detail. There is no alternative to this. Alot of misrepresentation results because people don’t bother to go below thesurface and discover the details and then analyze them. All this requiresproper attention span and concentration. In this age of technology, to ensurethat this advancement is used for proper progress, people need to return to abalanced position, only then we can move from the complaining stage to solving the problems stage.
Syndicated from: A Thinking Mind