Analysis of Visual Culture - Essay Sample

Introduction

Every person is bombarded with images of visual culture in their daily lives. Visual images are influential 'cultural objects' that can deliver a multi-faceted account of the social world, and because images are not generated in a vacuum, they inescapably carry entrenched frameworks of values and ideologies. As a result, images have the representative power to create meaning. Debord (1967) proposes that images 'as commodities' are differentiated from the human links that contributed to their creation and people might live today in a hall mirrors (Debord, 47). Images have the capacity to initiate new values into the world and threaten the old ones. Because of the global spread of new media technologies, the wide-range uses of personal electronic tools and the advancement of intelligent architectural interfaces, visuality is widely eclipsing textuality and image. The paper analyzes how visual culture shape and alters how people know the world.

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The power of visual images to create meaning makes them strategic tools to monitor the changing new mindset. Work and leisure are focused on visual media from the latest technology. Human experience is now more visual and visualized than ever before from the satellite images to clinical images of the human body interior. Nowadays, most people's lives are mediated through television and to a lesser extent, movies. Interactive visual media are now challenging these types of visualization like the internet and virtual reality applications. The gap between the affluence of visual experience in postmodern culture and the capacity to evaluate that observation markets both the prospect and need for visual culture as a discipline of study (Debord, 45). Visual culture is focused on visual occurrences in which the consumer pursues information, definition or pleasure in an interface with visual technology.

Visual technology enhances natural vision, from oil artwork to the television and the internet. Postmodernism has usually been delineated as the crisis resulting from modernism. While print culture is not going to disappear, the captivation with the visual and its impacts that marked modernism has stimulated a postmodern culture that is most postmodern when it is visual. Technology has the most significant influence on visual culture. One of the fascinating characteristics of the visual culture is the advancing tendency to envisage things that are not in themselves visual. Connected to this academic shift is the increasing technological capability to make observable things that individual eyes cannot see unassisted. For instance, images of distant galaxies that are in fact reversals of frequencies eyes cannot see. The initial call to attention to the development of visual culture was understood underworld picture. World picture did not mean that it was the image of the world. World picture did not transform from the medieval one into the contemporary one, but in face became an aspect that differentiates the essence of the contemporary age (Rosen, 1).

Visual culture does not rely on images themselves but the contemporary tendency to picture or visualize existence. This visualizing makes the current period fundamentally diverse from the historical and medieval world. While that visualizing has been universal all-through the modern age, it has become mandatory for everyone. The principle of visualizing generally fails to replace the discourse but makes it more understandable, faster and more effective. Visualizing has had its most amazing impacts in fields such as medicine, where every aspect in the activity of the brain to the heartbeat is now changed into a visual structure by multi-faceted technology. In this modern period, visualizing the computer surroundings has created a new feeling of enthusiasm around the probabilities of the visual. (Sturken and Cartwright, 102) Modern technology is not, nevertheless, intrinsically visual tools. The machine process data uses a binary framework of ones and zeros, while the software makes the outcomes easy to the human user. The arrival of programs like Realplayer and Shockwave has enabled technological tools to play real-time video with full-color graphics. However, there is no intrinsic reason that technological tools ought to use a visual interface, although people tend to prefer it that way.

In this contemporary society, there is no escaping visual culture. People look upon images and personalities from the visual culture world as role models and then identify with images and actions that make a link to their belief frameworks or that assist them to fit into certain groups. People are often surrounded by illusions and things that not what they appear to be. Human beings depend on objects or ideas to deceive either themselves or others to put on another identity more suited for the world that flourishes on superficial impressions. People nowadays use the internet to mask themselves. Visual media is very incognito for the news that they broadcast are usually opinionated and biased though viewers take it in as fact (Mirzoeff, 34). Numerous truths are masked by the media through reports and current occurrences. The society is keen to seek approvals of themselves, so in their efforts to blend in, they tend to conform to the group they desire to belong to; and in that course, they lose their identity.

Today, everyone with a technological device can generate and change a picture. Because of that, the influence of image has been adulterated in one sense but reinforced in another. It has been weakened by the ubiquity of images and the numerous populist technologies that provide almost everyone the power to produce, distort and convey images. But it has been reinforced by the progressive submission of the written word to images, especially moving images-the conceding of text to an image, which communicates expression instead of language. Most people love the democratizing power of technologies that give them the capability to make and manipulate pictures. Anthropologists and historians have examined the narrative of humanity's movement from a verbal-based culture to a printed culture, later to a published one. However, a few decades back, most societies began to assimilate the impacts of the shift from a culture oriented on the printed work to be based mainly on pictures. In forming pictures instead of text as a guide, the society is opening new vistas for comprehending and expressing visual culture (Howells and Negreiros, 88).

Visual culture is a new concept due to its emphasis on the visual as a situation where definitions are generated and argued. Western culture has continuously advantaged the verbal word as the greatest form of academic practice and observed visual symbolism as second-rate depictions of notions. One of the key considerations of visual culture is to comprehend how the multifaceted images come together. They are not generated from one focus-point as the exceedingly specific categories of intellectual practice would have it (Walker and Chaplin, 70). Visual culture guides individuals' attention away from configured, recognized observation backgrounds like the film and art exhibition to the criticality of visual practice in daily life. Nowadays, diverse ideas of observation and spectatorship are modern both inside and between all the different visual subjects. Individual attitude differs on whether a person is going to see a film, television or visit an art display. Nevertheless, most individual visual experience occurs in places aside from the formally configured moments of observation. Artwork may be identified in an advertisement, while television viewership is seen as a section of domestic life instead of the individual activity of the audience. Visual culture appears to prioritize the daily experience of the visual from a snapshot to the VCR and eventually to a prominent art display (Heywood, Sandywell and Gardiner, 56).

Conclusion

Conclusively, visual culture recognizes that visual image is not stable but transforms its connection to the outside reality at certain instances of modernity. Visual culture also ascertains the occurrence of visual systems of media, communication, and information in the postmodern world. Additionally, visual culture approves the reality of living in a universe of cross-mediation. People's experience of culturally meaningful visual content occurs in numerous forms and visual content and code shift from one form to another. The power of visual images establishes a meaning is currently changing the mindset of the society. The society is currently more visualized than ever before. Visual technology improves natural vision and is currently based on television, internet and other forms of media. Currently, technology is the most crucial influence on visual culture. People are capable of seeing images that were not seen before.

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Last Word Press. 2016. Print.

Heywood, Ian, Barry Sandywell, and Michael Gardiner. The Handbook of Visual Culture. , 2017. Print.

Howells, Richard, and Joaquim Negreiros. Visual Culture. Polity Press, 2012. Print.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. Psychology Press. 1999. Print.

Rosen, Christine. The Image Culture. (2005). Retrieved from: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-image-culture on date 14/11/2018

Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford University Press, 2017. Print.

Walker, John A, and Sarah Chaplin. Visual Culture: An Introduction. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997. Print.