IT100_52/Fall 2009

The invention of writing systems for language and math structured this learning even more. Ideas could be remembered more accurately, and just as importantly, their organization could be examined and analyzed. Ideas could also be indexed, retrieved, and propagated easier. Writing allowed the organization of information to penetrate into many aspects of life and vastly accelerated trade, creation of calendars, and laws – all of which organized information further.

With our fingers we will drag objects out of films and cast them in our own movies. A click of our phone camera will capture a landscape, then display its history, which we can use to annotate the image. Text, sound, motion will continue to merge into a single intermedia as they flow through the always-on network. With the assistance of screen fluency tools we might even be able to summon up realistic fantasies spontaneously. Standing before a screen, we could create the visual image of a turquoise rose, glistening with dew, poised in a trim ruby vase, as fast as we could write these words. If we were truly screen literate, maybe even faster. And that is just the opening scene

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places — like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity

With our fingers we will drag objects out of films and cast them in our own movies. A click of our phone camera will capture a landscape, then display its history, which we can use to annotate the image. Text, sound, motion will continue to merge into a single intermedia as they flow through the always-on network. With the assistance of screen fluency tools we might even be able to summon up realistic fantasies spontaneously. Standing before a screen, we could create the visual image of a turquoise rose, glistening with dew, poised in a trim ruby vase, as fast as we could write these words. If we were truly screen literate, maybe even faster. And that is just the opening scene.

Digital technology gives the professional a new language as well. An image stored on a memory disc instead of celluloid film has a plasticity that allows it to be manipulated as if the picture were words rather than a photo. Hollywood mavericks like George Lucas have embraced digital technology and pioneered a more fluent way of filmmaking. In his “Star Wars” films, Lucas devised a method of moviemaking that has more in common with the way books and paintings are made than with traditional cinematography.

The overthrow of the book would have happened long ago but for the great user asymmetry inherent in all media. It is easier to read a book than to write one; easier to listen to a song than to compose one; easier to attend a play than to produce one. But movies in particular suffer from this user asymmetry. The intensely collaborative work needed to coddle chemically treated film and paste together its strips into movies meant that it was vastly easier to watch a movie than to make one. A Hollywood blockbuster can take a million person-hours to produce and only two hours to consume. But now, cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, Photoshop, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images. To the utter bafflement of the experts who confidently claimed that viewers would never rise from their reclining passivity, tens of millions of people have in recent years spent uncountable hours making movies of their own design. Having a ready and reachable audience of potential millions helps, as does the choice of multiple modes in which to create. Because of new consumer gadgets, community training, peer encouragement and fiendishly clever software, the ease of making video now approaches the ease of writing.

As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be remanipulated by the audience. This gives images a liquidity similar to words. Fluid images­ made up of bits flow rapidly onto new screens and can be put to almost any use. Flexible images migrate into new media and seep into the old. Like alphabetic bits, they can be squeezed into links or stretched to fit search engines, indexes and databases. They invite the same satisfying participation in both creation and consumption that the world of text does.

The site organizes the sprawling threads of these visual chats so that they can be read like a paragraph of dialogue.

Currently, the smartest object-recognition software can detect and categorize a few dozen common visual forms. It can search through Flickr photos and highlight the images that contain a dog, a cat, a bicycle, a bottle, an airplane, etc. It can distinguish between a chair and sofa, and it doesn’t identify a bus as a car. But each additional new object to be recognized means the software has to be trained with hundreds of samples of that image.

It took several hundred years for the consumer tools of text literacy to crystallize after the invention of printing, but the first visual-literacy tools are already emerging in research labs and on the margins of digital culture.