A Picture Says A Thousand Words

Marcel O'Gorman talks about the hypericon in his book, E-Crit. At first, I wasn't sure what he meant by this, even after we discussed it in class. I had a general idea, but wasn't altogether sure. Then it hit me... a picture says a thousand words. It is a saying that I have not only heard a hundred times in my life, but I have used just about as many times. That got me thinking. With everything that I have learned in my life up to this point, with every experience, how do I interpret icons that I see every day? So I made a list of what I thought to be everyday icons and looked them up on the internet. Each time I found one, I examined it in two ways.

First, I glanced at it briefly and wrote down the first thing that popped into my head. Then I looked at the icon again, but this time I spent three minutes looking at it and then wrote down everything that I could think of that the icon meant to me. It was fun. After about the fourth one, I began to see what O'Gorman was trying to get at. No longer can everything be seen as cut and dry. New Media has and is seeing to that. The best example I can think of to illustrate this is the internet.

The internet allows what seems to be infinite amount of information to literally be at your fingertips. The ease of accessing the information, and its quantity, immerses its users and crams them with many different cultures, experiences, etc. It changes that way people see what is around them. No longer are people left in the dark, so to speak. Of course whether or not they choose to use this knowledge is up to them, but it is there. So why not use this inside the classroom? Why not change what once was to coincide with what is? Education should no longer simply look at the pretty picture, but touch it, smell it, stomp on it... use it. After all a picture says a thousand words.