Xref: utzoo alt.hypertext:852 comp.multimedia:368 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!garnet.berkeley.edu!thom From: thom@garnet.berkeley.edu (Thom Gillespie) Newsgroups: alt.hypertext,comp.multimedia Subject: Re: Images vs. Text Message-ID: <1991Apr17.204748.8994@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 17 Apr 91 20:47:48 GMT References: <34980@athertn.Atherton.COM>> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Distribution: na Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 66 In article jpenny@ms.uky.edu (Jim Penny) writes: >Scott McGregor Asks: > > deleted stuff... > >Now an addendum: > >I do not deny that pictures are useful. > > deleted stuff... > >There are useful reasons to use pictures in a computer interface: > >1) The intended audience could be pre-literate. >2) The intended audience could come from the writer's culture but > be non-literate. >3) The intended audience could simply prefer seeing the pictures, > either as a relief from a day spent looking mostly at words, > or as some part of a religious belief. >4) The intended audience might not read the writer's language. > > deleted stuff... > >Secondly, if it takes a long time to decode a word, it is not because it >takes longer for a word to be seen than a picture. Decoding the >meaning of a picture will take at least as long, and since most of us have >a great deal of practice decoding words, it will probably take longer to decode >the picture. Granted I 'culled' from Jim's thoughts/words, but what the hell, it's email right? 1 Point: The primary means of communication today is TV, print isn't even close, words are the 'illustration' on TV, not pictures. Pictures aren't just useful, they are indispensible. 1 Question to Jim and the other 'text leaners': Can you and do you draw? ************************** My guess is that you can't and don't because you can't. It took you at least 10 years to learn to use words well -- words are much more difficult to learn to use than pictures. Some one learning to use a picture language or a text/picture language will have to expend some energy -- tool using is tough. Remember that when "The Birth of the Nation" previewed people ran crying from the theaters because of the close-ups of heads, they had never seen a 10 foot head. The filmic techniques used by Orson Wells in Citizen Cane resulted in it being a flop with the viewers because they couldn't 'read' the message -- today it's a masterpiece and everyone uses his techniques, the viewers understand the language, they learned. The only reason there are computer screens with only text on them is because of technical limitations, not because text is better. My guess is that even in research areas we will 'run' the experiment and 'see' what the experimenter 'saw' in the first place, and if we can't 'see' it, it's because it we have a different 'view'. There will be 'connecting text' for the visualizations and the auralizations, but it will be just for illumination. And yes, I can read and I can draw. --Thom