Xref: utzoo alt.hypertext:868 comp.multimedia:383 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rpi!uwm.edu!linac!att!ucbvax!ucbvax.berkeley.edu!nj From: nj@magnolia.Berkeley.EDU (Narciso Jaramillo) Newsgroups: alt.hypertext,comp.multimedia Subject: Re: People who can draw Images vs. People who can't Text Message-ID: Date: 22 Apr 91 17:37:49 GMT References: <1991Apr18.191452.5677@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: nobody@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Distribution: na Organization: Postcarcinogenic Bliss, Inc. Lines: 89 In-reply-to: thom@garnet.berkeley.edu's message of 18 Apr 91 19:14:52 GMT In article <1991Apr18.191452.5677@agate.berkeley.edu> thom@garnet.berkeley.edu (Thom Gillespie) writes: > People who play music 'can' and 'do' talk about music differently than people > who 'can't' play or read music. Yes. And presumably atonal music communicates something to people who have a deep understanding of music, but often fails to communicate anything to people who don't. Indeed, what the ``average'' person may get from a piece by even Mozart or Beethoven, let alone Schoenberg, may be quite different from what the ``musically adept'' person may get from the same piece. The former might be distinctly impoverished compared to the latter, or it may simply be different. Now let's carry this analogy back over to visual images. You are claiming, if I understand you correctly, that those who are ``visually adept'' can both express more and richer information in a visual medium than those who are, let us say, ``visually inept.'' But is this information necessarily going to be accessible to anyone who is using the medium? It's an encoding/decoding problem--you can encode as much information as you like in subtle nuances of perspective, shading, layout, etc., but how many people are going to pick up on those nuances? And how many people are going to interpret them in the way you intended them to be interpreted? As with music, what a ``visually inept'' person gets out of a rich picture may be distinctly impoverished compared to what a ``visually adept'' person gets. This analogy is a bit abstract, and not entirely reasonable, so let me back off and try to clarify and expand on my views. As with most things, they are pretty close to the fence, rather than clearly on one side or the other. * Images and text are both incredibly complex media. We often fall into the trap of thinking that text is necessarily precise and restricted, while image is much less so. But while a word is unambiguously made up of certain letters, all the levels beyond that (from polysemy and syntactic ambiguity all the way to conceptual ``fuzziness'') can provide a good deal of imprecision and richness. * In scientific arenas, however, a good deal of effort has been put into making text and language precise, through carefully controlled definitions, symbol systems, and so on. No such effort has been put into making images similarly precise, because that's not what images are for. * In artistic arenas, a good deal of study has gone into the analysis of art--what certain things convey, and why they convey what they do. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your bent), there's a good deal about art and image which don't appear to be expressible or analyzable, mostly because of what we might call ``differing tastes.'' Different people view art in different ways, and that's that. * As I said above, text is also imprecise in this way, even in context. In this arena, the difference is not so much in ``aesthetics'' as it is in conceptual structure. Different people have learned slightly different concepts because of their differing experiences. And some concepts which are labelled with single words are so complicated that not everyone could possibly agree on their definitions, because the concepts which they rely on are themselves different. (For instance, try to precisely define "freedom," "honor," or "justice.") * Now, despite what I said above (about ``visually inept'' people not being able to get everything out of something drawn by a ``visually adept'' person), it is certainly true that a visually adept person can communicate more with an image than a visually inept person can, even to a visually inept person. However, the extent of that extra communication may not be all that much greater than what could be communicated by a certain amount of extra text. Anything richer than that might not be communicatable to a visually inept person. To draw all this together, my point is that people who are visually adept can use more pictures, and people who are not can use more text, and there's no reason to believe a priori that one approach is better than the other. I think more people are linguistically skilled than are visually adept; thus, it is easier for people to get more subtle information from language than from image. But this can only be verified empirically. Of course, none of this applies to things which can only be communicated with imagery (or animation). But I don't think this has anything to do with visual adeptness. A more useful topic of discussion would be an attempt to find that boundary--what must be represented with image versus what can be represented with text--rather than worrying about whether one should stay on the text side of that boundary (because one is visually inept) or on the image side (because one is visually adept). Once we determine that general area, then we can individually fiddle with the boundary line, depending on our various skills. nj