Visual Blogs
“Different mediums evoke different ways of viewing. While we might gaze at a painting, we watch television and we see films. The Internet, however, we tend to glance[1] at; our eyes skim over the screen in a freefall of vision until something interests us enough to pause the plummet momentarily.”
I cannot express how much I adore this introduction by Meridith Badger. She sums it up perfectly. We live in a fast paced world, and nothing is a better example of that than the internet. You can’t often put up a wall of text on your webpage and expect many people to read it. You need to catch their attention, pull them in.
This article explores the uses of picture and visual medium in blogging. A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say, but what thousand words? Everyone can percieve these as different messages, can string images together in different stories. And with the internet the way it is, you can never be sure where this picture is really coming from or what it’s original intent was supposed to be.
Overall I really like the ideas and questions brought up in this article. A photo-blog, expressing someone’s personality without hardly any words at all, can be a beautiful and intriguing thing. A completely made-up story using a girl’s photograph without her permission or knowledge? Now that’s a little sketchy.
In this modern world the internet is the subject of much awe, adoration, and intense debate. Where do we draw the lines, what is acceptable, what can we believe? And where does this movement towards visual blogging leave the debate for the supposed deterioration of language through the internet? Are no words at all preferable to chatspeak? If a fictional blog can be argued to have merit, could we do the same for a stolen picture?
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