Mapping the millennium: Colours of culture

WERE we to vote on which of our sense organs is the busiest today, there is no doubt that the eyes would have it. Everywhere you look, you have to look.

In this wired world, the triumph of the visual image is all but total. Other kinds of sensory experience have now been disembodied, broken down and brilliantly repackaged for immediate consumption through the eyeballs.

Consider music. Since the rise of MTV, the joys of rock and pop and soul and country have become more televisual than aural, and therefore far less physical: The music asks you not to shake your booty but to watch a lot of really buff performers shaking theirs.

Words too have largely been adapted to the omnipresent visuals, as in advertising, with its iconic monosyllables and wild collage typography; or in TV news, its every verbal stroke dictated by the footage; or in the rise of USA Today, with its thumbnail articles and cartoon colours.

And yet to say that culture in 2000 is a visual business does not convey exactly what it is like to look around today. For ours is not a world of still lifes, rich visual artefacts that somehow let us grasp and savour what is in them. Such images are exceptions to the raging norm, a bit like monasteries a millennium ago.What marks our visual experience today is its crazy speed and boggling multiplicity. We barely get to focus; all we really see is that there is too much stuff to look at. The totality of sights is, finally, blinding, for the images that work as provocation actually repel the careful gaze.

Our only recourse is to seek out those exceptions that are really worth it and give them the attention they deserve. Otherwise, the beat goes on, if you see what I mean.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER

The writer is professor of media ecologlogy at New York University.

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