6. Visual Culture and New Media Technologies

6.    

Visual Culture and New Media Technologies

We learn to see images long before we learn to talk or read. Images have always been around and played a crucial part in human life. Due to the popularity of the internet, the rise of cyberculture, and digital software and technology such as editing programmes, cameras, webcams and camera phones visual culture, which was once left in the realm of the professionals, can now be easily and efficiently produced by the average person and shown to the world with a simple upload. In a very effective way new media technologies have transformed us from a culture that not only sees, but also visualises and creates. The greatest transformation new media has brought visual culture is in the way we see and look at the world through representational images of it. The nature of an image or a visual representation can be said to constitute a viewer or spectator, largely by the way they give us a position and an identity from which to view the world and from which to express our own worlds and identities.

Lister, Dovey, et al (2009) affirm “Changes in the ways of visually representing the world and the relationship of the resulting images to historically changing ‘ways of seeing’ are also central to the study of visual culture.” (p. 127). New media technologies has greatly influenced and transformed the visual representation of the world in the very way our consumption of images has increased. Images now come from all parts of the world and all walks of life which can affirm or challenge the way we see the world. New media tools can manipulate and with precision and subtlety, create reality or unreality. Visual culture is not only more available and consumable but it has become a full out assault on our senses. Another transformation of visual culture can be seen in virtual reality – the use of fonts and typing through to three-dimensional presence and animation, often found in games, but also in computer graphics and the manipulation of text and pictorial space.  

New media, such as digital imaging through to cinema, is usually based around the realism and the realistic image. This concept is known as verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is a type of representation that claims to capture the visual appearance of people, objects, and thus, the world as it appears to the human eye. Verisimilitude in an aspect of cinematography that has become conventional and taken for granted but it has become of interest to both producers and consumers in computer imagery and thus, one can say that computer imagery has transformed the aesthetic of visual culture in the way it has brought Verisimilitude back into fashion. A myriad of internet sites such as Photobucket reveals the verisimilitude and the visual representation of life.     

New media has transformed visual culture in significant and  ways from styles and popular arts through to the way we use images to represent our own realities to the world – through record keeping and documenting such as online photo albums, profiles, and videos, through to interacting with virtual reality, being stimulated by and interacting with alternative realities based on properties and rules. Most of all, visual culture has been transformed by our knowledge, our use of images and the types of art now consumed and produced that visually represent the world, and reveal a way of seeing the world. All this would not have been possible without new media technologies.  

References

Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I., & Kelly, K.  (2009) New Media A Critical Introduction (2^nd ed.). New York: Routledge.