PICTORIAL VERSUS ABSTRACT SYMBOLS OF COMMUNICATION

Don’t let your opinion be a line of steel that cannot be bent with our bare hands. I don’t want you to enter the paradigm of the erstwhile Major of New York City, His Lordship Rudy Giuliani who is out for a grandeur that had eluded him since 911 at the dawn of his life. He will not yield and his words is his bond. I will talk about video game addiction and pictures or pictorial interaction. The object of writing is communication. In some cases, the readers or interlocutors need to interact with the speakers. I do not favor quietism that follows most of my renditions. My genuine interpretation is acquiescence, ignorance or summary dismissal as bunkum by some readers if at all there are any or last and not least, quiescence. Then I may be awry as the new generation is not essentially growing to be book-learned but pictorially-learned. This is not of their making but ours that are bent on getting rich at the expense of their successes and continuity of the foundation of knowledge we have laid or inherited.

A strident picture of a naked Hollywood actress in her prime posted on Face Book or YouTube, Twitter or Instagram by some euphoric member would attract a million likes from viewers, ‘readers’. Whereas information on how to escape from a marauding desperado armed with guns, invading a bucolic school is ignored at the readers’ peril. You may be surprised that only ten readers may browse not because such information is not relevant as incidentally, from their perspective reading is painful, boring and not ‘exciting’.

Pictorial communication ardently promoted by the Face book and others is inadvertently outdistancing the alphabetically written formats or alphanumeric symbols of communication with certain groups of Internet users in North America. My apprehension is how pure scientific information would be transmitted in the future? It is easy when we employ a refined form of pictorial symbols, alphanumeric symbolism. However, if the trend of video gaming and use of still pictures continue, I envisage with naïve difficulties how quantum physics, psychology, linguistics and the learning of foreign languages would be effectively learned. Would we be regressing or progressing? I may be downgrading pictorial transmission of information of the type on Internet at this juncture. However, it is a known fact that most alphanumeric symbols we employ in our daily media had their genesis in pictorial symbolism. The fact that we do not take this into consideration is because most of our reasoning is abstract, refined symbolism and not necessarily pictorial or a combination. The outward facets of our thoughts are symbolic. If it were essentially pictorial that could retard the progress of our communication. I know many questioning if the Japanese and Chinese scripts do retard or accelerate communication above all to the uninitiated?

Armed with information that most abstract symbols have their genesis in pictorial symbols, should we not question it if the graphic generation that is indulged in video plays with pictorial symbols from dawn to dusk would be moronic or super intelligentsias since they would require no throes of laborious and serious reasoning to comprehend what is being transmitted? Many are greeted by video games when they rise up in the morning and bid good night by them at night. The absurdity of killing 8 to 10 hours at the expense of reading those great books that made the Western Civilization to ranking among the greatest on earth and if not in the universe is what makes me wonder if serious research has been carried out to see the danger we are putting these children and even adults into. Then, do all thoughts or psychic uses necessitate the use of symbols and would pictorial symbolism in our communication media accelerate or decelerate our comprehension? If it is professed that most living things with eyes learn to interpret pictures automatically vis-à-vis abstract symbols where some learning is required for effective interpretation, there might be some need in pictorial transmission of information irrespective of its addictive tendencies. Our dilemma is where users get addicted to and other vital chores suffer. Pictorial symbolism has been employed in cartographic communication since time immemorial and even today when it comes to tourist maps, plans and charts. Then in most maps, the use of abstract symbols apart from being clear in presentation, avoids crookedness, noise that may interfere in the transmission of intended information. This is a different perspective from video games that is geared towards entertainment and not necessarily for pedagogic purposes. However we are wondering aloud if it could be employed for teaching purposes now that we have seen it wastes a great deal of valued times of youths in schools and colleges.

You will remember that no one has ever visualized in real-time but always in the past. The object being visualized is captured by the photographic lens of the eyes, sent to the processing parts of the brain for interpretation before it refined or prostituted with our innate foreknowledge before being seen. Time elapses in the process. Therefore no one can see in the present and none had ever done so. It will ever be in the past. Even when you are speaking to yourself employing that auditory system of symbols you have to reason and then articulate and that takes time.

Knowing that one of the merits of pictorial presentation is getting youths to focus for hours and hours therefore could pictorial or video gaming be employed for pedagogic purposes which could be a bonus for those who have schooled themselves to read photographically. This draft that took me five minutes to pen could be read in one quarter of a second. With the acquisition of that skill of reading, it could take an enthusiastic scholar on average to read with formidable comprehension a thousand books in eight-working-hours’ day. Such would be classed among geniuses and many who have not mastered that skill would be flabbergasted and even surrender before the battle is declared. 

I am left with conjectures as some persons are of the opinion that inculcating knowledge and theories on the youths is torturing their innate witticism when they could with the click of a button ask Google and other sites, WWW, to produce billions of variegated answers. If applicable, we could envisage a vista of schools springing up where tests were not essential since everyone traveled with an up-to-date computer and could get answers to every conceivable question in the universe with a click of a button. Then would man not be controlled by machine, robots and look moronic? The fact is man is more intelligent than the computer and the moment he would allow himself to be dominated by it with the assumption of being comfortable, he would signal his demise. Domination is infiltrating through many guises. This is no longer scientific fiction or what could be examined casually, but many have working mini computers that translate and articulate in the languages of their interlocutors, do their assignments and a thousand and one others. With such possibilities, would there be any need to learn to learn or learn other languages or things?  Perhaps one of my readers would ponder a solution or solutions to this apparent conundrum. I will not sneak away from your comments as I am flexible and not like the toughened steel line of the former Mayor of New York earlier mentioned.