Archive

»One of the most important skills of humankind is visual communication. It is ‘pre-historical’; we all know about Native American imagemaking and European cave paintings. Written communication with alphabets and characters is a comparatively young invention.
Yet, in school the pupils are educated in reading and writing, mainly focusing on textual literacy. The general public is left to intuitively learn Visual literacy. Today, we constantly hear how students in the post-modern era are increasingly visual. This is nonsense. While these students have been born into a period when highly advanced technology for creating the most sophisticated visual imagery ever produced is readily available, it does not follow that they have a critical understanding of this imagery. My experience is that students and the public are, in fact, almost totally visually illiterate when it comes to analyzing visual messages. This is not to say that they don’t understand the messages. To the contrary, they quickly understand the sense of these messages. But if you ask them to explain how they interpret visual messages by outlining the codes they’ve accessed and inferences they’ve made in the process of communication, they show little categorical or critical understanding. Students simply are not taught to take apart visual messages and to analyze them. Instead, we read visual messages quickly and without a lot of thought.«

Craig, Robert L. (2000): Visual Communication in the 3rd Millennium. One of the Most Important Skills of Humankind. In: Aviso. Informationen aus der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Publizistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft, Nr.26, Februar, S. 4.
zitiert bei: Müller, M. G. (2003). Grundlagen der visuellen Kommunikation. Konstanz: UVK Verl.-Ges., S. 178f