“Nobody reads anymore.”

- Steve Jobs

     I’ve been reading a lot lately about the death of reading.  Shuttered newspapers, slow ebook reader sales and falling literacy rates, it’s argued, all portend the demise of the written word.  To fill the void, those holding a still-fogged glass over literature’s ashen mouth offer us its replacement: image-based language.  The king is dead, long live the king.

     Flickr, YouTube and Google, they say, have the vocabulary for this new language languishing on their servers.  All the “words” need is a taxonomy, an index, and fixed definitions.  No problem.

     Image-based language cannot approximate written language because of its difficulty with precision.  Photographic or cinematic mise en scéne in all but the most controlled set-ups is imperfect: accidental signifiers appear, meaning is unfixable.  Fine for impressionistic art, but less valuable for philosophical wrangling.  We use abstract symbols to describe the world, because its reality is beyond our complete grasp.  We cannot create the whole of existence from scratch.  Images are terrific when used to depict the world as it exists.  They fall shorter when asked to depict the world as it is experienced.  Readers subconsciously fill in the blanks, the parts of the universe the artist couldn’t or didn’t summon, that viewers have unpurposefully completed for them.  This new language of images is doomed to such fundamental imprecision as to be practically useless.

     The problem of imprecision in language is important because it plagues us already.  Language has always altered over time, but our time is unusual in the amount of words whose incorrect pronunciations or definitions have become standardized.  Our fondness for colloquial misappropriations intertwines with our society’s utter disdain for propriety and formality in conversation, knots our collective tongue and we speak as the deaf.  Our stilted English already feels the lack inherent in any image-based language.  It is a language of greetings and concrete things – free from ideas, from action and abstraction alike.  It is direct as a river of Hemingway prose, but bereft of the emotional undercurrent.

     And so what will the visual vocabulary created by our tongue-tied culture look like?   We supposedly see its unorganized protolanguage on YouTube and MySpace.  Will we be crass Eskimos, with a hundred “words” for fart?  What is the visual equivalent of “sorrow”?  Will our new visual language need interpreters?  Genetic and environmental differences in ocular sensory perception among different people seem to make a high-res hieroglyphics so much less universally approachable than our current arbitrarily abstract system.  How do you translate images?  So many questions.

     If Steve Jobs is right about reading, as, sadly, he might be, we’re staring at a future of human interaction impossibly less nuanced and expressive than its already stunted present.