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So you're saying a word is worth 1000 pictures? How did we get this so wrong?



They're categorically different media, it's not just a matter of quantity. You could sum up 1000 pictures of bananas with the word "bananas", or you could spend 1000 different words describing nuances and context in just one of those pictures. Something is lost (and something is gained) either way.


Non-verbal experiences are easier to communicate non-verbally. (Breaking news!)

But, I'd like to see someone try to communicate the Bhagavad Gita or the history of F=ma in visuals using the same amount of bits as text.


In a sense, language is a clumsy facsimile of the concepts we mean to express, in that we search for words to express the ideas in our minds rather than the other way around. By contrast, an image represents precisely the concept it depicts, by definition.

We forgot this about language by about the time of the Enlightenment era, when the intellectuals of the time thought that forcing everything to inhabit the structures of language (i.e., "rationality") represented the highest moral good one could achieve.




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