Left to right: the cultural shift from words to pictures

Abstract

LEFT to RIGHT: the Cultural Shift from Words to Pictures is an in-depth study of the influence digital technology has had on the way we communicate, and the increasingly visual nature of our culture.

It demonstrates that the development of language has gone hand in hand with the development of technology, discussing the challenge posed to alphabetic information by the rapid development of screenbased media over the latter half of the twentieth century, which has seen the introduction of an increasingly portable range of digital technologies. With this has come an increasingly image-based use of language.

The increasing convergence of the television with the home computer, the video game, the world wide web, the mobile telephone and the digital camera has run in parallel with a reduction in the number of people reading text. Artists, designers, authors, publishers, schools and universities have all had to reassess their approach to language and find new ways of talking to a generation who have a new way of reading.