Resize Text: 
The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the image,” according to cultural theorist W.J.T. Mitchell (1995). The centuries-long domination of texts and words in culture, particularly Western culture, has come to an end. The new “pictorial turn” means that images no longer exist primarily to entertain and illustrate. Rather they are becoming central to communication and meaning-making.
Mitchell wrote about a culture saturated with images in print, television, film, and public spaces. He did not fully anticipate how, and how quickly, evolving technologies would transform our visual environment. The camera, for example, was not so long ago a specialized device that, except in hands of experts, produced low-quality pictures seen by few people. Now digital cameras are just another component in many electronic devices, and images are created to be uploaded rather than printed. The four-year old photo-sharing Web site Flickr includes more than two billion images, and in just one recent month (January 2008), more than 79 million viewers watched 3 billion videos on the three-year-old site YouTube.
This visual explosion is not only a popular-culture phenomenon. Vast scholarly archives—including the ARTstor Digital Library (www.artstor.org), NASA’s Visible Earth collection (visibleearth.nasa.gov), and the American Memory site at the Library of Congress (memory.loc.gov)—make high-quality visual materials available to students, teachers, and researchers everywhere.
Our visual, screen-based world is the natural environment for many of today’s college students. Our technology and culture, some would argue, are producing a large crop of visual learners—“digital natives” who are “intuitive visual communicators” and “more visually literate than previous generations” (Oblinger and Oblinger, 2005, ch. 2).
Peter Felten is associate professor and director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at Elon University.
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