Last year a friend of mine asked which of the inter web app's I thought would win out in the end - you know, in the war between Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and all the rest.
I told him right off the bat, I thought it would be Instagram because people all seem to interact more meaningfully with images than words (or they seem to on my Facebook feed - photos always get way more likes than plain sentences). Plus I argued that the young folk (ahem) conduct whole conversations using emoticons (well allegedly - the closest I have to actual experience of this is by texting my 21 year old cousin and well, trust me when I say the conversation is emoticon heavy) and if the kids are short cutting language in favour of images, then they are going to favour those kinds of apps.
I've been thinking more on this and I think our brains are wired better for images. I occasionally get powerful food cravings and the craving is always constructed by my brain flashing an image of whatever it wants into the middle of my thoughts... Like, I'll be sitting at my desk working away and a great big slice of Banoffee Pie will flash big and vivid into the front of my mind. I don't even eat Banoffee Pie (!) so those demands are not too hard to ignore, but when a crispy chilled glass of sav blanc appears with dewy condensation beading down the glass sides, it's a little more challenging... But you get my point? Our brain is designed to communicate with us through images - well I think...
Plus, if you look at how writing developed the world over, its all picture characters. Over time we have developed written words, but the pictures came first and maybe that is because they were more intuitive...
Actually, thats all pretty interesting when you start looking at it don't you think? How the brain converts image to language... Wow, actually I think its really interesting! I should look into this more.
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