issues of a visual culture

“From TV to newspapers, from advertising to all sorts of mercantile epiphanies, our society is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by the ability to show or be shown and transmuting communication into a visual journey. It is a sort of epic of the eye and an impulse to read. The economy itself, transformed into a “semeiocracy”, encourages a hypertrophic development of reading. Thus, for the binary set productionconsumption, one would substitute its more general equivalent: writing-reading. Reading (an image or a text), moreover, seems to constitute the maximal development of the passivity assumed to characterise the consumer, who is conceived of as a voyeur (whether troglodytic or itinerant) in a “show biz” society.” (de Certeau pxxi, 1984)