ABSTRACT
One need not be a technological determinist to recognize that the globalizing, mass-mediated, commercially driven visual culture that so much of the world lives in today – a culture embodied in movies, television, advertising, and other pictorial media – is in part the product of technological developments in those media. Whereas one can conceive of complex verbal cultures based only on rudimentary means for the dissemination of the written word, contemporary visual culture would be inconceivable without the technologies that make it possible to produce automatic images of the visual world, to manipulate, copy, and store those images, to make them seem to move, and to transmit them instantaneously across vast spaces. This overview of visual culture will focus on four visual technologies, and on the implications of each. In order of the chronology of their invention, these four technologies are: print-making, photography, cinematography, and television. In connection with these technologies, this discussion will examine the relationship between visual culture and cognition; the nature of photographic truth and falsehood; the impact of visual fiction and fantasy on viewers’ evaluations of their own lives; and visual culture’s increasingly international character.
