In the beginning there were symbols.
Long before we had a representation alphabet, humans carved pictographs into stone and wood to preserve ideas or pass important messages along. And then along came the alphabet somewhere around 1,000 – 1,200 B.C. We began to use letters to form words which, in turn, represented ideas. If you lived back in the early alphabet days, you’d still understand the meaning of pictographs on a gut level, but if a message was encased in the form of words, you needed to have decoding (reading) skills to figure out what was going on.
But I wonder if the essence of raw communication has changed much. Lately, it seems that gut-level slogans and visual images are telling more and more of the stories – even to the point where they capture entire identity (and profits) of huge corporations. Think about the Nike “swoosh,” for instance, or the Baskin Robbins “31” logo, or the ever-familiar stylized apple inside the computer company bearing the same name.
Are we distilling critical and complex ideas down to slogans and modern pictographs? Are we, in many cases, comprehending things the same way our ancestors of eons ago did? And how do these distilled images affect the way we learn and live in our contemporary world?
