“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.’”Stan Brakhage, Metaphors of Vision
Eventually, Brakhage’s crawling baby grows up and understands extraordinarily complex messages.
How does that happen?
Two of the great minds of communication theory—George Gerbner and Ray Birdwhistell—had two radically different views on
how communication worked.
Gerbner—famous for studying the impact of violence on television—believed that a message was about its affect.
Birdwhistell—the man who first taught us the importance of “body language”—thought that was ridiculous.
1. Individuals did not invent society. 2. Society invented individuals. 3. Social communication invented (and maintains) society.
Before he even contemplated the idea of “message,” he set out several challenging principles:
He proved that point when he found that babies only a few weeks old reflect the gestural patterns unique to their cultures.
Their societies shaped their individual identities.
And he taught us that a smile is not just a smile. It depends on who is smiling, what world they occupy, and what
the smile means to those around them.
A message is not simply the transmission of information. Nor is it simply the affect or impact of that transmission.
And when you look at it that way, you understand the true nature of complex messages that the crawling baby
grows up to understand.
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