13 - Images and Reality

Summary

Abstract

Images cover our world and can be viewed as a threat to its everyday reality. On inspection, images thicken that everyday reality or animate events that pair bodies with the media where images are found. On another interpretation, those events are viewed as scaffolds traced in media by basic minds animating those bodies or as affordances that turn up in media for embodied minds. As affordances, images prove to be resources that, for good or ill, advance the forms of life embodied in minds. It is up to those embodiments to form lives which pick up what is good in affordances and cast aside what is not including the distractions images often present. Education can help us form lives that more regularly turn up the good that images afford us, but that education must be enacted in lives also regularly disposed to enhance the reality where we find images.

Keywords: images, everyday aesthetics, reality, aesthetic education

It is a commonplace to say reality is awash with images. The wash can be observed on movie and television screens, on computer screens where multiple images compete for our attention, and on the equally crowded screens attached to various mobile devices. It can be observed on billboards, bulletin boards, mass-transit kiosks, in newspapers, magazines, and wherever we find advertisements posted or delivered, on storefronts and product packaging, for example, or in the mail. The text emerging on the screen in front of me is an image of the text that may be printed and bound together with other texts that came to life-like images on screens. A social media platform, Slack, recommends using emojis and images to save readers the trouble of writing a reply. Other social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter – facilitate sharing images with “friends” and “followers.” Others, still – Tik Tok, Pinterest, Instagram – traffic exclusively, some say excessively, in images. Memes are yet another example of the proliferation of images. Awash we are with images, or so it appears, so long as we are awake and, in our sleep, we dream in images ostensibly taken from scenes in real life which, as we have just noted, is replete with images.