1 - Images

Summary

Images dominate our language, writing, and thinking and are therefore a key influence on the occurrence and frequency of mistakes. Images are a major influence on social change and almost always act as a conservative force. It is rare to observe the details of an event or a process. What happens instead is that one's ideas about occurrences are shaped by memorable pictures, placed there by journalistic accounts, everyday conversations, political oratory, or other sources of alleged information who devise striking images to win and hold audiences. Striking metaphors as well as conventional and common beliefs and stereotypes comprise part of the large body of sources from which memorable images can be forged.

Just as observation is not the source of images, so also observations that show the invalidity of current images do not change them or erase them. Observations in themselves are irrelevant to ideas and thought because observations always need to be interpreted before they can form images. As I write this on my computer, I observe the mouse that helps me write what I wish to say, but until I place the mouse in a context that highlights what I can do with it, it is just an oddly shaped bit of plastic.

Further diluting the role of thought and innovation in shaping images and their effects is the fact that they are defined by dimensions that are stereotypes themselves: good–bad, active–passive, local–universal, real–unreal, and others.