Why a Picture is Worth 1000+ Words

A story on NPR’s All Things Considered yesterday (“Vivid Photos Remain Etched in Memory”) provided some explanations of why the pictures of the abuse of Iraqi detainees are so much more captivating (and horrifying) than the written reports — some thousands and tens of thousands of words long — that have been circulating for many months. Hal Buell, former photography director for the Associated Press and author of Moments: Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographs, attributes the stronger impact of photos to the fact that they are less mediated than textual accounts — we can see an event more directly for ourselves rather than have to reconstruct the event from someone else’s description. Edwin Guthman, a USC School of Journalism professor, cautions that photos and videos can be altered to affect their impact, citing the example of the Rodney King video in which the first part of the video, showing King’s initial attack on the police officers, was not included on the TV broadcast (the reporter, Ari Shapiro, notes that many of the photos from Abu Ghraib have been cropped so that they do not include the onlookers). John Gabrieli, a Stanford psychology professor interviewed for the story suggests that since human brains have been processing images far longer than they have processed text, our brains react more strongly to images and we naturally remember photographs longer and in more detail than we remember words.

I’m reminded of a recent discussion with Adam Seifer, Chief Fotologger of Fotolog.net, in which he claimed while many people may experiment with text-based blogging, few people will maintain such blogs over time, both because of the difficulty many people have in consistently composing text [that others want to read], and because most people don’t want to read [much]. In contrast, he believes that photoblogging will continue to increase in popularity, because of the relative ease with which people can compose and post, as well as view, photos – a larger pool of potential producers and consumers.

If a picture is worth thousands of words, I wonder what a video is worth. Does the temporal dimension add or detract from the value of a single image, or does it depend on the length, quality and/or other features of the video? Will VideoBlogging ever “take off”? I suspect there are fewer people who can produce video [that others will want to watch] than there are people who can compose text [that others will want to read], but this may be a generational thing: as more people get their infotainment from video streams (e.g., TV), and tools for capturing, editing and providing access to video become more widely available and easier to use, perhaps video will become the media of choice for personal commentary on the web.