Graven images
by Bob on December 14, 2007
The making of graven images is forbidden in some modes of morality and religious books.
We are living in a world of such images. Most of them illusory and false just as predicted. Especially on internet social interaction networks where the photos may not even be of the person it says it is. It could be entirely fabricated or just misleading. You can't tell with images.
And it happens on TV, in movies, and in magazines. We see the images and generally believe them. And it makes some people sick because they don't look like the models in the fashion magazines. What they don't realise it that the models themselves don't even look like that in real life or they live a tortured life to keep their figures.
People get hurt in their hearts. On a social interaction network, a "friend" (who really isn't a friend in any conventional sense of the word) , or if you will allow me, an e-friend, can quickly ignore our messages, or even delete us from their friend list in the blink of an eye with a mouse click. And there's no recourse to socially be had. No fairness, no justice. Just gone.
Marshall McLuhan has been proven right again. We have fallen for the medium, in this case the photo of the person, rather than the person himself in reality. And it's all to easy to fall for this magician's trick. The medium itself becomes the message as he predicted.
In ancient Greek mythology we have the cautionary tale and story of the sculptor Pygmalion who made a statue of a beautiful woman, Galatea, who came to life and with whom he fell in love and was enraptured.
The playwright G.B. Shaw in his "Pygmalion" turns the same message into another cautionary tale. A professor teaches an awkward and ill-spoken street woman in London how to act with excellent courtly manners and how to speak the King's English of a courtly manner. So she fools everyone eventually since the professor is so brilliant in language and linguistic methods. But she remains who she is behind the facade of her royal accent, a lady with an uncourtly accent. But everyone at proper tea parties falls for it and thinks she is a proper lady of the court. The message is there. Not all we see and hear is really, down deep, true. Of course, Shaw had an ax to grind with English and wanted to revise how it is spelled and taught as a language. Nevertheless, the warning persists.
We also see that people can be entranced by images on a screen and on paper and forget that they are un-real in an interpersonal sense. Thomas Edison knew the parlour trick and made a bunch of still images move by rotation, hence we have film rolling in the projector. Woody Allen even chimed in on this illusion in his cautionary tale, the 1985 film entitled "The Purple Rose of Cairo" wherein a character on the screen in a movie theatre leaps out of the screen into reality as we know it. Perhaps his earlier 1983 film "Zelig" was even a deeper example of illusions and chameleon-like behaviour, despite its outward seeming humour.
For we find in the ancient origins of theatre, especially comedy, a sense of hurt and tragedy underlying it all.
We can become lethargic sheep being told anything and believing it.
And the 1976 movie, "Network" also warned us about that complacency. The central character asked his hypnotised-by-TV audience to scream out of their windows, "I'm mad as hell and I won't take it anymore". A wakeup call.
We must not confuse images with the real thing. People are real people that we can see in person and see multi-dimensionally in the street and talk despite their wearing an iPOD or Walkman. A false image on a website is just that: an illusion and a projection of a persona, not a person who might exist.
So the great writings in every civilisation warn us of this temptation societally. We must heed it. If we don't, the Solipsists win, and everything becomes an illusion indistinguishable from "reality" however we choose to define reality which admittedly is hard to define.
Beware of images. They may not be what they seem. And beware of projected personalities as on the internet, as people may not be who they seem to be.
The art of face-to-face conversation is losing out to text messages on a cell phone or in an instant messenger on a computer or even in emails. We have not always been able to learn from history, despite its clarity. Perhaps we humans are destined to learn as a child learns, from direct harsh experience or as it's called "the school of hard knocks". I hope not.