Video ergo cogito

Visual education and analogical thinking

Bibliographic Data

ID12477238
AuthorsPaul Messaris (corresponding author)
Year1996
Volume4
Issue2
Pages46-59
Publication date1996-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueYoung (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1103-3088 • E-ISSN: 1741-3222
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/110330889600400205
OpenAlexW2008557232
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited18

For more than a decade, educators and media critics have been arguing that we are on the threshold of a new age of visual thinking (e.g., Pittman, 1990). Their reasoning: young people's minds are now being molded from the earliest years by intense exposure to television and other visual media; consequently, the young people of today are part of a new 'visual generation.' This is a widely accepted claim, and there are some data that seem to support it. For example, recent findings indicate that, over the past decade, young adults in the 18-24 age group have exhibited a pronounced increase in visual-arts involvement (Zill & Robinson, 1995). However, there is very little systematic theoretical work on the following basic question: if young people are indeed acquiring visually-oriented habits of thought from their encounters with visual media, what exactly do these habits of thought look like? To put this differently: if there is a visual intelligence, what mental skills does it consist of?\nThis study is an attempt to give a partial answer to this question. Specifically, the study takes a close look at one particular type of mental skill that seems to play a major role in people's uses of visual media—namely, analogical thinking. Consider, for example, a recent music video called Take a Bow, which portrays a sexual encounter between Madonna and a matador. This video contains a lengthy sequence in which the editing takes us back and forth between two scenes: on the one hand, Madonna and the matador having sex; on the other hand, the matador fighting a bull. This form of parallel editing is clearly intended as an analogy: the viewer is meant to see various strands of similarity between the passionate doings in one scene and the violent ritual in the other

Cogito ergo sum · Epistemology · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Computer Science · Digital Storytelling and Education · Educational and Social Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Visual and Cognitive Learning Processes

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