With more pictures, fewer words

Updated: 2012-05-13 07:48

By Anita Patil(The New York Times)

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A hologramlike projection of Tupac Shakur performed at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California to stunned fans and Facebook bought Instagram, the photo-sharing service, for $1 billion last month. Meanwhile, the absence of a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for the first time in 35 years and price-fixing charges in the e-book business roiled the world of letters recently.

What's become of words and text in a visual world?

They've been turned into mere accessories. The book has been transformed into a clutch, carried by the likes of the actress Chloe Sevigny and other fashionistas who do indeed want to be judged by their covers. Olympia Le-Tan, a French designer, has created $1,500 purses embroidered to look like the covers of works by literary masters like Kafka, Moliere and Dickinson.

Text is losing clout with an image-hungry audience constantly searching for, posting and reposting photos. "Everyone is in an archival roller-coaster process of picture language," the photographer Thomas Struth, who studied under Gerhard Richter in the 1970s, told The Times.

With more pictures, fewer words

And in the rise of the visual Web, it's all about the image, as Tumblr, Facebook's Timeline and Instagram show.

"The photograph itself, even an artily manipulated one, has become so cheap and ubiquitous that it's no longer of much value," Karen Rosenberg wrote in The Times. "But the experience of sharing it is, and that's what Facebook is in the business of encouraging us to do."

It's what Pinterest, now the third-most-popular social media site after Facebook and Twitter, is based on. Users share images collected from around the Web by "pinning" them, creating virtual bulletin boards based on themes like food, home decor, travel and fashion. Words are sparse.

"Pinterest is creating sort of a meritocracy of what's visually appealing," Andrew Lipsman of the research firm comScore, told The Times.

Visually driven businesses have incorporated the site as a marketing tool. Planning a home renovation? Browse the "Lovely Laundry Rooms" board of the magazine Better Homes and Gardens. Online retailers like Gilt Home use the site. Blake Cahill of Banyan Branch, a digital media advertising agency that manages the Gilt Home page, said pictures were replacing words when it comes to social media. "Everyone is a voyeur," she told The Times.

And how can you not be when everyone's on screen all the time? Video chatting has become a normal part of life, for online dating, interviewing, Skyping with family or videoconferencing at work. And have you noticed that you look a little jowly? Your face and neck too droopy? For $10,000, the FaceTime Face-Lift, named after the popular iPhone feature, will fix that.

Dr. Robert K. Sigal, a plastic surgeon in Virginia, says his procedure can help people look younger when they appear on video chat services by reducing sagging necks, but without leaving a scar under the chin. About a quarter of the 100 face-lift patients he has a year cited the way they look on Webcams as a reason for getting plastic surgery, he told The Times, including his own wife.

"Back when you just kind of chatted with people, you didn't know you had broccoli in your teeth," Rosalind W. Picard, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told The Times. "Now the camera shows you all the horrible stuff."

For comments, write to nytweekly@nytimes.com.

(China Daily 05/13/2012 page9)