Why do we often trust pictures more than sound? A short answer to a complicated problem in two parts: first of all our eyes / vision is regarded as the most trustworthy modality in the western world over the last few hundred years, even though our ears / hearing used to be on top of the sensory hiarchy here also, and still is regarded this way in many less industrialized / mediatized cultures (cf. J.C Carothers 1959, M. McLuhan 1962 or R. M Scafer 1980). Secondly: there are differences between our sensory modalities and physical characteristics of sound and light, that also account for our 'blind trust' in the images. Edward Branigan writes about this in his 1989 article "Sound and Epistemology in film" (being re-written as we speak). Writing about the different physical and sensory characteristics of sound/hearing and light/vision Braigan says: "Lightness and color appear to reside in an object - to be a quality of the object - rather than to emanate from an object. By contrast, we think of sound as coming from a source, from an object: a radio, a door, a boot. [...] our hightened sense of the movement of sound waves [...] account for our impression that sound is created and contigent - mediated - while light is directly posessed by distant objects and permanent." In sum: our hierarchy of the sensory modalities, and our trust in them, is related to both top-down culturally learned perception and to bottom-up data driven perception. The culturally learned part of this, makes it interesting for media scholars to focus on the way codes and conventions play a part in convincing us to trust or doubt images or sound... Which - by the way - I'll be spending the next 4 years studying in relation to sound in television. Arnt Maaso ________________________________ Arnt Maas=F8 [log in to unmask] Institutt for medier og kommunikasjon Telefon: +47-22 85 04 19 Telefax: +47-22 85 04 01 http://macimk44.uio.no/ansatte/arnt.maaso/ ________________________________ ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]