Our visual age endangers young people

Simon Marcus Gower, Director, Research and Development, Harapan Bangsa School, Tangerang, Banten

In our age of computer games, entertainment from television and cinema and the massive quantity of material available on the Internet, it is increasingly clear that we live in a highly visual age. But this "visual age" is creating a condition in which people, and in particular students, are growing up with fewer and fewer powers of concentration. Our visual age is creating a generation of people that have very limited attention spans and confused perceptions of reality.

The power of imagery has, of course, always been great but with modern technology and modern day forms of entertainment the power of imagery has been taken to new heights. Unfortunately too, so much of modern day imagery is targeted at young people and this is having an observable effect.

Young people, and by definition this means students, are caught up in this potentially confusing mass of imagery and it is robbing them of both their powers of concentration and their imagination.

Children play video and computer games, watch television and films and are left with limited space for their own imagination. Imaginative pretend play seems to be becoming less of a part of children's play. Instead they are being engaged by and interacting with the likes of computer imagery which all too often features violence and destruction.

The debate about the possible dangerous effects of exposure to violent imagery may be on going, but observable facts tend to suggest that children are becoming anesthetized to violence. For example, in the aftermath of the horrors of the Bali bombing, instead of sadness and empathy, strangely, some childrens' response to it here in Indonesia was laughter and amusement that Indonesia had made world news.

A dark and disturbing response that suggests that for them violence is not so much of an abhorrence, as it should be. Their exposure to violent imagery on television and computer screens has distanced them from the horrible realities of violence, making it "other-worldly" for them.

Reactions such as this suggest not only a lack of empathy but also a terrible lack of understanding of reality. Because it was distant to them and only brought to them in television imagery, they failed to understand the magnitude of what had happened.

Young people, too, do not seem to read well and widely and so their understanding of the world and world events such as the Bali bombing is limited and usually it is limited to the images they see on television screens.

This, in turn, creates a limited attention span and limited powers of analysis. A news item on television is short and fragmentary at best and the likelihood of a young person spending more than a few moments focused on a news item is small. Far more likely is a quick skip through television channels to find a music video or some such that literally bombards them with imagery.

If you watch a typical three-minute pop music video, you are likely to experience literally hundreds of images as the video producers, directors and editors piece together frames of imagery that often appear for no more than seconds. In fact, so fast is the inter-splicing of images that quite often it is near subliminal and so images may be being transmitted to viewers without them being conscious of their receipt.

This type of use of visual stimuli is really bordering on manipulation of the viewing public. With about half of the human brain dedicated to visual recognition, the use of visuals is, in effect, a means of deliberately targeting our natural human biological responses of recognition and response to visual stimulation. In this sense, the brain is being stimulated and naturally responds.

Even if we do not see anything malicious or manipulative in this kind of stimulation, we should still be considerate of its possible and/ or likely effects. One of these is an addictive quality to visuals that may tend to push aside attentiveness, concentration and the desire to truly interact with the real world around us rather than just the visual world delivered to us on a screen.

An example was the response from some junior high school students to a plan to take them to watch a recent Indonesian stage production of Romeo and Juliet. Their response was negative towards the prospect of attending a live event. Some even came to the conclusion that it would be "better just to watch a film version."

Here the depth of the effects of our visual age can clearly be seen. It might have been reasonable to have expected some interest and even excitement at being able to attend a live event but sadly, no, these students' preference was for the more passive and rather more lazy option of video viewing.

All of this is also creating the unfortunate condition of a lack of real interaction with the world and other people. As noted this tends to create poor attentiveness, concentration and empathy but it also reduces the development of observation skills. Students/ young people more and more want a "quick fix" for their visual appetites/ addictions. The images are delivered to them and all they need do is watch and consume. There is no effort to search out and observe.

This inevitably engenders laziness and a lack of observation skills. For students to grow in their studies and truly develop intellectually, their observation skills need to be enhanced but our visually intense age does not seem to be helping in this development.

Students are impatient in their desire for the next image and visual stimulant and this does little to help them intellectually.

A well rounded, intelligent individual benefits from patience, self-control, concentration, attentiveness and observation; all of which lead to a desire and thirst for knowledge and understanding. With the ease of access and abundance of imagery, people are becoming less able to investigate and explore for themselves and this is a potentially hazardous condition. Those that are content to merely sit back and watch are those that will be easily lead and equally easily mislead.