Pictures Carry Too Much Weight in Today's Society

Recently, much has been made of professionals football's Baltimore Ravens star player Ray Rice and how he slugged his then-fiancee (and now wife) in an elevator in Las Vegas.  NFL commissioner Roger Goodell levied a two-game suspension on Rice, after which the player publicly and contritely apologized...alongside his wife, who also curiously expressed regret at her own involvement in the incident...despite the fact that she was the victim.  There was a video surveillance tape circulating around the media showing Ray Rice dragging his unconscious fiancee out of the elevator and standing there with her lying on the floor.  The video sparked outrage at Goodell's light punishment of Rice, but the matter seemed destined to be finished with...until another video was released, this one in the elevator showing Rice slugging and knocking out his fiancee.  Suddenly, it seemed that everyone in the country exploded into rage over it all, even though it had already been established that Rice had hit his fiancee.  But apparently simply KNOWING this did not seem to make a very deep impression on people...but SEEING it did.

The same can be said for the recent videotaped beheadings of western journalists by ISIS in Iraq/Syria: it appears that the victims' deaths, while tragic and uncalled for, were not the main driving force in radically focusing public opinion so vehemently against this insurgent Muslim extremist militarized group: it was seeing it on video that did it. And now we're on the verge of extensive and extended military involvement in the area against ISIS...

The point to the above examples is not that the information wasn't already out there: it was available, but people did not accept it in its deeper reality and significance until they saw visual evidence: words were not enough.  But I already knew this anyway, judging from my experiences on Facebook for the past few months...

I have noticed that certain Facebook users are in the habit of digging up from the Internet "posters" dressing up often trite and even objectionable messages as some kind of wisdom and presenting them with a graphically designed background...such presentations inevitably elicit "likes" from other users, even when the message has a hateful nature to it. But would the same messages be even read, much less "liked", had they simply been presented as unadorned text? I seriously doubt it. From my own experience with putting links on Facebook with this blog's entries, I have noticed a much higher level of reaction whenever (usually rarely) I insert a picture into an article.  Suddenly my "writing" somehow apparently becomes more readable...