The Age of the Image Quotes

“We are story animals. And we need to tell our stories in as direct, as unmediated, and as emotionally resonant a way as possible.”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in the a World of Screens

“Being visually literate, said Debes, enables the viewer “to interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made, that he encounters in his environment.”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“visual literacy”—the idea that comprehension of what we see in movies, photography, and television is as vital a skill as that of reading the written sentence.”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“They are more primal and less filtered. And we have a more emotional relationship with those messages. Sound-writing is primarily an intellectual exercise. Seeing is more libidinal”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“Images are traced to a different home, and also a different method of acquiring knowledge.”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“The unstoppable rise of visual expression as a popular means of conveying truth is going to require a new discernment on the part of the reader/viewer: a combination of skepticism and incisiveness that assesses the value of the image-based argument rather than the spoken. It is a sensual kind of literacy.”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“More than this, the literacy of images shares a mutually reinforcing relationship with the literacy of words. The two are forever entangled.”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“This is not, however, an obituary for the printed word. There will never be a “death” of words on paper (or on screens or some other delivery mechanism), or an end to the sequentially ordered sentences that define how we transmit and preserve ideas. That form of expression will never cease to be relevant.”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“The grammar of violence is a particularly powerful means of communication unleashed by this new visual potency. Napoleon once said he feared three hostile newspapers as much as a thousand bayonets. The image is a tool of revolutionaries as well as counterrevolutionaries.”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“What we are now seeing is the gradual ascendance of the moving image as the primary mode of communication around the world: one that transcends languages, cultures, and borders.”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“Under Anne Marie’s leadership, we created a program that used the language and tools of a filmmaker to help third-grade students improve their writing skills.The program was based on the notion that there are three primal components to the experience of media—what we see, what we hear, and what we feel (or what emotional response we have to the text).”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“As new literacies emerge, they don’t negate more traditional forms of literacy, but rather embrace them wholly.”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“This kind of “visual reading,” the ground upon which reading is built, is sadly dismissed in favor of just words when our children get to school. Picture books give way to books with fewer and fewer illustrations. Ultimately, the image becomes an afterthought, with much sacrificed along the way. We spend countless hours on letters and words, but hardly anything on the images.”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

“Visual media are redefining what it means to develop the tools of literacy to understand a changing world—with regard not just to the reception of information but also to its expression”
― Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens