On Power of Visual Images in the Era of New Media

Abstract

The idea of the “visual turn” and power of images is not a feature of the contemporary era; it has emerged in the history of culture multiple times, especially when new reproduction technologies or new options of images arose. The novelty of the contemporary situation has to do not only with quantitative proliferation of images and the expanding subject field of the visual but also with the fact that the flow of visual images transmitted from various mobile screens shaped a specific online mediatized reality. Contemporary visual images that have become a part of the cultural media industry make an impact on the subject viewer and, in this sense, wield power over our visual experience, registering the social changes occurring in the contemporary culture. Technical means of visualization cause disappearance of the image’s aural property, automation of perception and industrialization of vision, mediated by the image’s digital processing. It is such digital images that build our mundanity, imperiously imposing the behaviors and social roles that a person identifies with. Digital images indicate social strategies of the visible that remove certain phenomena or objects from or return them to the field of the social vision, creating or breaking image-related taboos. Additionally, representation of reality is superseded in the Internet environment by online “public representation” that drastically changes the positions of the perceived and the perceiver. Methods and approaches of visual studies as an interdisciplinary field of humanities knowledge were applied to identify specific features of contemporary visual culture and analyze visual images’ imperious influence on individual’s modes of vision and perception, their inhabited world and ways of identification.