Image World‪.‬

A picture, according to the old cliche, is worth a thousand words. That is because the message it communicates is unmistakable and instantaneous. We relate to images in more direct ways than we do to words. Words require more work, and we increasingly feel that we are already busy enough simply trying to absorb everything our multimedia world is throwing at us. But unless we take care, we will soon be unable even to imagine that there is anything wrong with this picture. NOT LONG AGO, a friend invited me to accompany him to a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game at the Air Canada Centre. We had front-row seats behind the goalie, the best in the house. Yet, perversely, I found myself repeatedly glancing up at the vast in-house screen positioned over centre ice. Somehow, the big pixel board seemed to frame the action on the ice in a more optically manageable way. And I wasn't alone; all around me, I noticed, other eyes were doing the same. The gritty, hard-contact reality was right before us, yet we were essentially watching the game on television, exactly as we've been conditioned to do.