Images on Screens
In her essay Pictorial Narrativity, Steiner posits “What is seemingly missing in pictorial narrative is some way of ordering the visual medium” (151). In the age of digital reproduction the internet is the ordering tool. Each time we crawl the web we are creating our own personal narratives, and multitudes of people are creating their own based almost solely on images. Sites such as FFFOUND! allow users to create personal collections of images, visual bookmarks. Of course these collections are a far cry from more traditional forms of narrative, but the use of tags, sets and collections on Flickr seem much closer. Drew asked, “If the currency of storytelling is text, where do pictures come in?” Steiner spoke at length about the necessity on behalf of the viewer to impart some knowledge in order to extract the desired narrative. One look at the recently erected Last Days of Gourmet, and I’d argue that the internet facilitates a space in which the currency of the story is the aggregation and ordering of images, not the text.
