Envisioning information - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 4

When you look out of the window you can see a great deal in an instant. 3
The mind has an extremely powerful system for processing imagery that can
instantly analyse a pattern of colours, of light and shade, and know that these
are trees, houses or people. How long would it take to describe all that you can
see in words?
Pictures alone are insufficient. This little topic is only held together by its
text. We have travelled a long way with our little symbols, the letters of the
alphabet, which exist only because they were easy to scratch with a stick or form
quickly with lips and tongue. Did our ancestors develop the most efficient means
of communication or did they make do with what was possible?
The spatial structure of 1980s British society, which is envisaged in these
pages, was made up of far more than a few large regions that can be named
and divisions that could be measured. Social structure has a texture to it, a fine
pattern, an elaborate organization, not unlike the fractal patterns to what were
thought to be chaos, which were first revealed in the 1980s (Figure 1.3).
We depend on vision, we think visually, we talk in visual idioms and we
dream in pictures, but we cannot easily turn a picture in our mind into something
other people can see (and not everyone can see). An artist will take days to paint
a single portrait. My parents' generation were the first to have easy access to the
camera and mine were the first to receive the computer, which can turn a huge
amount of data into pictures - snapshots of our society. In the future we may be
able to speak visually and may be able to summon up an image to explain what
we are trying to say. For now we still have to learn how.

1.2 Pictures over time

One of the great potentials of computer graphics is to provide a vision
of what we might not otherwise be able to see in a photograph or
real life.

(Dooley and Cohen, 1990, p. 307)

Our first permanent communications were cave paintings and our first textual
scripts were made of pictures. Today the liquid-crystal display screen, which
abounds with icons, is the modern cave wall (Figure 1.4); we have rushed forward
to the beginnings of visual communication. 4

3 'Humans can recognize unexpected objects in around 100 neuron-firing times' (Plantinga, 1988,
p. 56).
4 Although now the touch screen means the cave wall can react back. The subject matter of
the earliest maps concerned people, the first map was a cave painting of figures dancing in a field.
Later: 'Chinese literature tells us that maps were being used in the East as early as the 7th Century
BC, while the earliest surviving examples of maps are clay tablets found at Nuzi, in northern Iraq.
Believed to be from the period circa 2300 BC, they show rivers, settlements, land-holdings and hills'
(Brannon, 1989, p. 38).