One of surrealist Rene Magritte's most well-known paintings is called The Treachery of Images. You've probably seen it. It's a realistically rendered pipe, the kind Beaver Cleaver's Dad used to smoke, not something you find under a sink. The pipe is floating above a sentence in cursive French: "C'est n'est pas une pipe" or "This is not a pipe." And Magritte is correct-it's not a pipe, it's a painting of a pipe, which is the whole point.
The use of language, both verbal and visual, has its own kind of "treachery"-that is, it words and images can quietly distort how a society thinks.
There's always some delay between the dawn of new media and society's ability to catch up. Early radio broadcasts were just band concerts, news items, or plays with microphones, then someone figured out how to use the medium as "Theater of the Mind." Early television was just radio with pictures mixed with the techniques learned from movies, until people realized that having a show in your living room was essentially different than going to a theater and seeing Clark Gable twenty feet tall. Television took a different breed of actor, a different production style, different economics.
The web, when it started, was a gawky hybrid of print media and television until all the kinks were worked out and connection speeds climbed. We didn't know-and to some degree, still don't know-what the web would become until it figured out what it is, and what it does best.
The same "delay time" also happens in language.
When was the last time you "dialed" a phone? When was the last time you even saw a real "dial" phone? And yet, we keep calling it that. How come? Because we don't have a better, more useful phrase for the action of keying numbers into a telephone. A student I spoke with called what he did to his iPhone "dialing" even though he admitted he didn't know what a "dial" was.
People still refer to "taping" something, even when there is no tape involved, as it often is with digital audio and video recorders.
When's the last time you went to the movies? When was the last time you thought about the word "movie?" Doesn't it sound like baby-talk, like "talkies," a popular term following the emergence of the first motion pictures with synchronized sound? Critics and scholars prefer "film" to "movie," and "cinema," which essentially means "movement," gets a pass because it's French. I wonder how many years it will take us to stop saying the word "film" after everything is digital? Someday soon, will we go to our favorite movie theater (how silly that sounds!) and watch the credits roll on A Data File by Martin Scorsese or Pixels by Steven Spielberg?
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