images communicate to people of all languages and are more insidious

Submitted by myth (Germany), Jan 19, 2015 at 04:18

An image communicates to people of all languages. Words in a particular language restrict the audience and need translations to reach more people. Islamists can kill translators of Rushdie's books and effectively block his book to a particular audience. Toward images they are quite helpless. In other words. An image potentially reaches the entire muslim world in ways a text does not.

On the the level of content and message an image can contain a lot of ambiguity and deliver different meanings to different people by means of different associations. An image forces the opposition to state the message in one's own words first in order to refute it. Whoever wants to counter the message needs to repeat the message it and thereby emphasize it. The image may express the unspeakable. This way an image is more insidious and disarming than a text.

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