convergence

With the explosion of user-created content online in the past few years, and given that the audio-visual part of this content cannot exist without some form of textual labeling, whether in the form of actual file names or through individually or socially based tagging, I have noticed the potential for our verbal and visual languages to converge in this digital environment. As such, I have become increasingly interested in how people relate to their created content. As this trend continues, will the massive online community inadvertently exert influence on how visual content is associated verbally, eventually resulting in a ad-hoc lexicon for image description? For example, through exposure to tagging categories and similar social or technological constructs, could a person's verbal perception of content in images and video change over time, conforming to those concepts of the larger online community? Furthermore, could these changing perceptions of visual content with regard to its verbal counterparts then affect how we communicate with each other in the physical realm?

To explore this idea, I performed simple, one-word queries of the image search section of the three search engines most commonly used by English-speaking people, Google, MSN and Yahoo. I then created line drawings of the highest ranked images that resulted from these word searches. I combined these words, and subsequent images, to create somewhat abstract phrases, while trying to include a word in each phrase that would illustrate a tangible object or idea. By doing this, I wanted to see if the images most commonly associated with certain words according to the three largest compilers of information online could be read in place of the words they were ranked to most represent. After completing this exercise, it appears that we may not be at a point of visual and verbal convergence online as of yet, but I remain curious about how this will develop in the future.

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