I think a more accurate title for this book would be How images make us think, or maybe How image makers make us think. In any case, it is a book for its time, when we are moving from the world where computers mainly process numbers and text to one where numbers and text are integrated with images.
This book is full of wonderful material, and I’ll get to that in a moment, but the speed of the transition to images is emphasized by what is missing. The hardcover edition of this book came out in 2004; in late 2006, I read two-year-old material from the paperback version published in 2005. Missing are such things as Google Earth and global positioning system mash ups, MySpace, and YouTube. The phenomenon of social networks, in general, is something Burnett anticipates in chapter 7, “Peer-to-Peer Communications/Visualizing Community.” In 2004, peer-to-peer (P2P) was hot stuff, but that term is difficult to apply to an emerging interactive virtual world like Second Life, which literally is a community with links in both cyberspace and real space.
As dated as some of the examples may seem, the basics are here. The first chapter, “Vantage Points and Image-Worlds,” should be read by anyone who takes photographs beyond the point-and-shoot level. I was reminded of Susan Sontag’s classic book [1]. Sontag covers many of the same issues that Burnett does, talking more about the roles and responsibilities of the photographer rather than those of digital image makers. The technologies between 1973 and 2004 are radically different, but the issues are human and timeless. For example, Burnett emphasizes the importance of vantage point, the physical and emotional placement of the image maker. Images are part of storytelling, whether they come from a camera, a computer screen, or a computer game. And we--the listeners, the readers, and the computer users--bring to the story our own filters based on our own experiences. Sontag emphasizes the need for the viewers of a photograph to infer the vantage point of the photographer. Why was the photographer at that place at that time? Why did the photographer choose that angle, that background, that shutter speed, and that f-stop? And Burnett emphasizes the need for us to infer the choices made by creators of Web sites, television shows, and computer games. Why that type font? Why that juxtaposition of images? Why is one window on a page a video and another static? Why are various navigation links placed where they are? Why was the site organized as it is? One of the powers we currently have, especially in computer games, is to change the vantage point and get more enjoyment and information from the choices available. Why are some vantage points provided, and others not?
In chapter 3, “Foundations of Virtual Images,” Burnett points out the importance of culture in our images, noting that digital images allow the creation of smaller units of microcultures. This is both an opportunity and a trap. The opportunity is to serve specific people with stories uniquely theirs. The trap is closed when an image, thought to be common, is misinterpreted in a specific microculture. Especially in the global world of the Internet, images cannot be contained and meaning cannot be focused.
Burnett uses several chapters to discuss virtual reality. He talks about illusion and how that can be created and interpreted. He talks about the weak immersion of movie theaters and the stronger impact of computer-generated automatic virtual environments. That chapter melds into a discussion of human interaction with machines and the questions raised by attempts at artificial intelligence. He raises the specter of the Star Trek Borg community intelligence, whose mission is to assimilate us individuals, and offsets that vision with Ray Kurzweil’s more idealistic view of how we will have human-level intelligence on our laptops by 2020.
One of Burnett’s most interesting chapters is about how computer games give new meaning to both images and storytelling. It’s all about interaction, not only between humans and computers, but also between humans using computers. Networks are discussed in this section, but, again, we’ve come a long way since this book was written, and, for example, cellular phones, never mentioned in this book, are now important nodes in the communication fabric that is part of the blended relationship between virtual worlds and reality. Interaction is what we humans are about, and we find ways of adapting technology to that end. It was true for the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, and now the computer. Interaction is the evergreen killer application.
This is a valuable book for everyone who thinks about creating images and telling stories using computer technology. This includes all of us who build or use Web sites, write advertising, or post to MySpace or YouTube. This book highlights why we interact with technology as we do. It is an important companion to another book [2] (not mentioned in the ample references that Burnett includes), which is a “how-to.” I recommend that Burnett and you read it.
Even though they are analog technologies, books too are images, and this one does not present itself well. The index and references are excellent, but for a book on images, it has remarkably few (only 30). It is printed in a sans serif typeface that I found difficult to read, and the text feels dense. The table of contents includes only chapter headings, and gives no guidance to what is inside the chapters. There is only a minimal biography of the author, and that’s only on the back cover. The content is worth the effort to get at it, but, as Burnett is saying with digital images, it need not and should not be that difficult.
