Will Visual Communication Supersede Verbal Communication?

One of the peripheral issues that Eva R. Brumberger’s article “Making the Strange Familiar: A Pedagogical Exploration of Visual Thinking” mentions is the debate over whether or not visual communication will become more integral to technical communication than verbal communication. Brumberger frames the issue this way: “Visual rhetoric has come to be recognized as a legitimate area of study within professional communication . . . Particularly in the past decade, we have seen rich debates emerge about the nature of print and electronic documents and whether visual communication will supersede verbal communication” (377).

This is an interesting and increasingly relevant question, as more and more writing takes place within a digital space. Brumberger points out that it has been a popular claim that writing in the digital medium is inherently more influenced by the visual than writing in the print medium: “Two important changes (among others) have marked professional writing practice over the past decades: First, design, which was previously not the responsibility of the tech writer, now often falls squarely into that writer’s domain; second, of course, is the growth of hypertexts, online help systems, and other forms of electronic documents, which, many have argued, are inherently more visual than their print predecessors” (377, emphasis mine).

If this is true: if digital media is more visual than the print medium, and digital media is also becoming more and more utilized as a writing space, then the question of whether or not the visual will eventually supersede the verbal is a significant one. There are certainly an abundance of visual-based social media, including Pinterest, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, infographic sites like this one, and Flipboard. There are quite a few blog posts devoted to the growing popularity of social media, including: The Dawn of Social Media, Trend Alert: The Next Big Thing in Social Media is Visual, and Visual Leads the Way. And it is certainly true that even social media sites like Facebook and Twitter integrate the visual through the usage of videos (primarily Facebook), customizable backgrounds (Twitter), and photographs (both). Even blog posts frequently rely on photographs or memes to relay important information.

Could visual communication supersede verbal communication? It’s certainly possible: the verbal components of social media are often shortened forms of earlier social media. Facebook status updates are shorter than 1,000 word blog posts, and Twitter updates can only include up to 140 characters. The advantages of visual communication in digital media are significant: visuals are often universal in a way that languages are not, and convey more information using less space and time. Yet it would be a mistake, I think, to predict that verbal communication will be completely replaced by visual communication, because some things are too complicated to depict in illustrations/drawings. For example, describing how car engines work would be difficult to depict entirely in visuals.

 

Brumberger, Eva R. “Making the Strange Familiar:A Pedagogical Exploration of Visual Thinking.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication . Journal 21.4(2007): 376-401. PDF.