So, there I am reading along. Tufte is talking about how images in informational texts have changed over time, Lanham just got off his rant on stuff and started his long lecture on how text has changed over the ages , and I’m waiting to read something we haven’t heard of before. The vocabulary may be new to us, but the concepts have all but been beaten to death by parents, news, and educators about how the individuals relationship to reality has shifted. Materialism is no longer about stuff in general but what it is associated with. Collections are no longer about cars, action figures, or books; but about ford, marvel, and Stephenie Meyer. Hell, you have to pay fifty dollars just to get a certain hair cut on the Facebook Sims game. Our reality is set in the files we have access to, the media we can create, and who’s computer we can hack. So what if I don’t have a X-box if I can mod my computer to play the games and hack into x-box live for free.
As for images in text, they’re just becoming more efficient at doing their job. text has been shifting from words that describe an image to being an image since graffiti became main stream. Nothing new… just new ways of doing old stuff.