> And that you can even argue that it wouldn't be clear that 1984 is trying to make a point is evidence that text is not inherently clear.
No, it's evidence that George Orwell was obfuscating his point. When you make a point through fiction, that is obfuscation. To make my point clear, had you made a faithful version of 1984 into a movie, people who know nothing of the book would still not be clear about whether it has a point or not. It has nothing to do with it being in text form.
> Also, I don't know how you can claim that it's easier to tell what text is documenting than a picture. It's much easier to lie with text.
The two are not contradictory. It's easy to tell what is being documented. Whether it is true is a different story.
The crux of my discussion isn't about what happens when the author/photographer is intentionally trying to mislead, but when they are not trying to mislead. If an author writes a nonfiction treatise it leaves a lot less room for ambiguity. When I read PG's essays, I don't have discussions with others on what he really means. A photo, without context, can inspire several emotions, all unrelated to reality, and this is true no matter how hard the photographer tries. Case in point, when I was in school, my teacher showed the class a photo he had taken from a newspaper - but without any context. He asked the students to try to write a news article where the photo would make sense. Obviously, the responses were widely different, and none was close to the reality. In some stories, the subjects in the photos were victims. In others, they were the villians. The reality turned out to be their being heroes.
Even when you provide accurate context to a photo, there are no shortage of instances where once you see the video of the event and/or hear from the subject, you find out that while the context was correct, the photo is showing a mere moment that is not reflecting what most people who see the photo are thinking. Take a video of someone having a long conversation, where they laugh often. It's not hard to capture a frame where it looks like the person is in pain.
You’re comparing incredibly arbitrary things. Is a photo comparable to a tweet, sentence, paragraph or novel? Is a video equatable to an essay?
You’ve convinced me that it’s all incredibly relative and complex, very much impossible to set up an equation with which to even compare it, and there’s no clear cut answer - and further, I don’t see why one side even needs to win, or why anyone cares beyond some personal attachment or game or identity pride or maybe just a childhood love of Wittgenstein.
Are symbols text? All of math could be represented as symbol. Are spoken words text? What about animal calls? The intro to Wall-E conveys so much, did I need text to understand that? I’m persuaded by a seeing a video of beautiful village in its natural state, or nature. Li Ziqi is maybe the most compelling video on all of YouTube, and it has no audio or text whatsoever.
No, it's evidence that George Orwell was obfuscating his point. When you make a point through fiction, that is obfuscation. To make my point clear, had you made a faithful version of 1984 into a movie, people who know nothing of the book would still not be clear about whether it has a point or not. It has nothing to do with it being in text form.
> Also, I don't know how you can claim that it's easier to tell what text is documenting than a picture. It's much easier to lie with text.
The two are not contradictory. It's easy to tell what is being documented. Whether it is true is a different story.
The crux of my discussion isn't about what happens when the author/photographer is intentionally trying to mislead, but when they are not trying to mislead. If an author writes a nonfiction treatise it leaves a lot less room for ambiguity. When I read PG's essays, I don't have discussions with others on what he really means. A photo, without context, can inspire several emotions, all unrelated to reality, and this is true no matter how hard the photographer tries. Case in point, when I was in school, my teacher showed the class a photo he had taken from a newspaper - but without any context. He asked the students to try to write a news article where the photo would make sense. Obviously, the responses were widely different, and none was close to the reality. In some stories, the subjects in the photos were victims. In others, they were the villians. The reality turned out to be their being heroes.
Even when you provide accurate context to a photo, there are no shortage of instances where once you see the video of the event and/or hear from the subject, you find out that while the context was correct, the photo is showing a mere moment that is not reflecting what most people who see the photo are thinking. Take a video of someone having a long conversation, where they laugh often. It's not hard to capture a frame where it looks like the person is in pain.