Some of the things that I find most interesting about the prospect of spacial literacy are the ideas of authorship and context within parsable images. Having read “Orality and Literacy” from Walter Ong, I was struck by how the move from static images and representations of space to spatial literacy and manipulatable space actually seems to parallel something akin to the “gaining of orality” more than the technologizing of the word. To be clear — it seems as the reality of parasable space is resulting in the shift from images sharing the traditions of writing to a more fluid space that renders visual communication more like oral communication. While parsable space does have the universal tendencies of writing [pixels akin to the alphabet, etc] and the attending technological and accessibility benefits, the ideas of author and context in images seem to be shifting more towards those traditions of orality.
First of all, I’d like to discuss parsable space in terms of the author. Ong makes a very interesting point that writing forces a separation between the author and the audience — forcing a fictionalization of the reader. Oral communication could not be divorced from the person speaking nor the person[s] listening, while writing necessitated and forced a divorce between writer and writing, reader and reading. Thus, as writing became more of a common practice, in many cultures, a guru or mediator was called for to bridge the gap between writing and “listener.” With images, or representations of space, that mediator or guru has always existed in the form of he who creates the image. Painter, photographer, “creator,” has been he who determines the perspective of the space and captures the image for viewers to take in. As image-capturing and sharing becomes more ubiquitous, the line between the mediator of the image and the image itself is falling away [see pinterest — authors of images are almost never credited while images are reappropriated from individual profile to individual profile]. The mediator is falling away towards a larger practice of capturing and sharing images. However, the divorce between image and viewer still exists. The image is much more akin to writing and the viewer much more akin to reader than speaker and listener. However, with parsable space and wider spatial literacy, the image becomes more akin to speaking — bringing the “speaker” and “listener” closer together. A truly parsable image creates an author who cannot be divorced from the image by the listener/viewer. For the image becomes particular not only to he who has created it but he who is analyzing it bit by bit. The relationship requires an immediate understanding and decoding of the specifics of the image — color, shading, depth. Instead of merely being pixels, the image has a tone, much like a spoken sentence, which much be interpreted and may be changed in the mind (or reality) of the user. The relationship is closer to that of speaker and listener. The conversation between image creator and image receiver is thus more immediate — and tied more closely not only to the two people communicating via the image but also to the context in which they are communicating.
In parable images, context similarly takes on more of an oral tradition than a written one. Static or analog images must always have a “frame”– the image is divorced from its context much like words are divorced from any context aside from the surrounding words. However, a parsable image — or a written or authored spatial creation — creates and exists within its own context, much like a spoken word. For example — 3D space in a video game exists within it’s own context, as the viewer/player moves through it. A photograph exists divorced from its context, and the viewer must imagine the context surrounding the image, much like a reader imagining the context of the words he or she is reading.
Spatial literacy seems to exist on a plane somewhere between orality and written literacy — with our ability to parse images and author images that are pasrable, we are gaining the universality and expanded consciousness attended to written literacy. However, the relationship between viewer and author and the context of the images seems to be more akin to orality. Perhaps, it may be the best of both worlds.