Reading Blog #1

“Re-Viewing Visual Literacy in the “Brain d’ Images” Era” is an article released in 2009 but discusses issues still relevant in 2023. The article states that “living in an image rich world does not mean [people} naturally possess visual literacy skill,”. This issue along with the rapid growth of social media and looking at pictures unmindfully can lead to matters like the spread of false information. Visual Literacy is a skill that helps decipher and discern what an image is trying to communicate. This skill is acquired and can be improved over periods of time. Considering the quick evolution of technology, some experts conclude that we might not be able to keep up and therefore be aware of the role technology has on visual literacy. Social media platform has become the way of communication and learning in our current day and age. Because of that visual literacy is not just an important skill, it is a crucial skill to be accurately informed and prosper in this generation. Furthermore, visual literacy should be part of the world's lower and upper education curriculum seeing the obvious strong ties it has with technology. The pictures below are examples of images that require visual literacy skills in order to decipher and understand the message. Growing up in the social media age has already equipped many people of this generation with the basic skills like connecting the dots or understanding symbols of images, but that still is not enough. We also need to be open and ready for changing visual literacy curriculums as the world evolves and technology advances. Acquiring these extra skills will, as the article says, increase our verbal skills, better our self-expression, increase student motivation in all subjects, provide equal opportunities, improve self-image, self-reliance, and independence.