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Jeremiah Weir

Professor Litle

ENG.121001

22 January 2019

Discussion Questions for Luc Pauwels’ “Visual Literacy and Visual Culture”

Visual Construction of Reality: Role and Functionality

1. On a daily basis, I see traffic signs instructing me on various rules and regulations for motor

vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians as well as potential hazards. I see caution signs placed to

ensure my safety, I see many advertisements that attempt to convince me to purchase products or

services, and I see a few sports images encouraging my support for different teams and sports.

2. As Pauwels indicates, the term “democratized” means that the use of visual technology for

production and perusal is no longer restricted to a select few I am inclined to agree with this

assertion. Because I am a member of Generation X, I attribute this to several factors, such as ease

of use, availability, reduced cost, and rapid technological advances.

Enhancing Visual Literacy

3. Pauwels’ statements regarding society being visually illiterate and its images not

understandable by everyone depict the barriers created by cultural, linguistic, and ideological

differences that present difficulties in deriving proper context when deciphering the meanings of

various images and other visual mediums. These can lead to gross misinterpretations, thus the

concept of visual illiteracy.

4. Pauwels points out that for us to cultivate visual literacy, we need to design specific,

structured, and codified sets of skills, competencies, and strategies that are universally taught,

known, and recognized, along with a universal visual language.

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Verbal Culture Versus Image Culture

5. Essentially the debate between the ‘literary’ crowd and the ‘visual’ crowd centers around the

literary group blaming visual media for the decline of literacy and the written word, attributing it

to a societal disconnection from reality, and associating it with mental laziness. The literary

crowd, including many in the halls of academia, consider it to be an inferior and base form of

entertainment and communication. The visual group counters these claims by alluding to its

potential for greater dissemination and absorption of information, thus its virtually limitless

capacity for creating a better-informed world.

Pauwels sees this argument as counter-productive and pointless because they are two

fundamentally different means of conveyance which are not diametrically opposed but are in fact

complementary to one another. He points out that visual media is mostly derived from the

written word. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how to make the two work better together.

Image Culture and Visual Culture

6. Visual culture refers to anything that is directly observable, and the cultural modalities used

for interpreting and understanding them. This is the most simplified and concise definition of the

concept. The reason studying this issue is so important is that the results could drastically

improve communication and relations between cultures, as well as eliminate a high degree of

misunderstanding and misinterpretation of visual phenomena.