Celebrating the Speed and Power of Video   

The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word

By Mitchell Stephens
Oxford University Press
262 pages; $27.50

If people didn't think contrary thoughts, then we would never make much progress. That idea comes quickly to mind in reading Mitchell Stephens' orthodoxy-busting book heralding a glorious new video age.

The book is densely packed with concepts and is experimental in format. Footnotes, factlets and icons float in its margins.

But mostly it is a bold and challenging argument that:

• Moving images are superior to words;

• Faster-moving images are better than poky ones; and

• "The speed, the asymmetry, the nonnarrative techniques, the surrealism and the juxtapositions of the new video" are driving us toward a new age of video-inspired enlightenment.

Few would contest that images are overwhelming words. But Stephens, positioning himself as "an inveterate reader and writer" trying to surmount his pro-print prejudice, goes much further. If we will only be patient, he argues, we will soon realize that "moving images use our senses more effectively than do black lines of type stacked on white pages."

Don't get too misty-eyed about words, Stephens cautions. He quotes one critic's observation that "the written word, we sometimes forget, was invented as a crude if useful substitute for the real thing."

Images, in contrast, are accessible, concise, vivid and compelling. "We think best in pictorial or geometric terms," scientist Stephen Jay Gould has said.

Stephens points out that "images often look better than nature." It is now commonplace, for example, for spectators at sporting events to turn their eyes away from the field and toward the giant video screens.

For the moment, video is stuck in an immature stage, mainly imitating or containing other art forms, Stephens asserts. But it is about to surge.

Just ahead is a multimedia, interactive, electronic age, featuring video on demand and an enhanced computerized mix of words, sounds and images that will, for the first time, have "the ability to catch up with the pace of modern life and the pace of human consciousness."

Here is Stephens' most daring departure from convention: his argument that speed doesn't suggest superficiality but is perhaps video's greatest virtue.

Commercials, rock videos and experimental films have begun to demonstrate that "this medium works better at higher speeds," he says. "By chopping the world into fragments, by layering on words and graphics, by arranging those fragments in new and meaningful patterns, the new video gives us ways to see much more than is available at any one place or time to any one gaze." In short, sound bites are good.

Stephens lists a variety of techniques through which video uses motion: "fast cutting" via "a rapid-fire collage of images"; "parallel editing" that cuts from scene to scene and angle to angle; and the overall effect of "compression, overlap, composite and pastiche."

What he calls "the new video" will accelerate images even faster, perhaps to the speed of 30 a second. They will not merely stimulate, they will communicate, Stephens argues.

"A half second of the Capitol may be enough to indicate the federal government, a quick shot of a white-haired woman may represent age. The part, in other words, will be substituted for the whole so that in a given period of time it will be possible to consider a larger number of wholes."

New video, in his hope, will be incongruous, narrative-driven, musical, jazz-like and surrealistic. It will take us to new worlds and reinvigorate our mental alertness.

Journalists will be particularly engaged by Stephens' discussion of image tampering, a practice he refuses to reflexively condemn. "Words 'lie' in metaphors," he argues, so why not images? New video will "speculate, predict, hypothesize, compare and sometimes speak in the negative... It may want to show how the plane might have, should have and could have landed."

Does this all seem a little breathless? Perhaps that is part of Stephens' point. He is, after all, exalting speed.

But the book has the disquieting ardor of someone just returned from an electrifying encounter session. Stephens may well be right, but some hard questions go unanswered. For example, a frenetic interplay of images is undoubtedly effective emotionally. But can it really inform? How well can humans process information at hyperspeed? What will we learn or remember?

Stephens does enumerate the drawbacks of video: its tendency to reduce activity, to cut down on time we spend with others and even on our need for others. But he maintains that the good of new video will outweigh the bad.

So he is doing some reaching and some speculating, but that is the nature of contrarian thinking. The book is a thoughtful and measured challenge, the kind of appreciated scholarship that helps push us forward.