I’ve noted before how America has moved from a word based and therefore cognitive society to one that is overwhelmingly visual and therefore emotional. One of the strange side effects of this development is that, even with unprecedented access to information, people don’t latch onto a story until they see pictures and can really feel it. Over at getreligion, Terry Mattingly does a great job of explaining how stories of prisoner abuse in Iraq have been out for months but it wasn’t until we saw the pictures that the “scandal” erupted. He also suggests some other interesting applications of this principle.
