Monday, February 2, 2009

The bias of Language, the bias of Pictures

In “The Bias of Language, the Bias of Pictures”, Postman and Powers say that we use language to alter the meaning of statements, questions, etc… Our original discussion of language was about perception. A color, an object, or a place is only a perception that society has developed as a unified reality that we all accept. To describe this unified reality, we use words and language. Each word represents something or someone in our unified reality that we all perceive and accept to be “true”, and “reality”.
This piece agrees that our language is a representation of society’s unified perception of reality, however it digresses to form a new perspective toward language- the manipulation of language. We use adjectives for description, but when using certain adjectives and certain language features and tones, you can alter the meaning of text. Language is bias, because however you write, no matter what words you use, you will always be giving a certain perspective of the matter at hand. However, pictures are quite different. Pictures are completely nonbiased because they tell accurate accounts without anyone’s altering. A picture tells the story without any connotative meanings, or verbosely bias adjectives.

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