Tokyo, Oct. 7, 2019–The world is brimming with visual pictorial and video images of good, bad, great, boring, and so on. Such images have historically served as the drivers of expressing human emotions, artistic creations, and often, societal activity decision-making. Over years since the birth of the Internet and smart phones, the number of image providers, limited to a small band of professionals until then, has exploded. Those providers not only post images but they also are viewers/customers, competing hungrily for winning the ‘likes’ to their facebook sites and ‘hits’ to their websites and blogs with the eye for ad income. And come the 5G era, the visual society will be revolutionized as images can be posted and viewed genuinely real-time, making people even more image-obsessed and -hungry.
Virtual image society looks colorful and gives an impression that a future looks bright, fun, and promising with little to be worried about: Images of athletes winning Olympic gold medals, 90-year-olds scaling Mr. Everest, 10 year-olds cruising around the world nonstop and solo. They would be handsomely and immediately rewarded with real-time Internet and TV show appearances, speaking engagements, appearing in commercials (photos and videos for sure). Of course, there would be disagreeable images that contravene with colorful optimism: scenes of riots, murders, and as such, but they should be kept in the shadows of viewers’ mind.
Is there something missing in the seemingly optimistic image society trend? My take is that the move to this trend is stripping people of sufficient time to pause, think and analyze, as people would be even more overwhelmed by the bombardment of video clips and still photo and anime images. Images, particularly videos, are making people react in a knee-jerk manner. The pattern already is showing up in the financial marketplace whether investors execute orders to reflect what Trump (less so now since investors are coming to ignore what he says) and Xi say about U.S.-China trade on top of what AI tell them to do, adding to greater volatility than unseen in the past. Mass-shooters may be inspired by violent video and game clips, as they are said to be already are.
What the world is going to experience in image-prioritized society, be it in the marketplace or society, would be the degradation of a vital human activity and greater volatility.
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