Stability of Gaze

From a typically illuminating piece by Camille Paglia:

"The visual environment for the young, in short, has become confused, fragmented, and unstable. Students now understand moving but not still images. The long, dreamy, contemplative takes of classic Hollywood studio movies or postwar European art films are long gone. Today's rapid-fire editing descends from Jean-Luc Godard, with his hand-held camera, and more directly from Godard's Anglo-American acolyte, Richard Lester, whose two Beatles movies have heavily influenced commercials, music videos, and independent films. Education must slow the images down, to provide a clear space for the eye. The relationship of eye movements to cognitive development has been studied since the 1890s, the groundwork for which was laid by investigation into physiological optics by Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Mach in the 1860s. Visual tracking and stability of gaze are major milestones in early infancy. The eyes are neurologically tied to the entire vestibular system: the conch-like inner ear facilitates hand-eye coordination and gives us direction and balance in the physical world. By processing depth cues, our eyes orient us in space and create and confirm our sense of individual agency. Those in whom eye movements and vestibular equilibrium are disrupted, I contend, cannot sense context and thus become passive to the world, which they do not see as an arena for action. Hence this perceptual problem may well have unwelcome political consequences."

What she does not mention is that another culprit in destroying our "stability of gaze" has undoubtedly been the automobile.

Again, I don't mean to be anti-car, any more than I am anti-TV or anti-rock music. But Paglia's point is sound: Educators need to redouble their efforts to "stabilize the gaze" of the young. Until such time as that, the constituency for New Urbanism and other arts of the stable gaze may grow not as much as some of us would hope.

Comments

[TM Lutas]

Evidence, please. I would think that comparative numbers on average daily time in car compared to average daily time in front of a TV would be the proper statistic and that's being generous in accepting the proposition that a car is as destructive to 'stability of gaze' as much as TV is.

My understanding is that TV watching far exceeds time spent in the car for most people.

[Laurence Aurbach]

Kids spend around 45 minutes per day in vehicles (3 to 4 trips/day at 15 minutes per trip). Kids watch 3.5 hours per day of TV; those with computers average 4.5 hours per day in front of a screen.

Along these lines and especially interesting has been the study published in the April issue of Pediatrics, "Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems in Children." An editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer summarized it this way:

"The problem, researchers theorize, is that modern TV's whiz-bang-boom imagery might be rewiring babies' developing brains - in effect reprogramming them to function in a world where things happen fast and nothing lasts more than a few moments."

Sources: Media In the Home survey, Annenberg Public Policy Center; National Household Travel Survey, BTS; Household Travel Survey, Sacramento Area Council of Governments.

[winifer skattebol]

The whole ADHD media blitz is real B.S. Teach kids to read at ca. age 2 and a half, on Beatrix Potter, and they will have excellent visual AND verbal comprehension.

Best part of the Paglia article, which I picked up on Matt Drudge, was the account of prehistoric hand stencils: "whether a personal signature or communal avowal of desire, clearly a magic image with copious later parallels." Who needs semiotics depts in universities when we have this? Indeed, the CG Jung Foundation has an entire archive called ARAS (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism), which traces themes like the Hand of God throughout world cultures.

Here is a "New Urbanist" community in MD which my friend administers:

http://www.kentlands.org/

[winifer skattebol]

Victor Papanek on the Inuit mode of seeing:

"Whenever a magazine arrived for me, my Inuit friends would gather round me in a circle to look at the illustrations...never was there the slightest jostling for postion: it wouldn't occur to Inuit that reading something upside-down or sideways is harder in any way...This radically different orientation system has been cited by both Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter as a result of the Inuit's living in an aural, acoustic, non-linear bubble of space...it is a fact that Inuit, when asked to draw the map of a coastline, will do so with their eyes closed while listening to the sound of waves lapping against the shore."

--The Green Imperative, Thames and Hudson,1995