The article Re-Viewing visual literacy in the “Brain d’ Images” Era by Maria D. Avgerinou talks about the visual literacy skills that the next generation of students and workers are expected to have. The article in the beginning mentions how the visual literacy skills are rapidly increasing and the skills workers are expected to have in a lot of fields are already much different in 2009 than they were just a decade prior to that. Even though this article was written back in 2009, there are lots of differences when comparing the visual literacy skills of today’s generation compared to a decade ago still holds true. Today’s generation has been fed this “Bain d’ Images” Image bath for almost our entire lives, from television, movies, video games, commercials, magazines, billboards, social media and almost any product you try to buy you can notice this unrelenting amount of images that are meant to invoke some sort of emotion, or thought process in the person viewing them being shoved down your throats no matter where you look. Today’s generation is supposed to be able to decipher or know about more trends and meanings behind the image baths, like memes for example. A lot of people from previous generations can be shown certain memes, or advertisements, or trailers for games or movies and not have any idea why the current generation is interested in them, they might not understand any of the context behind them. Same with using the technologies that create or post these image baths. I know personally when I have helped my grandparents post something on facebook, or convert a video into a different format so they can post it on a social media platform. This is some of the visual literacy that my generation is just expected to know how to do, or understand the context around, while previous generations aren’t expected to have that same photo literacy. I think this gap in visual literacy will only continue to grow at a significant rate with the next generation now that AI technology is being thrown in the mix. Soon I think the visual literacy skills the next generation will be expected to have will be identifying false and real information, artwork, and various things. To be able to differentiate between ads or images or information that AI has created or been used to alter form the original. I believe with AI as well the problem of “Bain d’ Images” will continue to worsen as advertisements, and images, animations, etc. will be much easier to create and take less time to make with AI assistance resulting in even more over stimulation of images and advertisements everywhere you look online and in real life.
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