With these words, for example, I can do something I am otherwise disinclined to do in my daily urban life: provide an account of the moving image landscape; itemize the extent to which I am surrounded by moving images whose primary purpose is to stimulate a purely irrational desire to consume. There are billboards in my neighbourhood that change pictures, and there are bus shelter roll-up ads that do the same thing. There are video monitors displaying advertising messages in banks, grocery stores, department stores, and franchise outlets in malls. In the core of my city, there are scores of strategically high-altitude Blade Runner-like pixelboard and video screens, and there are television screens everywhere: in shop windows and hotel lobbies, behind pharmacy cosmetic counters, in every one of the dozens of music, video, or electronic equipment outlets within just a few kilometres of my home. Every time I turn on my computer and log on to the Internet, I am offered countless opportunities for imagistic distraction. They call it surfing, and that’s something you do on water, isn’t it?

When I go to the commercial cinema nearest to where I live – one of those cacophonous monstrosities built to the blueprints of the roller coaster principle, I am confronted by moving picture pitches from the moment I approach the theatre – thanks to outside monitors displaying movie trailers on streets – to the moment I exit. In between: monitors in the lobby where tickets are sold. Monitors above the concession stand where corporate franchise junk food is sold. Advertisements on screen in a theatre too dimly lit to do anything (like read, perhaps?) but watch them. Commercials before the trailers and trailers before the movies and product placement in the movies that follow the trailers and the commercials.

Were I to remain consciously, discerningly, and deconstructively aware of all these images all the time, I wonder how long I might maintain sanity. At a certain point, survival in the atmospheric riot of commercial moving pictures necessitates the nullification of the interpretive mechanisms – to merely cope and prevent an overload of signification, one has to stop thinking about what’s going on. It’s the modern media equivalent of breathing: if one was consciously aware of each intake of breath one took, breathing itself would become an exercise of Herculean effort. Survival depends on a certain amount of automatic response and reflexive obliviousness. As it is in the atmosphere of oxygen, so it is in the atmosphere of commercial images.

This is not to say I am not aware of these images, just that most of the time I am not engaged in a conscious process of interpreting them: I am not reading them the way you are reading these words. And while I have no doubt that a certain process of neurological refinement has taken place over my life, which has acclimatized me to the evolutionary shifts and developments of these audio-visual systems, I am reluctant to call that acclimatizing process literacy. Adaptation to environmental change, perhaps, but not literacy.