When it comes to the idea of image literacy, this is a crucial distinction. While it is possible to process images subconsciously, one cannot read words passively: the act of reading language involves active processes of engagement, interpretation, and response that reacting to images does not. If this capacity for purely visceral stimulation is why moving pictures are such an overwhelmingly powerful force in the process of stimulating consumption – a process which only stands to collapse if subjected to too much reasonable thought – it also explains why image literacy is a fundamentally different process than print literacy.

While there is no question that the mere capacity to navigate oneself through the contemporary electronic environment involves a level of neurological sophistication that previous generations of homo sapiens did not possess – and while it seems only likely that each generation marks a certain degree of evolution in image literacy over its predecessors – it’s a form of literacy that functions primarily on a non-intellectual level. So it must. For the most part, our image culture exists to maintain a consumer culture, and consumer culture depends for its very existence not on thought but emotion, and not on interpretation but stimulation. If this is why image literacy must be considered an essentially different process than print literacy, it is also why the latter is perhaps a more crucial form of literacy than ever before: by its nature, it arrests the flow of images that would otherwise seek to wash us away in their currents of passive consumption. I can choose not to think about the images that flow around me. I am compelled, however, to think about what I read.

In my quiet, extra-megaplex moments, I take keener pleasure in reading than I ever have. This is partly because it now feels like an almost subversive activity, a quasi-clandestine practice that pulls not only one’s attention but one’s entire mode of thought away from the ceaseless cacophony of hard-sell, soft-thought image culture. I practically never watch television either, because it insists in its very form on the presumption of perpetual engagement – one must always watch lest one miss something – there is something almost criminally satisfying in simply ignoring it. But what do I like to read about more than anything else? Movies, naturally. And popular culture. Words about pictures. Thoughts about feeling. The interpretation of sensation. The resistance of language.