The Moroccan thinker, Dr. Abd al-Salam Ben Abd al-Aali, affirmed that the image is stronger eloquence and the greatest ability than writing to intensify meanings, display and disseminate them, stressing that each product has an impact on the content itself, and on the values and meanings of culture, because the bearer of meanings and the form of culture affect its content.
The author of the book “On Communication and Separation” revealed the primacy of our ancient critics in raising the issue of the carrier of meaning and its relationship to significance, so they noticed that the text differs in its meaning according to the carrier on which it is written. , and others that are less quick to disappear, such as weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual books, until we reach the books that seem to appear to stay.
Ben Abdelali believes that the meanings are not pure souls, but rather inhabit the materiality of writing, assume its body, feed on its ink and blood, move on its back, inhabit its floor and carry its clothing, adding that the writing that inhabits the two covers of a book bearing a specific name, is not the one that appears as an image on a small screen, And the difference is not the difference between ink, sound vibrations, and light waves: it is a difference between two cultures, but between two visions of the world, or more accurately, between two different worlds.
He attributed to the media revolution the establishment of a different world, and a new relationship for man to that world, and said: «It is not necessary to ask whether the screen cancels the book, or if the electronic text cancels the paper text? For the main issue in our view is not to know whether electricity cancels candles, and whether the writing machine cancels pens, but rather to ask what new values were established by the advent of electricity in the last century? Image?".
He pointed out that the media boom makes us today face a world that our traditional concepts cannot absorb.
Pointing out that, based on what the inventor of the optical telegraph, Claude Chapp, said: “The telegraph cancels distances, erases the land, and reduces France to reduce it to one point.” Today we can generalize this saying all over the world, confirming that information transfer technology eliminates space today and shrinks the world to make it a single point and returns it to time, which makes us break into new patterns of kinetic representations whose meanings and readings are generated directly from the interrelationship between the dynamic elements involved in Its composition, the fact that the crowding of images and the intertwining of the channels that convey them generate today a crystalline vision of reality that changes our representations and sensitivities, and allows our imaginations to work in new spaces.
And he believed that the effect of the small screen on the viewer makes him understand the relationships and link his opposition completely to what he is doing while he is in front of a written text, and perhaps today we are more convinced than ever that the image provides a different pattern for attaining knowledge and mastery of it. It is the strongest rhetoric and the greatest ability to intensify, display and spread meanings.
And he believes that the most important thing is that the aforementioned transformation is not limited to our psychological capabilities and mental functions, but rather affects our existence as a whole and the relationships that will establish between us, because screen culture does not differ from oral culture, and book culture in tools of expression only, but rather on level of existence itself. Image, writing and speech all define a certain field of intelligibility.
He goes to the fact that the screen culture believes that writing and speech are based together on existence as it is an appearance, and in this culture the existent becomes separated from itself, delegated by its substitute and an image of it. It is a culture that replaces the world with the tele-world, with an excerpt from the images that exist “above” the sensible, and presents itself as the sensible indisputably.
He called for contemplation of the media boom, which not only puts us in front of a virtual world, which does not actually exist, in front of a group of images, but rather puts us first in front of “social relations mediated by images”, a world in which deception has a share of truth, action and effectiveness, but rather of actual existence, a world In it, the thing is as much as it is not, and the image is the “core” (not the realism of the real society), and behind it are the processes of transformation, production, and industry, perhaps the most important industries of the contemporary world.
Presented by: Ali Al-Rubai @Al_ARobai