Philosophy

Seeing

As a teacher, do I put a premium on in-class discussion, or do I allow email, threaded online discussion, and online chat to carry the "traffic" of student to student and student to teacher interaction? As a public educator and journalist, do I put my resources intp cable production, radio production, or text media like blogs and online columns? As an historian of philosophy, do I preserve the work of important philosophers as printed texts and transcripts, as audio recordings, or as video recordings? All of these decisions have this in common: they require that one have some kind of line on the importance of the visual "component" of human behavior. Researchers know that this component is incredibly complex: they can study the play of gestures at a 2 minute family breakfast for months. And we all know intuitively that we have reactions to people's presentation of themselves that we would not have to a transcript of their talk. But neither of these facts settles the question about the importance of the visual information, its relevance to the range of purposes we bring to communication.

Here's what I suspect: when we watch someone talk, we want to know what he or she has to say, and also how he or she could say that (in the sense of the exclamation, "How could you think....?") We are especially interested in what happens when people get something astonishingly right or astonishingly wrong. In some of the visual cues, there is information not just about the thought expressed, but about how the thought came to be, and that information is more valuable, often, than the thought itself. We learn attitudes by watching people.