A picture is worth 60k words
Images vs Text
Everyone knows the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” and if you have spent any more than 10 minutes on social media recently you will realise that visual content is the large majority of what is being published and shared.
But why?
A newly born baby understands and recognises the image of her mother long before the term “mummy” means anything to her. Our brains recognise and understand images instantly as this is one of our cognitive functions, but we have to work to process text. It doesn’t come naturally to us.
In fact, the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it does text. So the answer to the question “why?”… Primarily it’s speed!
Technology is catching up with our brains ability to process imagery (either than or the human attention span is dwindling to that of a goldfish).
In a land far far away…
There was a time (not that long ago) when the Internet was more text than images. Downloading a photo could take the best part of 30 minutes if not an hour, so more images meant more waiting.
Fast forward to 2016 and it’s a completely different story.
Webpages with images are 94% more likely to be viewed than their text only counterparts, Facebook users are sharing 4,501 images every second, Snapchat users a staggering 8,796 images every second.
Visual content is actually forty times more likely to be shared on social media than any other type, so it’s clear that there has been a major shift towards this desire to share what matters most in pictures rather than words.
Geeky science stuff says it’s more memorable
As well as our ability to consume larger quantities of information through images, there is also a phenomenon known as “The picture superiority effect” which states that images are far more likely to be remembered than words.
This could be because memory is another cognitive function of the brain, however…
Fancy research, that I’d be lying if I said I understood fully; states that this is because visual stimuli generates both a verbal and image based response in our brain, opposed to text stimuli which generates only a verbal.
We’ve all gone mobile
One of the other big contributors to this is that so few people sit down at an actual computer anymore. It’s all iPhones and iPads.
80% of adults worldwide are said to have a smartphone (that’s more than have a toothbrush by the way, if you haven’t seen the video) and the use of them is nothing short of astronomical.
But have you ever tried reading articles or a whole book on your phone? It’s neither easy nor natural… They are built to be visual and nowhere is this more evident than on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram
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