The relationship betwenn visuality and texuality in a digital age intensifies. A digital society holds vast implications for sending and receiving information at exponential rates. Because of this, the audience is placed in an enviornment where content minds its spatial and temporal economy, in hopes of capturing the interest of readers in an otherwise, fast-paced, saturated realm.
The digital age accelerates the process of production, making a myriad of content/information available. Consequently, althogh Warhol may argue, things that are copies are treated with little value, and don't aim to hold an aura once ascribed to content before the age of mechanical reproduction. Therefore, an enviornment ubiquitous with signs and symbol systems becomes cluttered, and it would seem that the sincerity of the content we find diminishes in its overuse.
Since the digital age (and the profit models of the media industry that have emerged with it) creates large amounts of competition between content and its success with audeince's attention, the content, itself, is conscientious of its medium and takes time and space as commodities. This may have different results for different mediums: Billboard content, for example, will try to be as expansive as possible. On the contrary, although the computer screen can provide huge proportions of space, and in effect time, its content is aimed at being accurate, brief, and clear.
Thus, messages competing for attention/interest have to be packaged in the most effective way -that is to say, messages in the constraints of time and space aim to be more accessible to their audeinces.
In effect, the relationship between visuality and texuality intensifies because (1) visuality, in its representationalism, provides the ability for the fast-paced transmission demanded by the saturated environment; and (2) although visiuality has more utility it still cannot operate autonomously outside from language (the constraints of time and space also highlight the importance of the text, as it would be even more space/time consuming to package the information of fine print with pictures/signs that may cloud the audience member's reception of the information/message)
With the above considered, there is a necessity for the synergy of visuality and text in the digital age, that requires a more provocative use of the two. In a cluttered environment, extremism is rewarded, furthering the need for easy to understand representational figures/language and also the employment of styles that are eye grabbing and stimulating.
