Summary Of Scopic Regimes Of Modernity By Jay Martin

In Jay Martin’s Scopic Regimes Of Modernity, one subject that really resonated with me is the idea of visual complexity that is presented in various forms throughout this article. The article begins with the author mentioning that “Although the implied characterization of different eras in this generalization as more favorably inclined to other senses should not be taken at face value, it is difficult to deny that the visual has been dominant in modern Western Culture in a wide variety of ways (page 3),” mentioning that other senses are also important, but that sight is the sense that is most prominent today. We live in a very visual world, we’ve become obsessed with documentation of our lives, and are constantly bombarded with millions of images to take in every second, from Facebook photos, to the news, to advertisements, etc. Many times we do not even realize just how many things are being presented to us in such a short time (and in turn how that elevates to a large scale). These images that we are constantly viewing is effecting us, and shaping the world around us from how we think to what we value.
We bring our backgrounds, values, ideas, and all sorts of other aspects of psychology when we view anything. What we see and how we describe it are all things that are effected by images we see constantly, and who we are. This relationship of our minds to images is a very complicated one especially these