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Within and Across the Media Borders
experiences of wars place the processes of othering in their specific political and
social context. Ihese processes themselves bear, however, global characteristics, too.
The current volume, in addition to being a continuation of the project started in
2010, is also an attempt to deepen the research and to present the specificity of the
eastern European gaze in many ways.
The World as not yet Overwhelmed by Images
During the 1940s to the 1970s, the amount of visual data with which people
interacted increased dramatically. The types of media multiplied, and the amount
of space (public and private) occupied by such images grew. To answer, in part,
whether the increasing number of the types of media and of their products enabled
people to understand and depict the surrounding world in a new way, we may say
that this growth of visual information resulted in an increasing role of images in
the process of the construction of identity. In other words, the constant circula¬
tion of images, their repetitiveness, and the frequency of interaction with them
has changed the perception of reality, and of the Other. Visual representations as
an instrument of communication exercised a more and more significant impact
on the life of average people. We hope that this volume provides some preliminary
insights into the tools and processes by which the new media changed the percep¬
tion of reality.
There have always existed social forms for the preservation and transmission of
information (e.g. oral culture, narratives, jokes, gossip, i.e. word of mouth infor¬
mation). The visual form may be identified as a technique for preserving messages
across a greater distance. It constitutes a form of communication with a wider and
also spatially distanced audience. According to Anderson's now classical definition
(1972: 5), ‘communication is a dynamic process in which a person consciously or
unconsciously influences the perceptions of other people. Therefore, by analyzing
the visual data we try to decode the implicit information hidden—both by the
author and by the cultural patterns guiding the particular ways of perception and
depiction—in a picture, a photograph, or a movie. It is highly probable that such
visual signs are important also for the recipients of the message, confirming their
values, and some meanings that are significant for them. It is, however, possible
that the meaning inscribed in a picture is contested or read 4 rebours. We try to
grasp in this volume all the mentioned ways of interacting with visual data.
‘The meaning of visual representations derives, however, not only from the mes¬
sages present in them, but also from the very materiality of the object or the kind
of media it is transmitted by—for example, illustration, photograph, movie. Laura
Marks (2000: 170), writing on the beginnings of cinema, pinpointed the certain
struggle between the material significance of the object and the representational
power of the image. The struggle is related to the two ways of dealing with visual
data—their use that is inevitably connected to (a) the representational content and
(b) their materiality. Moreover, in every visual representation we have two levels of
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