Wood for trees
The Tragedy of the Commons is when individuals with unrestricted access to a shared resource act in their own short-term self-interest and overuse it, depleting it, causing collective ruin for everyone. That's where we are now in my opinion, with many things, including imagery. Stories however are different. Adding stories to the sum total of human stories adds wood, not trees.
Apparently, humans have been making images for at least 67,800 years. That's a long time. For figurative images representing something, subtract 27,000 years. So for about 40,000 years humans have been creating what you'd call actual images of something.
Unrestricted access doesn't mean creating an image, because, as above, it's been going on for a very long time and for most of that time, access was restricted in the sense that not everybody could make unrestricted numbers of images all the time. Access means showing it to people who have access to it.
Suddenly, in the past few years, anybody can make unresticted numbers of images all the time and show them to people. The result is the collective ruin of imagery. No one image means very much, apart from famous historical images like the Mona Lisa, or an image of an event, like, for example Donald Trump becoming God. Some stick in your mind more than others but they are soon replaced by new ones in the stream of images being made all the time by anybody and seen by literally anyone, anywhere. This is the internet and now, AI. No-one can see the wood for the trees.
What you need is an image with a story attached, because then, an image can mean something. Stories endure.
I should clarify that I'm not talking about technical images like images whose purpose is to show how something should be done. I call those diagrams or engineering drawings, however rough. Presumably, in olden times, when a cathedral was going to be built, people had a graphic way of explaining how it would be, but I don't know much about it.
Until photography was invented in the 1820s, images were mainly paintings and drawings. Public access was in art galleries, books and other publications mainly on paper (or on cave walls). You could get a rough idea what the Duke of Wellington looked like, or Jesus. The Duke of Wellington could never sit still long enough for an artist to capture him exactly so you saw only an approximation of what he actually looked like. Photography changed all that, but not in time for the Duke of Wellington. Nobody well ever know exactly how he laughed or looked when he got angry. But we know exactly how Adolf Hitler looked angry, and with motion pictures, we know how he sounded and how he moved. And of course, attached to Adolph Hitler is a very big story. The image of Hitler is as unforgettable as the story.
I make images so I'm giving this more thought …
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