Who's going to teach us how to look, now?
For centuries, literacy has been one of our democratic society's achievements, but today it's no longer simply about deciphering words but about “translating” images.
Never before have we produced so many images. Rise Above Research estimates that by 2026, around 1.95 trillion photographs will be taken worldwide, mostly on mobile phones. That's more than five billion photos every single day. Yet the true meaning lies much beyond this wide range of numbers: in fact, images have become one of the ordinary ways to record, share and make sense of reality in our society.
For centuries, literacy opened the door to knowledge, participation in public life and active citizenship. But it's worth remembering that literacy has never been solely about reading words. At its core, it has always been about learning how to interpret: placing things in context, making comparisons, distinguishing facts from opinions, recognising intentions and forming our own judgements.
In this sense, reading was a school of interpretation. The question, then, is whether we have developed an equivalent and actual approach in which an increasing amount of meaning reaches us not through text but through images. This is not about setting written culture against visual culture - nor suggesting that reading matters any less. Quite the opposite: precisely because reading has been our most demanding exercise in critical judgement, we should ask ourselves what would happen if we applied the same rigour to images.
We tend to think of looking as something immediate, almost instinctive. Seeing, after all, is a biological ability. But looking is a cultural practice, and understanding what we see requires context, references and learning. Just as nobody develops strong reading skills without reading widely, it's hard to interpret images without building a certain degree of visual literacy. Good judgement needs raw material: we need to have seen, compared, recognised patterns and learned to question what appears to be obvious.
That's why visual culture is about more than simply accumulating images. It's also about training the eye. Seeing more doesn't automatically mean understanding more, but genuine understanding often comes from having seen enough to make meaningful connections.
A simple example illustrates this well. When we look at The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch today, we don't see the same thing his contemporaries saw. Between that work and our own perspective stand centuries of painting, photography, cinema, television, advertising, video games and the internet. The point here isn't creativity, but interpretation: an image is never received in isolation. We see it through what we already know, what we've seen before and the cultural frameworks we've absorbed, often without even realising it.
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The New Sight Literacy: Who's going to teach us now?
This idea has a long intellectual history. John Berger's Ways of Seeing, published in 1972 and based on his BBC series, became a landmark work for understanding how we engage with images. Erwin Panofsky distinguished between describing what appears in an image, identifying its iconographic conventions and interpreting its deeper cultural meaning. W. J. T. Mitchell introduced the concept of the “pictorial turn” to describe the growing importance of the visual in contemporary culture.
Once, it seemed like a concern only for art historians, semioticians, and visual-culture scholars. Today, it has become an essential civic skill. Images don't simply illustrate ideas: they create, organise and give them emotional force. A photograph can evoke compassion or fear before we've even formed an argument. A meme can communicate a political stance faster than an editorial.
The rise of generative artificial intelligence makes this issue even more imperative. For decades, one of the first questions we had been asking about an image was whether it represented reality faithfully. Today, we have to ask a question at its source: does this image even depict a real event?
Arts and humanities play a key role here: art history, philosophy, aesthetics and semiotics have long explored how forms create meaning. Teaching people how to look at a painting, a photograph, an advertisement, a viral video or an AI-generated image is not an intellectual luxury; it's about teaching them how to ask questions about reality itself.
If literacy was the great educational project of the age of print, interpretation may become the defining educational challenge of the digital era. So, learning how to read images is a vital part of this task — not to replace words, but because more and more meaning now circulates visually, and we need citizens who can understand, question it and engage with it critically.
Images don't simply reflect the world; they help shape it. And that is why one of the great questions of our time is whether we are truly learning how to interpret what we see.
Original Post on Forbes, authorized reproduction and translation by the author
