迄今为止的人类文明史,如果仅以人类对自然与社会的认知及其文化的传播手段与方式来看,主要可分为图画时代、文字时代、印刷时代及视像时代这样四个阶段。电视技术的发明与视像时代的到来,可以说引起了一种革命性的变化,即人们对自然与社会的认识由图画时代的体验、文字时代的思考、印刷时代的记录转向了视像时代的“观看”。虽然阅读与观看都运用到人的视觉器官,但两者却有本质的不同。对于写作者而言,印刷时代的叙事是一种线性的叙事,由于句法与语法规则的要求与限制,从而注定了它是逻辑的,句法是论述的结构,是大脑通过语言表达思维的映射;对于阅读者而言,印刷传播要求阅读者注意力积极地投入,因为阅读本质上是一种充分运用形象思维,通过对具体文字符号的翻译而实现的对语词所指的了解。同时在具体的阅读行为中,阅读者翻页的动作,内容的前后相承,从上到下的阅读过程,所有这些都表明了循序渐进的时间流动过程。在视像时代,人们随时随地地面对具体的图像与画面,镜头与画面成为了社会文化与人们生活中的最主要的因素,视像成为世界的本质,因此人们社会文化的获得方式由对知识的掌握转向 The history of human civilization up to now can be divided into four stages: the picture age, the text age, the printing age and the video age only by means of human’s understanding of nature and society and its means of dissemination of culture. The invention of television technology and the arrival of video era can be said to have caused a revolutionary change: people’s understanding of nature and society turned from the experience of the picture age, the thinking of the word era, the records of the printing era to the era of the video “Watch ”. Although both reading and viewing are applied to human visual organs, there is a fundamental difference between the two. For writers, the narrative in the printing age is a kind of linear narration. Because of the requirements and limitations of the syntactic and grammatical rules, the narrative in the printing age is bound to be logical. The syntactic is the structure of discourse and the mapping of the brain expressing the thinking through the language. For readers, print communication requires the reader’s attention to be actively engaged because reading is essentially an understanding of the word through the use of figurative thinking, through the translation of specific literal symbols. At the same time in the specific reading behavior, readers flip the action, the content of the next phase, from top to bottom of the reading process, all of which indicate the gradual flow of time. In the video era, people face specific images and images anytime, anywhere. The lens and the screen become the most important factor in the social culture and people’s lives. As the video becomes the essence of the world, people’s social and cultural access depends on The mastery of knowledge turned