They say 90 % of communication is non-verbal.  Which makes sense if you consider that we need to understand the world around us , which speaks most likely in non verbal languages, which are accessible to all.  ( This is also why visual art is a way of exploring insights otherwise then science.

This vocabulary of visual cues is often a reflection of how we interact with the world. 
When technology changes how we interact with the world, those visual cues change along  side  too,    . 

And often, as McLuhan suggested,  you begin to become nostalgic for those former cues, that language you acquired when " I remember when" ...  Maybe it's tradition, maybe it's old fashioned, maybe it's the generation gap, maybe it's a lack of desire to learn anew,

I'm undergoing that nostalgia now, as Public TV has moved digital.
"In my time"  of analog television  signals, the accent of the medias language was snow, noise, ghosting, double images and blur. These were part of the signal that one learnt to ignore, so as to find the visual cues  of meaning embedded in the data .

Those accents in the signal that one had learnt to put to the side, have now been displaced with overlapping pixel patterns, stuttering imagery, metamorphosed creatures of anguish, distorted looped time spasms, exhausted blue screen and so much more that simply creeps me out. .

I do understand that eventually, this will reign as the new norm.  And in turn eventually someone else we bewail its loss.  Lonergan's percept of nostalgia for the displaced media is as constant as change itself..

Maybe what we really bemoan is that we have never realized the full value inherent in any former media yet- and that we don't care, we move on to the new  - which expresses something lacking in our character.

© GAMcCullough      2011