Practices of Looking–Introduction

        The introduction of the book Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright starts with what our visual culture is and what it entails in our society today. The very first thing that stood out to me in this section of the book was when the authors said, "We negotiate the world through visual culture...Our lives are increasingly dominated by communication technologies...that allow for the global circulation of ideas, information, and politics" (pg.1). I like this because I felt like it really summed up exactly what our world, especially my generation is going though and growing up with. I feel like the more technology evolves and becomes more complex then more complicated it gets, but every new generation is trained to adapt and change to accommodate this new complex technology because our world doesn't seem like it ever wants to give up on our technology dominated communication. The introduction of the book touches a little bit about this, but goes on to explain what the rest of the book to going to cover. It explains that even though there are all kinds of different cultures and subsets within each culture, this book is more focused on the visual, those things that we can physically see with our eyes. Things such as paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, film, television, video, digital images and advertising are what most people, including myself, think of when they think about visual culture, but the book goes on to include things like animation, graphic novels, comic books, popular culture, news images, entertainment, images as legal evidence and science images were all things I had never though about before, especially as visual culture that can greatly influence our lives.