In 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet and philosopher, came up with a theory about the readiness of people to accept ideas that are clearly fantastic and unreal when engaging with the arts, and the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief" entered the language. Television and literature are obvious examples, where we are prepared to suspend our critical faculties and our everyday model of reality in return for entertainment: We know it's not real, but we are prepared to forget that, in return for the emotional experience the medium induces.This is particularly true of the visual media, which do not come close to our real visual experience of life; yet we are happy to accept images far removed from our reality. Images are powerful – “worth a thousand words” -- as the proverb goes, because they can convey large amounts of information very quickly, are easily memorised and recalled, and are capable of eliciting an emotional response. Images are far more powerful than text. Much of what people know about the world beyond their immediate experience, they absorb through visual media.
