A picture is worth a thousand words?

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"A picture is worth a thousand words." Attributed to Fred R. Barnard.

It’s an often-quoted declaration. How true? Where does this idea come from? Apparently Napoleon once murmured something like, “Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu'un long discours.”

Since one picture can often use 1000 KB compared to a thousand-word MS Word file taking up 10 KB, it could be argued that numbers bear this out. Go figure.

“Aha! Usted está comparando manzanas y naranjas!” protests a Spanish lawyer. (Comparing apples and oranges!) A Word file is coded in ASCII which is much more compressed than a JPEG graphics file.

“But wait,” pipes up the prosecuting attorney, “a picture is so dense, it contains so much information, it cannot be reduced. Words are just the essence, the bones. There is little in the way of context.”

“I have a suggestion,” chips in a negotiator. “Pictures that contain text sometimes have a double impact. Is that possibly one reason why comic books and anime are so popular? You take a picture to sketch in the context, the background, and then add a speech bubble to highlight the crucial quote. Something that sums up the speaker’s main idea or philosophy. A soundbite, if you will.”

“Pix + text = bite?”

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