A picture’s worth 1000 words. This is a very popular dictum. Is it really? Worth about 1000 words I mean. We live in a visually intensive society. Bombarded daily with a steady, unrelenting stream of visual stimulation from all manner of media, we seek understanding from pictures when we are only taught to understand words. We see mediated images more than we read words. Some have warned that if the trend continues, civilization will regress to illiteracy and lawlessness. Other, more optimistic researchers predict that technological advances will merge words and pictures in new ways that will create innovative educational possibilities.