These are superficial characterizations, but images matter. They register with the unconscious as symbols and evoke a visceral response precisely because they're processed by the brain's right hemisphere where our emotions hang out. Written language, on the other hand, is processed by our left hemisphere -- home to reason and logic.
Our right lobe feels; our left lobe thinks. It's no mystery why the Democratic Party, identified as the more-feeling party, is also home to more artists and actors, while the Republican Party tends to attract more business-minded folks.
This is an oversimplification of the workings of brains and politics, clearly. We're all a little bit this and little bit that, and the lobes, though one usually dominates, communicate with each other through 250 million or so nerve fibers. Some of us are even ambidextrous, though we try to keep it quiet.
But the issue Dean raises about honesty vis-a-vis media in the political realm underscores the danger of relying too much on what the camera delivers versus what the mind deduces from reasoning through the written word. What we see is not all of what we get.
We don't want to live by words alone, obviously. Emotions aren't frivolous, but they are another form of information. Visceral responses, otherwise known as ``gut feelings'' or intuition, are often reliable, if primitive, ways of knowing.
Yet when it comes to understanding issues, television becomes the enemy of thought and YouTube is inherently unfair by the deliberate exclusion of context.
Of course, thinking is harder than feeling, which may explain why reading has fallen in disfavor and candidates scramble to post their own flicks on YouTube. But Americans who want to make informed choices would do well to spend more time reading than watching.
The ``boob tube'' got its nickname fair and square.