Reading Response to Susan Sontag

I read Susan Sontag’s “In Plato’s Cave” in which she talks about almost every aspect of photography and how it has affected our lives and our society. In part of her essay she compares photographs and their effects on people to that of motion pictures. During this she states “Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.” She then goes on to give examples of situations where photographs have left a lasting image on the American people and claims that in these instances moving images just wouldn’t have done the trick.
While I think that photographs give us strong memories in a sense that they seem almost classic to us I disagree with Sontag’s overall thesis of photographs compared to moving images. I think that the things that stick in our mind are the things that are highly promoted in our society, and in our society moving images are one of those things. Here in America we have almost made pictures seem boring with our emphasis on the fast lane and movies and advertisements seem to fit that profile better. Movies have the ability to keep us enthralled for great lengths of time and therefore can send us a host of messages over the course of a captivating film without ever losing our attention and possibly without us even realizing it. Motion pictures also have the ability to instill more emotions within us such as suspense and foreboding that a picture would be hard pressed to produce. I especially disagree with Sontag’s statement “Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor.” It seems to me that she is referring here to the fact that technology is constantly getting better and older films are being replaced by the latest and greatest. I would argue that photography is undergoing much the same process with digital altering of images and new photo cropping technology. So my overall argument with Sontag’s passage is that moving images are actually the more memorable of the two especially in the fast paced society of America today.
I used Countering according to Joe Harris and started by arguing how moving images actually leave a strong lasting impression which contradicts what Sontag is saying. Then I go on to analyze her little summary of moving images and state where I think it is flawed and how, and I topped it off by dissenting with her statement of what a photograph is compared to a moving picture.