Numbers are useless in a world of images.

Let me explain.

I came across an article in Monday’s edition of the New York Times that especially sparked my interest. The title of the article was “Venezuela, More Deadly than Iraq, Wonders Why.”

It turns out that in Venezuela, a country with a population comparable to Iraq, almost four times as many civilians are killed each year in murders or other violent deaths than in Iraq.

There are two questions one could ask after hearing about such figures. First, why is Venezuela, a country not ravaged by civil war, a much more dangerous place to live?

The second question, one that I pose to my readers, is why will this not matter tomorrow?

There are several reasons, such as the American military has no presence in Venezuela, and Venezuela is in South America while Iraq is in the Middle East.

I propose the reason why Venezuela’s murder rate will not matter to most people tomorrow is this; numbers mean nothing in a world guided by images. Sixteen thousand violent deaths have little impact upon the average citizen because there is nothing for them to visualize.

Most Americans know little about Venezuela and have not seen images documenting the murders or subsequent investigations. We have, on the other hand, seen countless hours of video footage documenting American military efforts in Iraq along with footage of car bombings in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. So Iraq matters. Venezuela does not. Iraq has pictures. Venezuela has numbers.

My claim here is not that pictures are the only things that matter. Such a statement is foolish and ill-informed.

Geographic, political, economic and cultural factors will always play a role. However, numbers still mean less than pictures in the fast-paced, visually driven nature of modern media.

Numbers require a different type of thinking. They require that news articles do not stand alone. When using numbers, context matters.

Analysis of context requires time. Sixteen thousand murders in Venezuela is useless information until one knows the population of Venezuela, the past murder rate, and the murder rates of comparable nations.

This requires abstract thinking and analysis, not a mere acceptance or rejection of the facts presented. Most of us do not read the news in such a way.

Most of us read the news as a passive audience. Pictures, images, words and numbers are presented to us.

We internalize facts without analyzing context. Articles and images are accepted as good journalism or rejected as biased scribbles. Again, this is still a passive process.

Because of the passivity, a well-framed picture does more than numbers ever can.

Articles in our modern world stand alone. So if an article starts with an image of a child crying near the wreckage of a car-bomb in Baghdad, then the violence in Iraq is obvious, and no number need be quoted.

But if a well-written article were to explain the dangerously high murder rate in Venezuela, it would accomplish nothing unless the reader truly digests the numbers and what they mean.