The clip art lion loses its ferocity. The clip art horse loses its spirit. As clip art, these cats are not so bad, but they certainly are cartoon images with little of the character captured easily in the backyard with a digital camera. The availability of clip art makes it far too easy for folks to decorate and illustrate their creations with mediocre images that fall short even of comic book quality. Life as cartoon.
Visual literacy declines as the lexicon of images narrows.
We are gradually forced to portray and view more of life as a comic strip. Enterprising schools, families and companies will spend extra money to buy clip art collections. There are many CDs now on the market which offer thousands of images for very little money. Trouble is . . . If we add more mediocre images, we have done little to address the problem.