A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words- Or is it an indication that we are no longer capable of prolonged thought, that our mental capacity is waning?

I love those quirky sayings that crop up on social media and other sites on the Internet. Here's one I came across recently:

"A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words" is an old saying and we appreciate that a picture can speak multitudes in a flash of insight, but are we taking this to an extreme? Have we gone beyond the pale in this age of online social networking? I am continuing to challenge the validity of some of the myriads of posters we see that are all too glibly believed and lauded as truth on social media sites.

In a previous post I demonstrated (I hope) that not everything these truth posters seem to say so elequently and with so few words - should be taken at face value. And this is not the first time, here is a couple that, with some thought, proved to be not quite what they seem.

Here's another one and I think it relates a little to the previous one:

Let's just do a little interrogation of the thinking behind this sandwich board. 

• Didn't the person who wrote the slogan already implicitly assume the belief that being a better person implies the belief that it would be beneficial to make this belief known? 
• Is it not true that the person who wrote this slogan about belief, wants us to believe them, with the goal of producing better behaviour, because they themselves have faith in the truth that right beliefs underlie right behaviours?
• Hasn't their faith in the power of beliefs to cause better behaviour, already been assumed by the behaviour involved in producing the sign?

However sarcastic my comments might seem, I don't suppose that anyone misses the important truth implied by the sign. There are differences in the degree to which people hold beliefs. Some give mental assent to beliefs without any consequent change in behaviour. As another has written "Hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue."

Here is a variation of the sandwichboard and another variation of that which entails why it is seen as simplistic, and erroneous more often than it is true. Like the sandwichboard, the idea is (apparently) that beliefs are not responsible for actions. What it fails to account for is the reality that we can hold beliefs that we don't act on, and which are therefore held as mere intellectual assent, but then there are other beliefs which are held on a deeply existential basis, and are the fountain of all actions.