Visual Media, Allegorical Consciousness, and Postmodern Culture

III. Purpose and stance; Here’s where we “read” the ad and describe it – visual rhetoric

Visual rhetoric plays a significant role in the modern-day world. Everyone and everything is in some way, shape, or form trying to convince everyone else to think how they think, or believe what they believe. This is achieved through numerous methods, such as: commercials, advertisements, television shows, and even political cartoons. While everyday television is a huge arena for visual rhetoric, the “Mecca” of advertisement would arguably be the commercials during the Super Bowl. If one were to watch the Super Bowl, particularly in 2015, they would likely remember the Budweiser campaign centered around a Labrador retriever puppy. This pathos-filled commercial contains all of the necessary aspects of visual

This passage from Elizabeth Daley’s, “Expanding The Concept of Literacy”, uses and introduces new examples to support the claim that multimedia is it’s own complex language. She builds on this by providing the reader with well known historic moments that were broadcast cinematically; like the moon landing and 9/11. She then proceeds to question whether these events would’ve been the same without the language of multimedia, implying that if these events were publicized by text alone our understanding would’ve been more limited. By calling the way these moments were broadcasted into question she also helps connect this idea to a common example the reader will easily be able to understand and analyze.

With the advent of information technology, the ways different aspects of life work and operate have changed a great deal. Media has always had a great influence in molding the culture of a society. There was a point of time when television and radio were invented and when computer was invented and there was little connection between the two. Time then travelled fast then through the age of cassettes, records, VCDs, DVDs, flash drive and then the internet. Media also started to go satellite on a massive scale and there came a point of time when media and digital communication systems became closely integrated with one another, opening the dimensions to digital media.

Furthermore, the author dwells into mediated popular culture which pertains specifically to movies, TV, songs, and advertisements along with the way they communicate

Rhetorical devices are elements embedded in a piece of work that allow the viewer to fully interpret and engage with the content presented. Rhetorical elements can be used universally through various mediums. In this essay I will be analyzing a photograph, specifically addressing the images logos, pathos, and Telos. The photograph frames your not so typical geriatric couple complete with skateboards and their flying birds. The caption of the photo is “This couple sticking it to the man”. This ironic photo packs a strong central message of living young wild and free. The unknown photographer develops the central message through the use of rhetorical deceives.

I know that, sometimes, instead of verbally telling my friend I hope she feels better (due to whatever reason) I text her a photo of a cat in a sweater. This image directly influences her mood in a way that my words may not have. I’m fascinated with the idea of the “non-linear, inconsistent, and unpredictable” ways images are distributed “within and across multiple networks.” The only control a human has over an image is its creation (if it is a graphic) and the very first place it is posted. This does not account for how individual humans will encounter the image, just its production and composition. Furthermore, the person creating the image will lose control over who views the image (the intended and unintended audiences). This is what leads to the transformation and possible satirization or an inversion of intent (protest versus call-to-action). This form of distribution and interpretation reminds me of how literature is void of authorial intent once it enters the public domain, depending on who encounters the text. Gries states this phenomena well when she writes that rhetoric “generates a multiplicity of consequences.” I think for this reason, it is incredibly hard to pinpoint the basic implications and methodology of visual rhetoric, as supported by the fact that Gries book, while engaging and interesting, is over 600 pages

Among the problematics that guide my understanding of the possibility of visual rhetorics are three. Each might be considered to exists within/bring together the nexus of history, images, and power. This nexus helps to form a framework for an economy of verbal and visual images that, in turn, might become the fabric of a visual rhetorics. The first is what I want to call the "enigma of unrepresentability." The second is that images become especially important for us when they can be read as "self-reflexive." Finally, the third, is the "ideological privileging" of the visual that renders its apparatus, quite literally, hard to "see." Let me briefly elaborate on each.

Authors of multimodal information use all modes of communication rhetorically to persuade their audience. Whether it's the rhetorical use of words, pictures, sounds, or videos they can achieve their desired appeals of logos, pathos, and ethos to influence their reader. Since the web creates an interactive environment for the audience the author has to manipulate

It is evidently true that human beings communicate through more than one medium. When communicating people express ideas as well as emotions through facial expressions, tone and pitch, and gestures, which are non-verbal languages know as body language. Body language comprise of our non-verbal communication or kinesics, and just like the verbal communication, it is a part of our culture (Zhou, & Zhang, 2008). Gestures are conveyed through the use of our body, mainly through the movements of our hands and head. All around the world, people use gestures when they communicate, but what the gestures mean totally depends on the speaker’s culture, because just like verbal languages, non-verbal languages, such as gestures are not universal (Archer,

Visuality, defined in a most straight forward way, is the quality or state of being visual or a mental image or picture relates to the process of glimpsing with the eyes. Even though the term encompasses a broad array of explanation and it conveys different things to different people, it relates with the prism with which people construe the world. It applies to both tangible and intangible and depending on one’s ability to exploit the visual senses. Visuality plays an integral role as a cultural tool in the society. In the contemporary context, it refers to the manner in which people see and how they are seen. However, on numerous occasions, mentioning of the word elucidates the idea of construing contents via media

There are a lot of people using words as symbols and what they mean differently. In society, people deals with symbolic interaction to define words. Symbolic interaction is the way of human beings with social behaviors and using words as definitions, but it can also create, define, and shared. According to G.H Mead, he believed all sorts of things about symbol interaction, and the way of how symbols can relate the vocabulary of all the words they know or what they don’t know. I can tell you all the symbols and what they mean in the vocabularies.

Who creates the visual argument and why the argument was created are also important visual elements. Therefore, in making a successful visual argument-- all the key components—the creators and distributors, the medium, the viewers and readers, the content and purpose of the argument, and its design (pg. 329) are equally important. Therefore,”You want every image or use of multimedia to carry out …purpose.” (Pg. 334), and that “Almost every design element sends signals about character and ethos.” (Pg. 337).

Fairclough (1995) clarifies that discourse is not only written and spoken language, but it also visual part that has meaning (p.54).

Carey Jewitt and Jeff Bezemer express how linguistic studies approach multimodality; the anticipation of speech, writing, images, gaze, gestures,...etc, in the meaning creation. the social semiotic approach to multimodality, in which it is; the extension of social understanding of language and its concepts to multiple type of communication and depictions used in a culture, assuming that the making of meaning resources are always