PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION: A NOTE FOR LECTURERS, TUTORS AND FACULTY

As Visual Culture enters its third edition as a book, the importance of visual culture as a discipline continues to increase. And while some things have changed, others remain the same. That's what we have done with this third edition.

What remains the same is our dedication to increasing the visual literacy of the college and university students at whom this book is aimed. It is still a book about how meaning is communicated in visual culture. As before, we do not seek to provide set meanings to a limited number of particular images. Rather, Visual Culture guides readers to interpret any number of visual texts with their own eyes. We do this by providing them with a methodological toolbox that they can put into use for themselves.

The first part of the book remains structured around method; the second is still arranged around media. We continue to focus on what we hold to be the major conceptual issues, because in terms of visual theory and analysis, the central ideas remain relatively constant - even within a world of (seemingly) perpetual change. And of course, we remain committed to writing clearly. Rather than seeking to impress our fellow scholars with the depth and sophistication of our knowledge, our mission continues to be to explain sometimes complex concepts to new readers in the hope that not only will they understand us, they may also find the experience enjoyable.

Meanwhile, the visual world around us continues to change. We observe, for example, increasing numbers of formerly printed publications now being available only in electronic form. For example, in March 2016, the Independent became the first British national newspaper to move from print to a digital-only format. We think it will not be the last, especially as subscription-based, internet versions of serious titles such as the New York Times grow in popularity. Readers of our chapter 11 on 'New Media' will continue to question whether the changes in media at the same time involve changes to the message.

Traditional news media are being over-shadowed in other ways too, and the United States Presidential election of 2016 raised important issues beyond the merely party political. As the campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton gathered steam, it became apparent that Internet news sources were becoming increasingly hyper-partisan and, in some cases, entirely false news stories were circulating which, it was argued, influenced the eventual outcome of the election. Let's begin with an example: during the campaign the Denver Guardian reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation director implicated in the leaking of details about Hillary Clinton's emails had killed himself after murdering his wife. The story, which included a vivid photograph of a house fire, was widely shared via social media on Facebook. The story was, however, completely untrue. The Denver Guardian was a fake news website, masquerading as legitimate. They completely invented the story. And it turns out that the photograph, although of a real house fire, had been taken by a neighbour back in 2010 and originally posted on image-sharing site Flickr before being appropriated and completely misrepresented as something else by the Denver Guardian. Other fake news stories circulated during the election claimed that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton had sold arms to the so-called Islamic State.

According to BuzzFeed News, the top 20 performing fake news stories about the US election of 2016 generated 8.7 million shares.1 This figure becomes all the more significant when we consider that the difference between the two sides in the US presidential election of 2016 was just 2.8 million votes out of a total of over 136 million votes cast. According to BuzzFeed, three big right-wing Facebook pages published 'false or misleading information' 38 per cent of the time during the period analyzed, and three large left-wing pages did so in nearly 20 per cent of posts. BuzzFeed further claimed that 'the least accurate pages generated some of the highest numbers of shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook - far more than the three large mainstream political news pages analyzed for comparison'. BuzzFeed's Craig Silverman concluded that 'The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world's biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear.'2

The recent proliferation of hyper-partisan sites and false news stories has led to what some people are now calling the 'post-truth society', described by Oxford Dictionaries (who made it their 2016 'word of the year') as: 'Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.'3 Due to the significantly visual nature of both Internet and broadcast news today, we wonder to what extent images and presentation contribute to this increasingly complex relationship with truth? It seems to us, however, that in visual culture true and false need not be entirely binary categories. Our fifth chapter (semiotics), for example, draws important distinctions between denotation and connotation, while chapter eight (photography) argues that even a 'documentary' photograph's relationship with reality can be similarly complex.

The rise of international terror has led to us writing a new section within chapter 4 (ideology) as part of this third edition. Here, we discuss how images of power, fear and seduction have become part of the terrorist arsenal in the twenty-first century, and consequently part of our own visual culture. We investigate a significant evolution from images distributed by the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda in 2005 to those circulated by ISIS (the so-called Islamic State) in more recent years. We note the increasingly 'sophisticated' use of Western-style techniques in support of a distinctly anti-Western movement. It all combines to underline the ever-increasing, global importance of the study of visual culture today.

On a lighter note, we have also added a new section on video games as part of our 'New Media' chapter for this third edition. As video games have become much more visually sophisticated, it struck us that they now needed to be taken more seriously within visual culture. On a more theoretical level, we have expanded our section on Immanuel Kant in our second chapter (form) and added an introduction to the work of another philosopher, David Hume. Both thinkers made early and important contributions to the debate about taste and judgement, especially regarding matters of beauty. Is everyone's taste entirely personal? Or are there more objective, universal criteria for aesthetic judgement? And can there be any such thing as 'good' taste? We welcome the contributions of philosophers to the study of visual culture, and note that the questions raised by Kant and Hume in the eighteenth century remain just as relevant (and tantalising) today.

Of course, we have updated the book more broadly along the way, including the further study sections, the index, glossary and bibliography. Finally, we are delighted for the first time to print this third edition in colour. We are aware that monochrome rendition of works in colour has always been second best - especially in a book about visual culture. The world is, after all, in colour and always has been - whatever old newsreels may lead us to believe! The reason we used black and white in our previous editions was with the best of motives: to keep the price of the book down for student readers. But things have changed. Since our first edition in 2004, the relative cost of printing in colour has gradually come down, and with the welcome support of our publishers we are now able to take this important jump while still keeping this latest edition affordable for everyone.

We are grateful to those who have supported this book in the past and who continue to do so with the third edition. This includes, of course, John B. Thompson, Andrea Drugan, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, Sarah Dobson, Elen Griffiths, and Mary Savigar at Polity Press. Sacha Golob and James Grant were generous with their thoughts and suggestions on the philosophy of aesthetics; Btihaj Ajana and Paolo Gerbaudo on video games.

Parts of this revised version were completed during Richard Howells' Visiting Fellowship at Exeter College, University of Oxford, so our grateful thanks to the Rector and Fellows thereof. King's College London have again provided welcome support from both the Dean and Faculty of Arts and Humanities together with the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries - whose students also continue to provide useful feedback and helpful suggestions.

We would like also to thank and commend the increasing number of museums and art galleries who have begun making images from their collections available to the public via public domain dedication and open content programmes. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles are shining examples here. We hope that increasing numbers of others will follow.

Finally, the authors thank their friends and families for indulging their continued fascination with the culture of the...