Visual Communication
Description
Visual Communication: Insights and Strategies explores visual imagery in advertising, news coverage, political discourse, popular culture, and digital and social media technologies. It is filled with insights into the role of visuals in our dynamic social environment and contains strategies on how to use them.
The authors provide an overview of theoretically-informed literacy and critical
analysis of visual communication and demonstrate the ways in which we can assess and apply this knowledge in the fields of advertising, public relations, journalism, organizational communication, and intercultural communication. This important book:
* Reveals how to analyze visual imagery
* Introduces a 3-step process, Research-Evaluate-Create, to apply the knowledge gained
* Combines research, theory, and professional practice of visual communication
Designed for undergraduate and graduate courses in visual communication as well as visual rhetoric, visual literacy, and visual culture, Visual Communication: Insights and Strategies reveals how to apply rhetorical theories to visual imagery.
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Persons
Janis Teruggi Page is Clinical Assistant Professor, Communication Department, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Margaret Duffy is Executive Director, Novak Leadership Institute and Professor of Strategic Communication, University of Missouri.
Content
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
About the Authors xiv
Part One: Understanding Visual Communication 1
Chapter 1: Making Sense of Visual Culture 3
1000 Words or One Simple Picture?
Pics or it didn't happen 3
Key Learning Objectives 5
Chapter Overview 5
How Visuals Work 5
Photographic Truth? 5
FOCUS: A Historical Perspective on Visual Culture 6
Growing Importance of Visuals 7
Our Precarious Visual Culture 7
Political Persuasion 7
Digital Transformation of Visual Culture 8
Smartphones and Visual Culture 9
Multiple Meanings 10
Polysemy 10
FOCUS: Trump's Hand Gestures 12
Form and Content 14
Decoding Visual Messages 15
Semiotics: Signs and Symbols 15
Visual Rhetoric 17
FOCUS: Saving Big Bird 18
What's Ahead? 18
Chapter Summary 19
Key Terms 19
Practice Activities 20
Note 20
References 20
Chapter 2: Visualizing Ethics 23
Revealing Shortcuts and Missteps
Friend or Foe? Hero or Villain? 23
Key Learning Objectives 24
Chapter Overview 24
How Visuals Work: Ethical Implications 25
FOCUS: Images of Tragedy:
Afghan Victim 26
Foundations of Ethical
Thought 27
Visual Deception 30
To Tell the Truth . . . or Not 30
Visual Manipulation Issues 31
FOCUS: Digital Manipulation 32
Framing that Distorts Reality 33
Effects of Virtual Reality 35
Visual Metaphors and thics 35
Brand Mascots and Celebrities 35
Favored Strategy in
Advertisements 36
Visual Appropriation 37
Mashups and Remixes 38
Homages 38
Applying Ross's Ethics 39
Unintended Effects 39
FOCUS: Rethinking Diversity in Visual Narratives 40
The Potter Box 41
Chapter Summary 43
Key Terms 43
Practice Activities 44
Note 44
References 44
Chapter 3: Ways of Seeing 47
Visual Rhetoric
What's in a Wink? 47
Key Learning Objectives 50
Chapter Overview 50
Three Key Terms 50
What Is Theory? 50
Rhetorical Theory 51
Methodology 51
FOCUS: Visual Rhetoric in Fake Facebook Accounts 51
Visual Rhetoric 53
Two Meanings of Visual Rhetoric 53
FOCUS: The Visual Rhetoric of Quirky and Magical Images 56
Basics for Analyzing Visual Rhetoric 57
Durand's Visual Rhetoric Matrix 58
FOCUS: Visual Rhetoric Glossary 61
The Different Lenses of Visual Rhetoric 61
Sign Language (Semiotic Theory) 62
This Means That (Metaphor Theory) 63
FOCUS: Visual Rhetoric in Activist Campaigns 64
Storytelling (Narrative Paradigm Theory) 66
Visual Voices (Symbolic Convergence Theory) 67
FOCUS: Visual Rhetoric Analysis: One Student's Example 69
Chapter Summary 70
Key Terms 70
Practice Activities 70
References 71
Part Two: Basic Ways of Seeing, Interpreting, and Creating 73
Chapter 4: Sign Language 75
Semiotics
The $20 Controversy 75
Key Learning Objectives 78
Chapter Overview 78
Semiotics: The Science of Signs with Meanings 79
What Is a Sign? 79
Semiotic Knowledge Expands Visual Awareness 80
FOCUS: Perception =
Interpretation 82
Question "Common Sense" 83
FOCUS: The Semiotics of
Cultural Appropriation 85
Meet the Semioticians 85
Denotation and Connotation 86
Icon, Index, and Symbol 86
Social Semiotics Explores
"What's Going On?" 89
Signs Are All Around Us 89
Marketing and Movies 90
FOCUS: Semiotics in Marketing 90
News 91
Advertising 91
FOCUS: Semiotics of Visual Appropriation 92
Public Relations 93
Activist Art and Installations 93
Doing Semiotic Analysis 94
Example Analysis 95
Applying Semiotic Analysis in Your Work 97
Chapter Summary 98
Key Terms 98
Practice Activities 99
References 99
Chapter 5: This Means That 102
Metaphor
Life is a Puzzle 102
Key Learning Objectives 104
Chapter Overview 104
Metaphor: When This Stands for That 104
FOCUS: Visual Metaphors Have Dramatic Effects on Your Own Creativity 105
Metaphor is All Around Us 106
Conceptual Metaphors 106
Types of Conceptual Metaphors 108
Metaphor's Extended Family 110
Visual Metaphors 111
FOCUS: Funny . . . and
Sometimes Creepy 113
FOCUS: Culture Clash: When Visual Metaphors Can Misfire 116
Visual Metaphor Lessons from the Media 118
Three Categories of Visual Metaphors 118
FOCUS: Verizon's "Better Matters" Campaign Showcases Visual Metaphors 121
Visual Metaphor Criticism 122
Example Analysis 123
Applying Visual Metaphor
Criticism in Your Work 124
Chapter Summary 125
Key Terms 125
Practice Activities 126
References 127
Chapter 6: Storytelling 129
Visual Narratives
Simple Stories 129
Key Learning Objectives 132
Chapter Overview 132
People are Storytellers 132
Look Below the Surface 132
Narrative Paradigm Theory 134
Myths and Archetypes 136
FOCUS: Storytelling with Color 137
FOCUS: Character Archetypes 139
The Art and Science of Visuals 141
Descriptive Content and Literal Form 141
FOCUS: Storytelling
with Graphics and Typography 143
Figurative Imagery 145
Narrative Criticism 147
FOCUS: Ethical Implications of Storytelling Through Immersive Journalism 147
Analyzing Narratives 148
Example Analysis 149
Applying NPT and Visual Narrative Analysis in Your Work 151
Practice Activities 152
Chapter Summary 153
Key Terms 153
References 154
Chapter 7: Visual Voices 156
Fantasy Themes
Pictures Can Speak
Louder than Words 156
Key Learning Objectives 157
Chapter Overview 158
Everyday Dramatizing: We're all Drama Queens and Kings 158
Symbolic Convergence Theory: A Merging of Imaginations 158
Key Assumptions 159
Visual Images Make Emotional Connections 162
Puppy Love 162
True Believers 162
Activism 163
Master the Basic Concepts 165
Fantasy Theme Analysis 165
FOCUS: Hands Up, Don't Shoot: The Power of Visual Protests 165
Applying FTA to Visual Strategic Communication 171
Research 171
Public Relations: City Images and Political Campaigns 173
FOCUS: Political Issue Advertising 174
Public Affairs: Questioning News Sources 175
News Coverage: The Pope, a Nobel Prize, and a Nice Grown-Up 176
Magazines: Voices from, and for, Teens 176
FOCUS: Where to Find Symbolic Convergence? Nonprofit Fundraising Campaigns 177
How to Analyze and Create Visual Symbolic Messages 178
Fantasy Theme Analysis 178
Example of a Simple F TA Analysis 179
Your First Fantasy Theme Analysis 181
Applying Fantasy Theme Analysis 181
Chapter Summary 183
Key Terms 184
Practice Activities 184
References 185
Part Three: Using Visuals in Professional Communication 187
Chapter 8: Advertising 189
#FaceAnything 189
Key Learning Objectives 191
Chapter Overview 191
Photography in Society 192
A History of Photographic Influence 192
FOCUS: Culture Jamming Creates a Visual Battlefield 194
Strategic Visual Communication 196
The Power of Visuals in Advertising 196
Historical Snapshots 196
FOCUS: The Early Image Makers 197
Visual Rhetoric in Advertising 199
FOCUS: Color and Contrast 201
The Contemporary Advertising Landscape 203
Social Media/Mobile Visual Messaging 203
E-mail Marketing with Visuals 204
Outdoor and Ambient Visuals 204
Televisual Ads 206
Product Placement 206
Chapter Summary 209
Key Terms 209
Practice Activities 209
References 210
Chapter 9: Public Relations 213
Fearless Girl 213
Key Learning Objectives 215
Chapter Overview 215
A Brief History of PR: How Visuals Defined It 215
The Golden Age of Press Agentry: Publicity Stunts 216
Historical Snapshot: Popular Culture Images of the PR Practitioner 217
The Power of Visuals in the Modern ERA of PR 218
Environmental Issues 218
Nonprofit and Activist PR 220
FOCUS: What Does Mental
Health Look Like? 221
Political Communication 223
FOCUS: The Art of Making a Political Ad Feel Like an Uplifting Movie 225
Visual Rhetoric Strategies in PR Campaigns 226
Communicating CSR with Facts, Credibility, and Emotion 226
Visual Persuasion in Risk, Issue, and Crisis Management 228
City Branding and Destination Image-Making 229
Chapter Summary 233
Key Terms 234
Practice Activities 234
References 234
Chapter 10: Journalism 237
Refugee Border Crisis 237
Key Learning Objectives 239
Chapter Overview 239
Photojournalism 240
Archived Visual Evidence 240
Photojournalists and Popular Culture 241
FOCUS: The Seven Sisters and their Influence 243
Loss of Professional Photography 245
Television 246
News: Visual Society. Visual Anxiety 247
The How and Why of News 247
FOCUS: Seeing the Refugee 248
Digital Manipulation 249
FOCUS: Deepfakes Challenge Our Trust in Reality 251
Ethical Dilemmas 252
Digital Innovations and Social Media 253
Instagram 253
Social Media as Launch Pad 254
Video's Giant Wave 254
Best Practices for News Sites 255
Critical Engagement with News Visuals 256
Morality Metaphors in News Front Pages 256
Visual Narratives in Editorial Cartoons 257
Visual Rhetoric of Political Satire 258
Racist Visual Framing in National Geographic 260
FOCUS: Magazines, Women, and Sexuality 262
Chapter Summary 264
Key Terms 265
Practice Activities 265
References 266
Chapter 11: Organizations 269
1984 269
Key Learning Objectives 272
Chapter Overview 272
Visual Modes 273
Four Major Areas 273
Understanding Organizations as Cultures 274
Becoming a Culture Detective 277
Values and Visuals 278
FOCUS: User-Generated Videos in the Workplace 279
Visual Cues in Marketing
and Promotion 279
Images Gone Wrong 280
Controversies and Crises 280
The Power of Visuals in Organizational Communication 282
Communicating Interpersonally: You're the Visual 282
FOCUS: Hey, You! 282
Communicating Using Digital Media 283
How to Use GIFs in the Workplace 284
How To Put the Visual Edge in Presentations 284
FOCUS: Using Visual Systems to Drive Business Results 286
Chapter Summary 288
Key Terms 288
Practice Activities 289
References 291
Chapter 12: Intercultural Communication 293
Welcome to Middle Earth 293
Key Learning Objectives 296
Chapter Overview 296
Ways of Looking at Intercultural Communication and its Place in Mass Communication 296
Intercultural Visual Communication 297
FOCUS: The Founders: Hall and Hofstede 297
Corporate Intercultural Communication 299
Intercultural Communication and the News 301
FOCUS: La Peña: Intercultural Understanding and Social Justice 303
Intercultural Communication in Nonprofit Organizations 304
Cultural Imagery and its Ethical Implications 305
Fair LGBTQ+ Reporting 306
FOCUS: First Impartial LGBTQ+ Global News Service Confronts Stereotypes 306
Honored and Misused Cultural Symbols 308
Ads Lost in Translation 309
Deconstructing Intercultural Imagery 309
Culture-Specific Public Relations 310
FOCUS: Using Photography to Build Intercultural Literacy 311
The Transcultural Greenspeak of Greenpeace 312
Chapter Summary 315
Key Terms 315
Practice Activities 315
References 316
Index 319
Chapter 1
Making Sense of Visual Culture: 1000 Words or One Simple Picture?
"Pics or it didn't happen."
Source: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/58791114. Reproduced with permission of RetroClipArt/Shutterstock.com.
By 2015, this phrase had morphed from a meme to a catchphrase that seemed to be everywhere. If a friend tweeted that she'd been cliff diving in Acapulco, you might respond with that phrase suggesting that perhaps she was being boastful without any evidence to back it up (Whitehead, 2015). If your gamer pal claimed to have reached level 60 in World of Warcraft, you might demand some proof.
Other phrases call on our desire to tap into what Whitehead and others have called "visual authority." You've all heard that "seeing is believing" and heard people say, "I'll believe it when I see it with my own eyes." And consider the famous Chinese proverb, "a picture is worth a thousand words." Here's the thing: it's not Chinese, and it's not a proverb. In fact, it was likely the creation of ad man Fred Barnard1 in the 1920s. As William Safire (1996) writes, Barnard, trying to increase his agency's business selling ads on railway cars, came up with the phrase. He had it translated into Chinese characters with the caption "Chinese Proverb: One Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words" and it passed into popular culture as "one thousand words." Whether it is one thousand or ten, Barnard tapped into the notion that most people find visual evidence more credible and interesting than verbal or textual expression (Graber, 1990).
In entertainment, politics, interpersonal interactions, and at work and at play, we're all consuming, evaluating, and creating visuals. Our culture is increasingly suffused with images aimed at selling us something, persuading us, informing us, entertaining us, and connecting us with others. Your skills and capabilities in communicating effectively and critically evaluating what's around you are crucial to your personal and professional success and that is what this book is about. In the following chapters, we'll provide you with the tools to become an ethical and effective communicator in an era increasingly suffused with images of all kinds.
Key Learning Objectives
- Understand visual culture and its transformation in the digital age.
- Explore the fluidity of visual meaning.
- Identify ways to research and analyze visuals.
Chapter Overview
In this introductory chapter, you'll explore five important issues relating to visuals in contemporary society. First, you'll be introduced to how visuals work and how we interpret them. Second, we'll review the astounding growth of visuals and video in recent years and how this trend is on a steep upward trajectory. Third, we examine the concept of visual culture and how changing technology relates to that culture. Fourth, you'll delve into how individuals can draw different meanings from the same visuals or video artifacts and how that process relates to social life and the meanings we take from our environment. Fifth, we preview ways to analyze visuals. At the close of the chapter we offer two vignettes illustrating how visuals work and provide an overview of the book as a whole.
HOW VISUALS WORK
LO1 Understand visual culture and its transformation in the digital age
Today almost every part of our lives is visual and visualized. We routinely use devices to see, to capture experiences, and to communicate. As suggested by Tavin (2009), visual culture is "a condition in which human experience is profoundly affected by images, new technologies for looking, and various practices of seeing, showing, and picturing" (p. 3, 4). We are now at a place of unlimited visual culture and thus how we understand media and visual literacy has changed.
Photographic Truth?
Among the things that strike us about images and photographs in particular is how they feel as if they are presenting us with a truth about reality. Sturken and Cartwright (2009) call this the "myth of photographic truth" (p. 24) because it obscures the roles of human beings who are creating the image. Those acts of creation include many factors such as the choices the photographer makes about the scene, lighting, and composition. Indeed, the photographer decides what subjects are worthy of their time or attention.
Even with technologies that make it easy and inexpensive to capture images of all kinds, the picture-taker must choose those subjects, whether they are powerful images of war or funny pictures of grumpy cats. All of these will affect the tone of a photo and thus the interpretations people take away from it. Even though we may know intellectually that the photographer has chosen a certain subject at a certain time and framed it a certain way, a photo still carries a sense of legitimacy. Put differently, it involves the "legacy of objectivity that clings to the cameras and machines that produce images today" (Sturken and Cartwright, 2009, p. 18).
FOCUS: A Historical Perspective on Visual Culture
Another way to understand visual culture is to look at it historically. This example illustrates the role of perspective. When we compare medieval paintings (1300-1500) to contemporary paintings, we see remarkable differences. People in today's societies are used to seeing two-dimensional (flat surfaces) that depict three-dimensional spaces such as a road receding into the distance. In medieval times, Christianity was the primary organizing principle of society and artists presented religious and historical images based on the importance of those portrayed rather than more realistic representations (Willard n.d.). The world depicted in the paintings was the domain of God, not the lived experience of people, as shown in this two-dimensional artwork from 1295 depicting the Twelve Apostles receiving inspiration from the Holy Spirit:
Source: Art Collection 2/Alamy Stock Photo.
In fact, it's thought that the highly religious yet illiterate people in medieval times would have found 3D representations to be puzzling and even heretical. The Renaissance in the late fifteenth century led to the emergence of interest in science, intellectual pursuits, and the more realistic depictions of the world. With this societal change, artists began achieving three-dimensional effects using a whole range of techniques including linear perspectives, in which the "illusion that objects appear to grow smaller and converge toward a 'vanishing point' at the horizon line" (Jirousek, 1995). This is illustrated in Rembrandt's 1632 painting, The Abduction of Europa:
Source: GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.
Growing Importance of Visuals
Increasingly, visuals dominate how we communicate and how we understand other people, our society, and the culture in which we live. The line between the media we consume and what we used to consider "real life" is largely erased. Media are our environment as much as the physical spaces we inhabit. Old ways of belief are challenged even more in a world built of visual communication. According to Anderson (1990), this is resulting in an "unregulated marketplace of realities in which all manner of belief systems are offered for public consumption" (p. 6).
Groundbreaking journalist and social critic Walter Lippmann (1922) was likely the first to apply the term "stereotype" referring to attitudes people acquire without specific knowledge of an event or individual. People tend to quickly process visuals along the lines of what they already believe or think and interpret them in terms of familiar categories (Graber, 1988). This may lead people to reflect less on the credibility and accuracy of visual claims than those made in type.
Our Precarious Visual Culture
Today, something that looks like a photo may be an image that's digitally produced, altered, or enhanced. Many images are essentially fictions deliberately created to amuse, to deceive, or to offer an artistic perspective. Many of these are shared and even go viral. They range from silly fictions and jokes, such as fried chicken Oreos and a man presumably holding an 87-pound cat, to manipulated photos attempting character assassination, such as President Obama shown smoking and President George W. Bush shown reading a book upside down (Hoaxes, 2015).
Some are memes shared by like-minded people. These images with text make fun of public figures or celebrities and often call on well-known popular culture references and icons. For example, during the Obama presidency, many forwarded email memes pictured Obama through the lens of racial stereotyping portraying him as a witch doctor, an animal, and even a pimp (Duffy et al., 2012).
For some people, such images are plausible and shareable and even if they don't literally believe the message, they nonetheless appear to believe that the visual joke carries an element of truth. The same message put into type likely would be patently offensive....
