If visual discourse has entered our domain, what is our relationship to it and how do we go about thinking critically of it?
With web-based communication in mind, Stroupe describes tensions between verbal “rhetorics and literacies” and “extra-verbal codes and languages” within the English profession and a reconsideration of Aristotle’s “verbal contentmaster” as the sole possessor of the dominant mode of discourse (Stroupe 14). (can you re-create this picture accurately with text?)
Because of resistance to iconic media within the English field, introductions to, and ongoing relationships with digital communication studies have been, and will continue to be on unsettled ground. Furthermore, the English profession’s great investment in print culture will continue to prevent “marginalized wings” of the discipline to get too close to the center. However, Stroupe suggests the tension between visual and verbal literacies can relax into a hybrid literacy that amplifies their continuity and extends their capabilities together. An advocate of digital communication, Richard Lanham, who finds the anxieties in the English field for these new modes unwarranted, believes digital expression “…attempts to reclaim, and rethink the basic Western wisdom about words” (Stroupe16). Lanham’s assertions prompt me to reflect on the new roles individual modes have taken on (such as text) and the effects of multi-modal, multi-layered discourse upon ideas and arguments. Initially, I just worry about the power of the media, but then I conclude there are too many academic applications of multi-modal discourse to let that worry wield much influence such as the documentary film.
Finally, in a historical analysis of the transition from oral tradition to the printing press, and from word processing and printing to digital communication, John McDavid asserts, “Each medium arises by building recursively upon its predecessor, taking the previous technology as content” (Stroupe 23). Stroupe uses McDavid’s ideas to suggest that “the rhetorics of literacy and digitality will be long intertwined” (Stroupe 23).
If bringing digital discourse into the classroom to work with textual is a priority of a given English department, how do they go about it in a meaningful way?
Mary Hocks observes through her own experiences transitioning to digital photography that its ability to empower us to revise and create “engage us in an exploratory process that allows us to experiment” (Hocks 202). Because visual displays can make meaning through both content (image) and form (color, arrangement, scale, etc.) and both the cultural popularity of and the common person’s access to creating and editing visual displays has greatly increased within a short amount of time, it is necessary to continue studying and teaching how to read and write rhetorically within the visual domain.
Hocks defines “two schools of thought [that] inform the current thinking about visual literacy” (Hocks 204). One finds that images work in a way much like words do in how meaning is made in syntax, proximity, and grammar, while the second school of thought finds images seductive and hazardous because of their imprecision (Hocks 204).
It’s puzzling to me to view images imprecise at times. For instance, I can say or write the word “apple” and that can mean any type of apple or even a computer; however, if I show you an apple that’s red or a Powerbook, you receive more precise information given you have seen or experienced the above but did not acquire its name. Furthermore, as writers of text, we may be susceptible to assuming that the audience has experienced or seen what we are saying in a similar way, much more so than as writers of visual discourse. In my own experience, visual information also aids in memorization and cognition of textual information because I think the semi-tangible visual sensation acts as a finder tab to the information from the accompanying the text. Valid claims rest on each side of the issue and it seems that both approaches should be implemented in some way when reading visual discourse, but visual discourse is rarely alone, it's usually within combinations of image and text, or image, sound, and text, etc.
What questions do we need to ask ourselves about the interplay of multi-modal discourse? What are the possible combinations of modes? How do different modes affect one another?
As for images being viewed as seductive, imprecise, and hazardous, can’t they also be less seductive, more precise, and less hazardous at times? images that come to mind are various photographs of casualties of war. Images of people in peril for instance convey a more realistically developed human factor than saying “soldier ‘x’ has been crippled by a land mine” while describing the look on his face or the environmental conditions surrounding. Showing soldier ‘x’ can be more precise in this case. When I hear soldiers’ names being added to the death toll in
Whether either of the two schools of thought take premise is irrelevant because both ways of thinking have their application. I certainly place more emphasis on how images work much like words do, but I’d even argue the unique capabilities that visual discourse provides. I guess I’m more interested in seeing where the technology takes us and what it has to teach us rather than being too cautionary of the imprecision and seductiveness of the visual mode of discourse. Stepping back from the university to look at culture, what about the value placed on communicating via digital media and how our identities are shaped by it even more so than in the classroom as stated by Giroux (Alexander 38)? This cultural emphasis has moved, and it will likely continue to move towards the center whether the academy is along for the ride or not. Realizing that text is no longer the sole mode of discourse, but one among several that also plays a fundamental role in all, is critical in my view. By embracing this post-modern approach to multi-modal discourse in English studies may just preserve the classical appreciation for the literary and the book rather than obscure it as traditionalists fear. If English programs wish to relate to an evolving culture in order to pass on the skills and appreciation of classical textual discourse, then they must also manifest the value youth place on, as Giroux puts it, “popular spheres” where their identities are shaped “through forms of knowledge and desire that appear absent from what is taught in schools” (Alexander 38). Because the landscape of English studies is changing to a more complex interplay of discourses doesn’t mean several sacrifices must occur and the printed word will be competing for attention; it means the printed word will take on new roles, applications, and the academy will have lots more work to do.
While the cultural value of discourse such as visual continues to increase, it is not only in the interest of English as a discipline, but in the interests of the students to learn how to think critically of these modes of communication. According to Anne Wysocki, “…critical reflection on the rhetorical and cultural contexts of all things visual is the most important lesson for learning visual rhetoric” (Hocks 205). This way, students can be active participants “as designers of their own histories and cultures” (Hocks 205). There appears to be plenty of ground to cover by way of composing digital works in English classrooms, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by way of testing the digital compositions in how “people see and read them” (Hocks 205).
One popular sphere in which students shape their identity outside the classroom is through the multi-modal rhetoric of the internet. Because text is working actively within, and adjacent to various other modes of discourse on the web, is it within English Studies’ domain and therefore its responsibility to teach active thinking as students participate in the influential discourse that takes place there? Hocks suggests that students begin engaging in “audience based analysis” by visiting a favorite website and asking themselves questions about form, related links, and surrounding advertisements (Hocks 206). For example, we might ask, “whose interests does this particular site represent?” or “what are the sites links, buttons, and banners persuading you to do” (Hocks 206)?
Enhancing a student’s ability to read and think critically of discourse via the web can also be approached by exercising composition on the web. Taking on roles from both sides of this type of digital communication helps students become more actively aware of the interaction between composer product and audience process on the web (Williams 22.3). “What are the available means of persuasion in the particular case of the web,” given process-product ambiguity (Williams 22.20)? This question will be approached much differently when we as traditional web readers try on the roles of web writers within the classroom. Rather than a text you read as a whole, the means of persuasion are within the writer’s formulation of “maps” through the information environments they construct. Do web users have an illusion of creating? Was I creating something when I read Choose Your Own Adventure books?
With students gravitating to multi-modal discourse outside of the classroom and developing cultural identity through it, it’s a question of whether English Studies wishes to play a part in guiding them by implementing or expanding digital media studies in English curriculum, rather than what will happen to the literary if English departments embrace multi-modal discourse. It seems unwise to me then, to hold on to the past this way with such rapidly changing technology, and thus culture. Furthermore, it may keep the book and text more relevant with English Studies being on location in domains of cultural identity, emphasis, and communication. According to Greg Ulmer, from the work Teletheory, “People will not stop using print any more than they stopped talking when they became literate. But they will use it differently—will speak and write differently within the frame of electronics” (Stroupe 24).
Doesn't text have a job to clarify the context of this picture?
REFERENCES
Hocks, Mary “Teaching and Learning Visual Rhetoric” Teaching Writing with Computers, Eds. Takoyoshi and Huot. NY: Houghton Mifflin. 2003. 202-215
Williams, Sean D. “Process-Product Ambiguity: Theorizing a Perspective on World Wide Web Argumentation” JAC. 2002. 22.2-22.20
Stroupe, Craig “Visualizing English: Hybrid Literacy of Visual and Verbal Authorship on the Web” Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World, Ed. Carolyn Hande.
Alexander, Jonathan Digital Youth, Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web Cresskill:
11 comments:
Nice post, Russ.
I like how you used the "apple" example to talk about the currency of images compared to text. When teaching an introductory Rhetoric course at Iowa, I opened the class with a summary/analysis assignment of cigarette and alcohol advertisements from the 1940s. The one thing that became clear to the students quite quickly was how difficult it was to "summarize" an image objectively (as opposed to a written text where main points and ideas can be picked out and highlighted at random).
It is possible, after all, to "narrate" an image of an apple: One would have to comment on the weight and shape, the colorization, the ripeness, give the apple a name (Rome, Fuji, Granny Smith), and describe its potential uses (not the kind of apple to use in pies due to its mealy flesh but preferred for sauces, jams, and butters).
After weeks of struggling with descriptions of cork filter tips and font choices, my students seemed to be able to get a good "picture" of their ads in words. In the process of breaking down the advertisement, they analyzed what the marketers were doing (What audience is drawn to a woman at a country club? What social class would appreciate the allusion to a fishing trip with the boys?). There were no fancy computer screens involved. Instead, we used Roland Barthes' "Camera Lucida", learning how to distinguish between the "studium" or the form and general social meaning attached to the photo (the composition, obvious symbolic meaning, etc.) and the "punctum" which is the highly personal reaction to a photograph or image that is directly connected to the viewer (In your last image, for example, I do not see the man in the foreground so much as the car behind him. For some reason, I am drawn to the make and model. I want to know who drove it and why the trunk is open.). Once we moved on to text, their summaries of articles and essays seemed to improve. Would the same thing happen if I began with a website as opposed to a solitary image? Should students be introduced to each element they may encounter bit by bit (just as we introduce them to metaphors, allusions, and define irony for them before unleashing them in a world of Shakespeare and Twain)? What elements, then would we need to teach them how to "read" before jumping head first into website analysis?
One final thought. I can't seem to find the quotation (figures), but one of our authors wrote about text stemming from an oral tradition. When I taught before, I was required to combine speech and composition. As a result, students were expected to always consider an audience while writing. Is this consideration of audience similar to writing for the world wide web? For you history nuts: when did oration and composition become divided on campuses? Since when did speech composition become limited to mass communication?
Good job, Russ. I am glad that you questioned the idea of images being viewed as "seductive, imprecise, hazardous": I responded in much the same way you do on your blogpost. Images can be more precise, accurate, and "truthful" (as opposed to the characterization of them as "seductive," which strikes me as Platonic, suspicious, and seems to show a specific gender relationship in reading verbal as masculine and visual as feminine, subject to the male gaze). Your example of images of war supports your idea that images can be more to the point than words. Images can also, however, through programs like Photoshop, be quite deceptive. Audience, purpose, context.
Which connects to Rebecca's question about consideration of audience when composing--yes, I think WWW writing requires more audience awareness, especially after reading Williams's ideas about how the audience/reader participates in webtext constructions by moving through them in different ways depending on what links are chosen. I agree with Williams that the author paradoxically enables and constrains the composition's possibilities but allows for a greater range of possibilities and multivocality than linear print text. I think this is a good thing.
Interactivity, reciprocity, dialogue in the construction of meaning seems to me to be a "meta" thread connecting these readings. For me, this emphasizes the social constructivist nature of webtexts / images / compositions.
I'm interested in what you and my classmates think about the different definitions of rhetoric posed by Hocks and Williams. Hocks: "Rhetoric is a dynamic system of strategies employed for creating, reacting to, and receiving meaning" (204). Williams: ". . . the domain of rhetoric, of persuasive communication designed to influence the responses and actions of another . . ." (378). Seems to me that one is more open and multivocal and one is more agenda-driven and manipulative, recalling that "images can't be trusted" idea.
You already got nice and good, so how about neat? Neat contribution, R.
Your orange question about putting the sunny meadow in words resulted in me having one of those micro-pseudo-crises I as a [pseudo-]writer have when mulling the improbability of representation.
Subject 2, I've often thought that in 200 years when scholars are writing about this time period, they are going to see choose-your-own-adventures (cleverly and tenure-attainingly) as pre-cursors to web writing. And your question leads to my impressions of Stroupe and Williams. I want to look at how Stroupe uses Elbow and at Williams' well-taken, though utterly-redundant, point that web writers manipulate their readers with associative links.
Let me quote the Elbow: “Encourage conflicts or contradictions in your thinking. We are usually taught to avoid them; and we cooperate in this teaching because it is confusing or frustrating to hold two conflicting ideas at the same time. It feels like a dead end or a trap but really it is the most fruitful situation to be in. Unless you can get yourself into a contradiction, you may be stuck with no power to have any thoughts other than the ones you are already thinking” (21).
What would Elbow think of Williams' argument that I summarize here?: “Neighborhoods and individual links present authors with strategies to build an interactive webtext that allows users to formulate their own text as they seek to order the dissonance of competing representations but that nonetheless allows authors to guide the users' constructive process by encoding meaning in structural elements” (second to last page).
Let me slow down for a second, because that was a lot of quoting. Ok. So Elbow's all about contradiction. And Williams sees websites as being able to include “the multiplicity of positions” on any particular issue. If websites were neutral, then, they might be a way to artificially produce that constructive, contradictory thinking Elbow wants. But Williams wants us to be aware that, say, Matt Drudge, has a stake in the way he's linking. The website, then, becomes a place where we think we're getting all the information because the extensive choice fools us into believing that both sides are represented.
Insidious!
And yet, don't open source sites counteract that problem? Williams writes, “Interactivity is, finally, a rhetorical feature that authors can manipulate in order to increase the persuasiveness of their documents, since the author controls the degree, the opportunities, and the forms of interactivity” (381). With pervasive “comments section”s on websites, this control seems to be changing. But it is true that the authors of websites have still been able to convince me that user-based content is not completely valid. Here's an article with extensive commenting http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/george-bush-the-comeback-kid/?scp=1&sq=Stanley%20Fish%20Bush&st=cse. I can only take so many, and, since my brother is paid to edit user-comments on a website, I certainly can't trust that I'm seeing a cross-section of opinion.
How do we find the contradictions Elbow wants us to revel in when websites are seeming to forward differing opinions while instead masking those opinions with their particular “neighborhoods” of linking?
This was meant to be a footnote to the Elbow quotation. Anyone know how to footnote in this thing?:
That reminds me of James Baldwin's line about contradiction: “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition (“Notes of a Native Son”). And Fitzgerald's too: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” (“The Crack-Up”).
Wow, great job Russ. Your post really helped bring the readings together for me. Your visual aids were also very interesting. While I try to piece together some intelligent thoughts for tomorrow’s class, here are my random thoughts at this moment:
Random thought #1 - Like Dave, your discussion has me thinking of the popularity of choose-your-own-adventure books in the early 1990’s. Perhaps these books were a pre-cursor to web writing (or the new essay). So, did we really get to choose our own adventure? Were we merely duped into believing that we were in control? Just kidding
Random thought #2 – Okay, on a more serious note …. I am very interested in the Williams article. I agree with Williams in regard to his suggestion that argumentation’s connection to rhetoric is always difficult to pin down. More so than Plato, I tend to side with Gorgias on this topic. I am also interested in his suggestion that the interactivity of web-based arguments have the ability to manipulate the reader/viewer because the author holds the power to control the “degree, the opportunities, and the forms of interactivity.”
Random thought #3 – Like Mel, I am also interested in the different definitions of rhetoric posed by Williams and Hocks. Do others think that Hocks is suggesting that meaning-making/truth-finding is the true purpose behind rhetoric? In my opinion, Williams seems to be suggesting that rhetoric inherently persuasion-driven. So – I guess my answer is YES, one definition does seem to be more open than the other. However, I do have a problem with those who consider the term rhetoric to define nothing more than agenda-driven/manipulative trickery.
I loved the questions posed throughout this post. I have a page of notes that I would like to cover, but will limit myself to what I think are the highlights of the post (and thus, discount my notes on the readings).
The most important question, I think, you ask last in standard text, no color, no different font size, no pizazz. Russ writes, "Doesn't text have a job to clarify the context of this picture?"
This question stopped me cold. I know the context of that picture, which I'm sure I learned through text. But what would I have thought if I did not have that context? How does my perception of that image change without text? Why does it have to be "text" that gives me context?
All interesting questions. Nevertheless, what value do we place on context? If I saw a picture of Hitler after he blew his brains out, but didn't realize it was Hitler until someone told me, would my sadness at the loss of one life change?
I'm reminded of a Star Trek episode with a mayor of some planet is considered a mass murderer because he ordered thousands of people to death. He did this because the area was out of food and he had to make a choice. Unknown to him, however, food was on a spaceship nearby. He was labeled "the executioner" for his actions.
According to the episode (which I am not citing because of time issues), the outcome could have gone both ways: bad, like it did; or good, he would have been hailed as a savior for the planet by saving so many lives.
Which would you have done?
Ahhh....I see our critical nature evades us with such a personal and perhaps profound question confronts us.
The problem with textual context is that it presupposes the meaning is clear. I argue it is not. Think of taking a GRE test, and how more often than not, those rascals put in a secondary meaning to a word that is far-less common, maybe rarely used.
Again, we are left to wonder.
Supplying text (as context) presents its own problems as does any medium we use to explain context: interpretation.
Interpretation of any sign or signal (I might suggest Derrida and deconstruction here) muddies the water with what we could assume is unlimited interpretations.
I find myself conflicted over several of the issues I've raised, which is another testimony to the problematic nature of this contextual discussion.
I want to suggest some other comments as closing (but hopefully still have discussion of my main points above). I am (dis)pleased with the idea of multimedia adapting classical texts. I am sad but also happy. Yes, we need new scholars in these areas, but at what cost? Are we duping them into "our" scholarship? Why can't the text stand by itself, dare say, defend itself? Think of a book you love that was made into a movie. Did the movie "ruin" the book? Far too often, I've heard that it has.
Namaste.
Good post, Russ.
I find it intriguing that you chose to argue against the conservative position exemplified by Postman's work (ref. in both Alexander and Stroupe). In our department it still needs arguing, while in many places and contexts (the journal, Kairos, e.g.), it does not.
You argue in Stroupe's (and Kress's)spirit for a refiguring of the relationship between verbal and visual rhetoric in English studies. I am thinking about how Stroupe critiqued Landow's Victorian web as a conservative approach to the visual where it is subordinate to a verbal argument and not expected to "talk back." This struck me as important. Why else would Stroupe spend all that time and space quoting and applying Bakhtin's dialogism to the subject?
The web texts that Stroupe privileges are the ones that do enforce "elaborationism," another word for reading and texts that critically engage each other.
Ironically, for me, in his discussion of Ulmer's "Metaphoric Rocks," Stroupe demonstrates the inadequacy of words in describing and hence analyzing web texts that are not easily available to us. We can't experience the authorial linkage choices Williams talks about and we have to more or less take Stroupe at his word about the interplay of discourses and images in Ulmer's piece.
That is, Bakhtin's "contrasting intentions" seem to be there, but I can't feel them. Stroupe writes that "Ulmer's words and images are able to speak to one another because neither directly illustrates the other" (28). I am wondering:
Does this mean that direct illustration of images and words fails, therefore, to enact dialogue between them? Is a certain pomo indirection and irony required?
What if you had "re-purposed" the famous photo of the self-immolating Vietnamese monk, say, in the context of the current war in Irag?
Finally, many of these readings seem to be testing the dichotomies that define English studies (a long list), mainly rhetoric/poetic.
How successfully do you all think they are at dismantling these?
Any comments on the Whale Hunt piece?
Albert
RE: The Whale Hunt
What makes the Whale Hunt a unique experience? What parts did you have to fill in with your imagination? What does the Whale Hunt communicate? How does the text develop the message of the images? If you had seen the Whale Hunt in traditional video format (without audio), how would the experience differ? How would it differ if there was an audio stream present?
If interested, the title of that episode is "Conscience of the King" from the Original Series of Star Trek.
I also enjoy the discussion of the apple image, as well as the question following the last image. I wonder what can language do that an image cannot in this sense. What can I do in writing about an apple that taking a picture of it cannot convey?
It also took me a while to see the burning man in the photo, Rebecca.
Going along with Melanie and with my above comment, I also feel that words can be just as imprecise and dangerous (if not more so) as images.
Mel also wrote: "Hocks: "Rhetoric is a dynamic system of strategies employed for creating, reacting to, and receiving meaning" (204). Williams: ". . . the domain of rhetoric, of persuasive communication designed to influence the responses and actions of another . . ." (378). Seems to me that one is more open and multivocal and one is more agenda-driven and manipulative, recalling that "images can't be trusted" idea."
I certainly prefer the first definition, but cannot ignore the role of persuasion to rhetoric as Williams emphasizes.
Rock, this is an awesome question: "if I saw a picture of Hitler after he blew his brains out, but didn't realize it was Hitler until someone told me, would my sadness at the loss of one life change? " I think I have to answer yes, but does that make me horrible? Context does matter, and it seems easier to convey context through text, though a series of visuals might also convey context (a la the Whale Hunt). An individual paragraph of description without a larger context may also be misleading or incomplete.
Russ, great job on your post, very thought-provoking. Sorry to reply so late, but had trouble getting on internet at home.
Sorry, also, for posting so late!
All of this talk about visual discourse makes me think about the 153 I am currently teaching on visual rhetoric. Something that I have been struggling with is how to convey the idea of the gaze. I remember being introduced to the idea as an undergrad and I think it took me weeks to finally grasp the concept. My students cannot seem to understand the difference between looking and gazing and particularly the power structures and identity politics that underlie the concept of the gaze. Today, we looked at images of 9/11 and of the war in Iraq. Doing a google image search for 9/11 results in pics of buildings and a search for the war in Iraq results in pics of mangled bodies. While my students found this interesting, they had no idea why the images of 9/11, for the most part, are dehumanized. Looking at Hocks’ article again, perhaps trying her interactive digital media critique of websites would help my students become “sensitive to how the visual, verbal, and interactive elements of web sites are rhetorical—that they aim toward cultural values used to persuade and capture the attention of audiences” (206-7). Perhaps the issue with my students is that they ignore the producer of visual rhetoric and do not recognize that images are marketed to them.
To answer one of Russ’ questions, I think that web users do have an illusion of creating. As we discussed in class, when we surf the net it seems like we are making choices when we click on some links but not others; however, we perhaps do not take into consideration the design choices that were made to influence our choice. Even though we all had the option to read the statement on the whale hunt web page, we all just started hunting for whales. As Williams writes, “the author’s product determines the user’s process.”
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