Photo by Stephane MARGERIN on Unsplash

Overview

The analysis of digital rhetoric would mean nothing without considering factors influenced by visual rhetoric, and to understand how visual rhetoric functions, it is essential to explore the origins of visual communication and its developmental growth across centuries and mediums. Josef Müller-Brockmann’s A History of Visual Communication (1971) clearly states that visual communication goes beyond body gestures and writing, and needs to express emotion, feelings, ideas, information, and thoughts with a combination of words and pictures, art, typography, photography, symbols, movies and/ or sounds (Müller-Brockmann, page 1). This means that visual communication is a flexible method to persuade an audience in seconds due to the speed at which an individual can see the visual text, process its content, and generate an emotional reaction. In his book, Müller-Brockmann goes deep into ten key moments that define what visual communication is now. From cave paintings (15,000 – 10,000 BC), The Alphabet (2,000 BC), photography and printing (the Industrial Revolution), to computers (early 21st century – present). Though Müller-Brockmann does not scrutinize the technicalities of visual communications from a rhetorical perspective, he shows the path visual communication had to endure for visual rhetoric to be a subject of study.

As a result, scholars have been fascinated with the abilities visual rhetoric grants a rhetor in modern physical and digital spaces. Douglas Eyman looks to concretize a definition for  “Visual Rhetoric” § (49–51) in his book “Defining and Locating Digital Rhetoric,” while surveying different perspectives and analogies. Though no concrete definition is given, Eyman stipulates that visual rhetoric is essential and all-around digital rhetoric, and for that reason, authors need to use it to their favor efficiently and effectively. Linda Scott (1994) contrastively argues “that images are not merely analogues to visual perception but symbolic artifacts constructed from the conventions of a particular culture,” offering a new humanistic perspective that assumes a visual texts’ persuasiveness is directly related to the audience’s idiosyncrasy. The more niche elements that identify a particular social group, the more the audience is in tune with the message of the visual text.

The semantics of visual rhetoric

Despite experts struggling to find a compact delineation of visual rhetoric, they have established certain aspects of its definition. Knowing that rhetoric is supposed to convey meaning through a text to persuade the audience, it is easy to assume that visual rhetoric should follow the same guidelines but with images. However, visual rhetoric not only conveys meaning and persuades the audience but also looks to help make a text or presentation more efficient. It is for this that, more likely than not, a marketing presentation that studies a product’s target audience’s consumerism behavioral pattern will be accompanied by pie charts and graphs to guide the inventors’ information perception through the right track. Sharing the information on its own will provide the necessary data to be presented, but it puts the investors’ interpretation of the message at risk. In this same way, this is why professors commonly use slide presentations to accompany their lectures to guide students through the focal points of the lesson, allowing them to follow the stream of information with ease and structure.

Another common example of visual rhetoric is assembling manuals, as seen when IKEA furniture or a box of Legos is purchased. Building an intricate figure of the Statue of Liberty on Legos or assembling a closet would be nearly impossible without the visual representations shown in the manuals. Even if the manual authors went into specific details to describe the parts needed, where to place them, and how to connect them, the users (audience) would have a hard time reading the text and aligning to the descriptions given in the manual. For this, visual representations of the pieces and how to connect them tremendously support the audience’s needs for a more efficient and effective assembling process.

More basic or day-to-day representations of visual rhetoric include hand gestures, traffic signs, and police lights and tape. It is sometimes difficult to see these as persuading rhetoric, yet while paying close attention to how these pan out, it’s seen how a hand gesture, maybe a wave, persuades the audience, or the person being waved at, a friendly interaction, and maybe a wave back in response. Traffic signs persuade drivers to drive in a certain way at a particular point in the road, to stop at a corner with a STOP sign, to drive at a certain speed depending on the limit speed signs, or to be attentive to road conditions or constructions. On the other hand, police car lights persuade drivers to move to the side and stop driving completely. Police tape persuades civilians not to walk through the taped area since it’s part of a police investigation.

Visual rhetoric as we Know it

Pie charts and graphs, though, only denote data. Still, Roland Barthe (1977) “asserts that images function both connotatively and denotatively and that the connotative signifiers form a rhetoric that serves as the signifying aspect of ideology” (Eyman, page 49). This means that the message conveyed by an image it’s mostly determined by the audience’s literacy on that particular image. Therefore, authors and designers need to clearly understand who their audience is, or else the intended message will be lost in the abyss of the audience’s perception. It is for this that Barthe emphasizes the importance of having an outstanding balance between connotation and denotation so the “connotative powers do not exert unpredictable effects” (Eyman, page 50) on the audience.

When analyzing a collage made from magazine scraps from the lens of visual rhetoric and Barthe’s definition, connotative powers can exert unpredictable effects if the audience doesn’t possess literacy on the collage itself or the meaning behind it. For this, rhetors who choose to express ideas through a collage must define their audience very well so the message doesn’t get lost in the audience’s perception. The University of Pittsburgh’s website on Audience Analysis says that “communicators should find out what their audience already knows about the topic.” They further explain that a communicator, or a rhetor, can never overestimate or underestimate the audience’s knowledge of a topic. “If a speaker launches into a technical discussion of genetic engineering but the listeners are not familiar with basic genetics, they will be unable to follow your speech and quickly lose interest. On the other hand, drastically underestimating the audience’s knowledge may result in a speech that sounds condescending.”

Not completing thorough research on a desired audience’s knowledge of the topic of discussion will not only be potentially damaging to the reception of the visual piece but also a waste of time, effort, money and resources if the project was being funded. This is without considering other possible influencing factors when the rhetor is representing a brand, whether that is themselves or a higher corporation, such as lost opportunities, negative customer/audience experience, and damage to the brand.

Digital Visual Rhetoric

We can apply it to the digital realm by grasping how visual rhetoric behaves generally. Mary Hocks connects visual and digital rhetoric, suggesting that “modern information technologies construct meaning as simultaneously verbal, visual, and interactive hybrids. Digital rhetoric simply assumes the use of visual rhetoric as well as other modalities.” On the other hand, it could be argued that digital rhetoric in modern society would be nothing without visual rhetoric. This strong belief comes from the heavily visually dominated culture that protagonizes the late 21st-century content consumption and the need for visual communication and elements to assist digital users.

The average individual has already internalized many of the techniques involved with visual communication and is unaware of the difference these make. Fonts, sizes, paragraphs, and even emojis represent different types of visual rhetoric that persuade the audience into a specific understanding. These are so elementary and so commonly used that not much attention is paid to their meanings anymore. Yet, these help us understand by separating titles from the text’s body, allowing us to follow the narration easily by giving us paragraph breaks, making it look “pretty” and eye-soothing, while also conveying emotions through emoticons.

Platforms

Visual rhetoric is all-around digital rhetoric, and in modern digital communities, certain platforms rely heavily on visual rhetoric, like TikTok and Instagram. These platforms have a continuous and never-ending display of images and videos arranged by a series of algorithmic setups to ultimately persuade the audience to consume more content, regardless of the page within the platform, as long as it is within it. Still, every page looks the same, so users keep scrolling and consuming their content. Additionally, these platforms contain special commands to increase users’ engagement and interactivity, consequently leading to more consumerism. Some of these commands are the “like” buttons and repostings. Though considering the like button as visual rhetoric may seem far-fetched, this button is what gives users the dopamine to keep on using the platform; modern society’s addiction to the like button has been categorized as toxic, and yet it remains the primary goal of using social media, receiving likes. Other platforms, like online shopping websites, also contain visual rhetoric elements in the form of buttons to increase engagement and interactivity. The checkout buttons on these platforms are big, bright, and normally multiply displayed on one page, perpetually trying to convince the user to complete the order finally.

Audience on Platform Analysis

Nonetheless, the fact that these types of buttons are generalized and all across different digital platforms does not signify that visual rhetoric is universal since more complex forms of visual rhetoric, like images, videos, graphs, and more, require the audience to have a minimal level of understanding of the topic a text exploits. As a result, authors must have a clear perception of their audience and the publishing platform. This will be crucial in how the audience consumes, analyzes, and interprets a text. For this, Caryn Talty, in her Teaching a Visual Rhetoric article, said, “The control is not in the writer’s words, but with the reader’s choices. This altered attitude about the roles we must play in order to communicate, the considerations we must have about the written and visual word, and the importance of disseminating information in a reader-friendly manner makes us better writers.” By this means, the author will also need to evaluate when visual rhetoric is necessary for their text, and to determine its necessity; the author must examine and set a clear delineation of their audiences, as well as how that audience behaves on different platforms, and what tools and requirements does a platform have for a post to be effective.