Visual Communication Theory and Research

A Mass Communication Perspective

S. Fahmy, M. Bock, W. Wanta

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349472567
  9781137362148
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137362155
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In today's multimedia environment, visuals are essential and expected parts of storytelling. However, the visual communication research field is fragmented into several sub-areas, making study difficult. Fahmy, Bock, and Wanta note trends and discuss the challenges of conducting analysis of images across print, broadcast, and online media.

Chapter 1

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Linking Theory to Visual Communication

Our lives are filled with visual information. Some visuals are obvious—such as a Calvin Klein magazine advertisement, where the visual dominates our senses. Other visuals are so common that we take them for granted—the octagonal shape and red background of a stop sign, for example, where the shape communicates importance and the red color communicates danger. Indeed, even printed text can be considered visual: we visually process the shapes of letters collectively to understand a textual message.

While visuals constantly bombard us, the study of visuals employed in mass communication has grown in importance through the years. Visual Communication Quarterly, a journal published through the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication (AEJMC) that was created in 1992, is now a popular and well-respected publication. AEJMC and the International Communication Association both have divisions devoted to visual communication. Many universities have now developed visual communication literacy courses. Photojournalism and Design academic tracks are common at universities around the world.

Several factors have led to the expansion of visual communication research.

The emergence of new technologies has made visual information more accessible than some traditional media such as newspapers and radio. Internet content is highly visual.

The development of complex software such as Photoshop and InDesign has created new areas of research dealing with both the use and the effects of software.

The visual communication field, long the purview of individuals with Masters of Fine Arts degrees, now has several scholars with PhDs conducting research.

The influx of researchers with PhDs has increased both the quantity and quality of visual communication research. While much research continues to be descriptive, many new scholars are conducting studies involving rigorous research methods.

Conducting Research in Visual Communication

The keys to successful visual communication research lie in two broad areas: A rigorous methodology and a compelling theoretical framework. Subsequent chapters will detail research methods utilized in visual communication. Briefly, social science methods of survey, content analysis and experiments have been used. Qualitative methods, such as historical and critical/cultural analyses, have also been employed.

Theoretically, visual communication researchers have borrowed many of the traditional theories of mass communication, including the theoretical frameworks given below.

Framing

An obvious theoretical framework for visual communication is framing, which is actually based on the idea of a photograph. When photographers take pictures, they cannot capture the entire world in the frame of the photograph. Photographers must select only part of the real work to appear within the photo frame, while eliminating everything else. Thus, the idea of framing looks at the selection of what content is included in the photograph, why a photographer chose this content over other content, and what effect the content has on views of the content.

Framing research goes back decades. Gitlin (1980), for instance, examined how the news media framed protests during the Vietnam War. He argues that the news media framed the protesters as radical students, ignoring the antiwar messages espoused by the protesters. This coverage trivialized the reasons behind the protest.

Several researchers have utilized the notion of framing in their studies. Goffman (1974) referred to “frame analysis,” defined as how individuals organize events in everyday life.

Agenda Setting

Agenda-setting research traces its beginnings to Walter Lippmann (1922) whose first chapter was titled “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads.” The “pictures” in this case involved issues covered in the news. The news media select which stories to run and which to ignore. The issues covered in the news media have a strong impact on the public, in which the public learns which issues are important from the amount of coverage the issues receive. McCombs and Shaw (1972) found a strong correlation between the media agenda (issues receiving extensive coverage) and the public agenda (issues that individuals believed were important).

Coleman and Banning (2006) examined attributes linked to political candidates in the 2000 presidential campaign based on visual framing. Their content analysis found that television news coverage depicted the nonverbal behavior of Al Gore more positively than the nonverbal behavior of George Bush.

Fahmy, Cho, Wanta, and Song (2006) examined how emotional responses to the 9/11 attacks would influence individuals’ visual recall of 9/11 images. Their study found that if individuals reacted to the attacks with sorrow or shock, they stored several images in their long-term memory, especially the emotional images of people jumping from buildings and depictions of dead bodies.

Wanta (1988) conducted an experiment testing the influence of photographs on individuals’ perceptions of the importance of issues. He found that large photographs attracted readers to accompanying stories, increasing the salience of issues in the stories.

Cultivation

The origins of cultivation research can be traced to George Gerbner and colleagues and their research involving the effects of television violence (see, for example, Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, and Signorielli, 1980). Gerbner argued that individuals who watched a lot of television eventually believed that the content of television is like the real world. Since television routinely showed a great deal of violence, Gerbner believed that the violent content on television would make individuals believe that the world was a scary place. In other words, television cultivated people’s view of the world in such a way that individuals who watched a lot of television (and thus a lot of violence) were more likely to think the world was violent. Viewing depictions of violence led people to believe violence was prevalent in society.

While cultivation research has been roundly criticized (see Hirsch, 1980), researchers have continued to conduct studies testing its validity. Levine and Smolak (1996) argue that television and fashion magazines contain powerful visual images that can lead to eating disorders.

Bissell (2006) examined whether media literacy programs could moderate the potential negative influences leading to eating disorders. She found media literacy programs did not reduce the desire of participants to look like the thin models seen in the media.

Semiotics

As with framing analysis, semiotics is ideally suited for research in visual communication. Indeed, semiotics is defined by visual information. As Moriarty (2002) notes, semiotics is the study of signs as conveyed through codes. “Meaning is derived only to the degree that the receiver of the message understands the code” (p. 21).

Codes, of course, can be information contained in visuals.

Signs have been classified as being iconic, indexical, and symbolic (Peirce, 1931–1935). An iconic sign is based on resemblance, such as a photograph of a dog. The dog in the photograph is perceived as a dog because it resembles a dog. An indexic sign is based on some actual proximal or physical contact with a referent, such as a wind sock that tells wind speed and direction. A symbolic sign implies a referent through convention; its meaning is arbitrary and based upon agreement or habit, such as the American flag. Visual communication often uses all three categories of signs.

Much of the research dealing with visual semiotics is interpretive. Harrison (2003), for example, laid out a framework for studying visual social semiotics, or how photographs make meaning.

Kruk (2008) examined visual semiotics employed by the Soviets. Under Stalin, visual signs in art, monuments, and architecture portrayed an idealized vision of the future of Communism. Sculptures and paintings were displayed throughout the Soviet Union. Under Lenin, monuments “perpetuated the neoplatonic artistic tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church, which meant there was no clear distinction between the iconic sign and its referent” (p. 27).

Overall

The model of communication study by Harold Lasswell (1948) is the categorizing method employed in this book. Lasswell wrote that the study of communication involves “Who, Says What, To Whom, In Which Channel, With What Effect?”

Chapter 2

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History

To cover the history of visual communication since its inception would require multiple books, since its story is nearly as long as the story of humanity itself. The story of mechanized visual communication, which begins in the early stages of industrialization, is a bit more manageable subject, spanning centuries rather than millennia, though that too constitutes considerable territory. Histories of mechanized visual communication have tended to be organized around technology and biographies, with approaches ranging from the traditional chronology to cultural criticism.

The Reproducible Image

A useful starting point for understanding the evolution of visual communication comes from a book not about photography but about the printing press. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s (1979) two-volume analysis of the early days of mechanical reproduction provides helpful context for the study of the image, with detailed, carefully cited accounts of how illustrations were added to early books, the development of typography, and the carelessness with which images were printed, reprinted and incorporated into printed works:

Printed illustrations drew upon the talents of goldsmiths, woodcarvers and armorers. Such workers did not necessarily have their hands on the pages of texts at all; nor were they always informed about the destination of their products. A middleman—the printer publisher—frequently intervened. The frugal custom . . . of re-using a small assortment of blocks and plates to illustrate a wide variety of textual passages also helped to set picture and words at odds with each other. (p. 259)

The tension between word and image pre-dates the focus of Eisenstein’s work, of course, and might be better traced to the writings of Plato and his emphasis on the life of mind and spirit over matter. This philosophical emphasis on thought (and therefore words) over earthly existence (and its tangible images) still courses through debates about the nature of the image in society.

It was Walter Benjamin (1936), however, who threw the gauntlet down in an intellectual confrontation with photography. His famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” was prescient in its description of the way a film is not contemplated by the audience but instead subsumes it and the way the boundaries between writers and readers was about to erode. He wrote that “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.” Benjamin saw danger in these blurred lines, as do many news critics in today’s age of the YouTube citizen journalism. Benjamin’s main concern was with a loss of “aura” for unique works of art in the age of photography and film. This loss of art’s unique, ritualistic function in culture, he argued, allows it to essentially be hijacked by politics. Given the popularity of so-called reality TV, the appropriation of images for propaganda on the web, and the ubiquity of the iPhone lunch photo, Benjamin’s critique was frightening for its clairvoyance.

In Picture Theory (1994), cultural scholar W. J. T. Mitchell, whose prediction that the twenty-first century would represent a cultural turn from the linguistic to the pictorial, suggested that “the tensions between visual and verbal representations are inseparable from the struggles in cultural politics and political culture” (p. 3). That is, the tensions between word and image echo other dialectics, such as those between positivism and postmodernism; functionalism and Marxism; patriarchy and feminism. Mitchell’s observation is useful for thinking not only about images, given that they often operate via emotional or subconscious processing, but also with the practice of photography itself—artistic, body-centered, and material. The word-image dialectic tends to be hierarchal. Western modernity rests on rationalism, valuing thinking over feeling; intellectual work is valued over the physical; Christian tradition glorifies the triumph of spirit over earthly life.

These themes often run through histories of images and their creators, through narratives of professional legitimation, alarmist accounts of image-encroachment on cultural landscape, or analyses of image epistemology. Other historic approaches are largely biographical (though these too are often legitimation narratives) or technological, focusing on the evolution of equipment or technique as a means of scientific investigation.

Cameras and Chemicals

One of the earliest published histories of photography (Joy, 1876) uses the technological approach. Published in Leslie’s Popular Monthly, a publication made popular in part for its use of images, Joy’s article summarizes the various discoveries that contributed to photography’s development. Joy traced the effort to use light-sensitive chemicals back to 1802, by Sir Humphrey Davy, explained the role of Nicéphore Niépce, and detailed the introduction of a developing agent by Fox Talbot and Daguerre’s use of mercury vapor as a means of bringing out images on a silver plate.

A more contemporary technological history focuses on Daguerre’s process as it developed in the United States (Newhall, 1968). Rich with compelling reproductions of daguerreotypes, Newhall details the way the Frenchman’s process took Americans by storm. For much of the second half of the 1800s, Daguerre’s process dominated the popular imagination. A person interested in photography could buy a kit and set up a studio as a hobby or business. As Americans pushed westward, new towns were often visited by portrait photographers. So popular was the daguerreotype process that the word “photography” was not part of popular lexicon. As Newhall explains, that term was reserved for the English wet-plate collodion process. Even though Fox Talbot’s system had the advantage of making multiple prints possible, the daguerreotype was more popular. Its unique images—usually portraits—were so crisp, deep, and lifelike that even today they seem to some observers to be almost holographic. Newhall writes that the wet-plate system was not a serious competitor to daguerreotypes until glass-based ambrotypes were invented (Newhall, 1968). In his historic study of the business and its creative product,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Linking Theory to Visual Communication
• 2   History
• 3   Who: Research on the Sources of Visual Communication
• 4   Says What: Research on the Content in Visual Communication
• 5   To Whom: Research on the Audiences in Visual Communication
• 6   In Which Channel: Research on Media Used in Visual Communication
• 7   With What Effect I: Research on Cognitive Effects of Visual Communication
• 8   With What Effect II: Research on Attitudinal Effects of Visual Communication
• 9   With What Effect III: Research on Behavioral Effects of Visual Communication
• 10   Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index