Media Literacy & Rhetorical Analysis

1. Media Literacy & Rhetorical Analysis Traditional categories: • Audience • Context • Purpose • Genre • Rhetorical strategies • Arrangement, style, delivery • Claim, warrant, evidence, rebuttal • ethos, pathos, logos • Assumptions, implications, counterexamples • Metaphor and tropes • Etc.

2. Audience • Is there an “ideal” audience? An “implied” audience? • How do images position the audience? • What role/position do they invite us to adopt? • How do they create particular “gazes,” spaces for identification, particular points of view? Are we invited to be spectator, voyeur, participant? • We can ask: what gender, race, class etc. does an image invite the audience to identify with?

3. Point of view (and other rhetorical strategies) This can include such elements as: • Framing • Distance from the subject (is the image a close-up, medium shot or long shot, and how is this used to suggest importance, relationships, etc?) • Point of view (“Eyes the prize”; how does the author position herself?) A low angle shot tends to make the subject look powerful, whereas a high angle shot can reduce the size/importance of the subject • Foregrounding/backgrounding • Selection • Use of visual tropes • Arrangement of elements • Juxtaposition of images – what relationships are inferred?

4. The gaze • In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Laura Mulvey argues for the concept of a “male gaze.” The audience is “required” to see the action and characters of a text through the perspective of a heterosexual man; events which occur to women are presented largely in the context of a man's reaction to these events. Mulvey argues that the male gaze denies women agency, relegating them to the status of objects. The female viewer experiences the text secondarily, by identification with the male. • Mulvey’s work has been highly influential, although it has also been criticized and reworked significantly, particularly from scholars doing audience analysis, reception studies and anthropological work.

7. What do you notice about these movie posters from the 1950s?

10. HORROR movie posters in the 1950s regularly focus on a scene of attack, with a woman in peril. The posters put the viewers in the position where they are asked to take action and to imagine themselves doing something to save the woman. The main scene in each poster spills over the edge of the poster, making it seem as if we, the audience, are there in the frame – we are incited to act. For example, in the creature from black lagoon poster, the rescuers are far away – “we” are closer. Conversely, women always are always victims and powerless. If they have any power, this is demonized.

11. Fear of a visual planet? • Concern about centrality of the visual (Postman, “peekaboo world” infantilizes and confuses; television and the “dumbing down” of America) • Argument by association – sidesteps reasoning but has impact in our frantic, fragmented, image filled world? (CfTufte’s famous “The cognitive style of powerpoint”) • Echoes concerns about oral culture, which also tends to work by association and juxtaposition • Digital media is shifting dramatically to the visual. Do we need a new media literacy? • Do we need to re-imagine composition so that visual more important?

12. When ads used a lot of logos

13. Today’s ads often use different appeals

14. ARGUMENT BY ASSOCIATION • With the predominance of the visual, do we move to the era of “persuasion by association,” or “one of these things is a bit like the other one”? • PERHAPS works by enthymeme, inference, implication, or abduction?

15. Visual Argument • Argument by association (analogy?)

16. Images & Cultural/Rhetorical Analysis • What information do images provide us about culture? • How can we use images to engage in rhetorical and cultural analysis?

17. Media studies & effects • Example: Gerbner’s “Cultivation theory” attempts to understand how "heavy exposure to cultural imagery will shape a viewer's concept of reality“ • Gerbner’s work points to large scale patterns in movies, advertisements, television and other forms of popular entertainment.

18. 1. Patterns • Masculine ideals in the 1980s

19. Shifting ideals for men Masculine ideals in the 2000s

20. Ken: 1950 vs 1988

21. Changing beauty standards • In 1957, Miss America was 5'7" and weighed 150 pounds. • In 2002 Miss America was: • 5'9'' • 117 pounds

23. Reading the (visual) patterns • Goffman: the positioning of bodies suggests social roles for the genders. Aperson's behavior and appearance can be expressive and symbolic, communicating to observers their social identity, their inner states and feelings, their intentions and expectations, and the nature of their relationships with others.  • Goffman observes that in every culture symbolic codes are developed  which express idealized social identities and relationships. Images of women and men together in the media often draw on these codes.

24. Women are pictured more often than men in what Goffman calls the "recumbent position... one from which physical defense of oneself can least well be initiated and therefore one which renders one very dependent on the benign-ness of the surround...Floors also are associated with the less clean, less pure, less exalted parts of a room-for example, the place to keep dogs" (p. 41)

25. What patterns can you identify?

26. RECLINING NUDES 1509 - 1997 (top left) Giorgione, (top right) Titian, (above) Goya, (left) film still, Titanic.

27. Most nudes depicted in art are female. A fairly small number of nudes are male. What are some of the differences in the way male and female nudity is represented?

29. What patterns can you identify?

30. Goffman argues that women are often posed bending their heads or bodies at an angle, or "cant." The effect of cant, he says, is that the "level of the head is lowered relative to that of others, including, indirectly, the viewer of the picture. The resulting configurations can be read as an acceptance of subordination, an expression of integration, submissiveness, and appeasement." (p. 46)

31. What do gesture & bodily arrangement communicate?

33. Reversing roles • Why does it strike us as odd, bizarre or humorous when roles are reversed? • What does this tell us about the cultural construction of gender – of the qualities are associated with images of masculinity and femininity and the accepted boundaries between them?

41. According to Kilbourne, women are more often shown “dismembered” (just parts of their bodies shown), associated with products, shown as smaller than a man, engaged in various forms of ritualized subordination, prostrate or recumbent, bent or leaning back, infantilized (with finger coyly in their mouth, standing pigeon-toed, wearing little girl clothes, sucking on lollipops, etc.), looking dreamy and introverted, overcome with emotions, or symbolically silenced with hand over the mouth.

42. The Cultural indicators project(Gerbner & cultivation theory) • Gerbner dean of communications at the Annenberg School of Communications • Cultivation theory attempts to understand how "heavy exposure to cultural imagery will shape a viewer's concept of reality“ • Gerbner’s work points to large scale patterns in movies, advertisements, television and other forms of popular entertainment.

43. Denouncing the Celluloid Ceiling See “Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women in the Top 250 Films of 2004” Martha M. Lauzen, School of Communication, San Diego State University

47. Image search – companies use it to figure out brand use and trends. We need tools that let us be informed citizens – more than just consumers. http://www.triplepundit.com/2014/10/brands-using-selfie-marketing/ • You can analyze patterns more easily with new media.

48. Photo-sharing sites are scanned to find brands, target ads, identify trends and marketing opportunities* • If you use Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest etc. and images are shared publicly, then digital marketing companies will search, scan, store and repurpose them in their work for big-brand advertisers. Smile! Marketing Firms Are Mining Your Selfies. http://online.wsj.com/articles/smile-marketing-firms-are-mining-your-selfies-1412882222

49. Research is emerging that uses/revises media literacy work and applies to the digital landscape. • Many new opportunities for research, many new forms of data, and many new research questions. • “Gamergate” points to some of the potential (and risks).