viz.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Tiny Subversions

When you live in Texas, you get used to people asking you to verify certain popular stereotypes: cowboy boots, country music, ten-gallon hats, and conservative politics. And—a belief in the capital punishment.

Image Source: Clothed Much

Fashion blogs have proliferated the internet since its inception; the rhetoric of the genre is as multifaceted as its participants, most of whom are women.  Daily fashion blogging, in which the blogger takes regular photos of the outfit she assembles each morning, is a popular iteration of the genre.  Obviously much of the blogger’s value systems is exhibited through the personal ethos she cultivates on these blogs; the way the blogger frames the narrative of the outfit in terms of its relationship to her day-to-day activities reveals much about these value systems, as well.  An interesting subculture has received a substantial amount of attention in the fashion blogging community recently, and that is modesty blogging.  All the modesty blogs I’ve come across are motivated by religious restriction; the vast majority of these base their definitions of modest clothing upon the tenets of the Mormon church.  Of course, the situated ethos of modesty blogging must negotiate an inherent contradiction between two competing definitions of modest: the function of modest dress as a physical representation of religious belief and the concept of modesty as the quality of being unassuming, scrupulous, and free from presumption.  What does it mean to take pride in modest dress, to wear it as a badge of individualism and difference?  And how can we read these modesty blogs in terms of visual culture?  Join me as I take you on a journey into another strange corner of the internet: Mormon fashion blogging.

Image Credit: Facebook.com

About half of my Facebook friends live in the SF Bay Area, and out of everyone they are by far the most active posters. They're constantly touting political views, promoting their startups, recommending good reads, and most of all reminding everyone through pictures and status updates that they live in the "best" city in the country (Businessweek made it official with their city rankings for 2012).  As a former resident of SF who once drank the Kool-Aid, it's hard not to sound bitter and hypocritical about the locals' enthusiasm.  Who knows, maybe instead of Kool-aid, now I'm just sucking on sour grapes.  Let me be clear: there's no reason why San Franciscans shouldn't love there city. It is indisputably one of the most beautiful urban centers in the country.  Pastel-colored buildings decorate its famous hills, which look out over the Pacific ocean and the wrap-around bay.  And it boasts world-class universities, progressive politics, and vibrant international communities, all of which attract a distinctly intellectual, liberal, and enterprising kind of person.  Like I said, it makes perfect sense that SF residents love their city, and that they would want to share this pride through social media. Most of the time I’m grateful for their posts because they offer me a way to vicariously experience the beautiful and eclectic place where I came of age. But the pictures also consistently make me laugh, and I confess they increasingly make me groan. This post will explore why that is.

Image Credit: United Nations webtv.un.org

Almost every male speaker to the September Summit of the General Assembly of the United Nations wore a suit and tie. It is easy to overlook this fact, so widespread is the convention, so rare the defiance. But what heads of state wear in front of one another shows something peculiar about the modern nation state. Leaders are, by and large, drawn from the cultural and economic elite. What all this suit-and-tie wearing indicates, however, is that the ruling class of the modern nation-state must subscribe, or seem to subscribe, to middle class or “business” virtues, like hard work, entrepreneurship, merit, and self-effacement. When a male leader chooses not to don a suit and tie, a choice made by President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pictured above), he is really saying something: but what, exactly, is he saying?

Image Credit: Imgur

H/T to Matt

For me, humor is one of the most powerful tools available for both pedagogy as well as social resistance.  It seems appropriate therefore to introduce myself to the viz. blog with something a little offbeat and (potentially) funny.

This morning I received an automatic update message from Imaging Notes, a remote sensing (satellite imaging) trade magazine.  The lead-off story was about one of the alleged nuclear material refining facilities in Iran. 

The image, and the annotations provided by a private company, are eerily similar to those Colin Powell used in his February, 2003 speech to the UN when he argued on behalf of the doctrine of pre-emptive war in Iraq.  I point all of this out not to question the interpretation of the Iranian image, but simply to point out that as lay-people and citizens, we do not have the means to engage with the arguments presented in such images, but must take or refuse their content based with only our trust or mistrust in the party providing the image to guide us.