viz.

For this week, instead of a visual analysis, I offer a pair of reading recommendations . This is in keeping with the spirit, if not the explicit aim, of viz., to analyze visual culture and serve as a forum for anyone interested in same. While thinking ahead about what is in store for this site and what directions it might take in the coming year, both articles offer useful reflections.

The first read is a short article by Scott Rosenberg, published in Salon, called "How blogs changed everything" (the article is excerpted from, and presumably a tease for, Rosenberg's book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters). Scholars of new media may find little new here, but as a general rumination on how blogs have, well, changed everything, it's a great place for the rest of us to begin. It would also be a great resource for instructors who want to introduce students to rhetoric and new media as well as the rhetorical dimensions of blogging. (The article both introduces content with which students may be unfamiliar and presents a carefully structured argument susceptible to rhetorical analysis.) Rosenberg cogently articulates why blogging has been such a successful phenomenon of the web; the article's most interesting claim is that rather than comparing blogging to television, a more apt parallel would be the telephone.

Like the telephone before it, the Web will be defined by the choices people make as they use it, constrained by -- but not determined by -- the nature of the technology. The most significant choice we have been making, collectively, ever since the popularization of Internet access in the mid-1990s, has been to favor two-way interpersonal communication over the passive reception of broadcast-style messages. Big-media efforts to use the Net for the delivery of old-fashioned one-way products have regularly failed or underperformed. Social uses of our time online -- email, instant messaging and chat, blogging, Facebook-style networking -- far outstrip time spent in passive consumption of commercial media. In other words, businesspeople have consistently overestimated the Web's similarities to television and underestimated its kinship to the telephone.

Implicit in Rosenberg's claim is the notion that blogging multiplies opportunies for identification (the keyword of twentieth-century rhetorical theory) by generating "a new kind of public sphere, at once ephemeral and timeless, sharing the characteristics of conversation and deliberation. Blogging allows us to think out loud together."

Rosenberg's simple but elegant conclusion offers a template for the kind of informal work we do on viz., which aims to get anyone interested in visual culture to "think out loud together" about its diversity. This brings me to the second of the recommend readings (first passed on to me by my colleague John Jones), a review article in the most recent issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech (Vol. 95 Iss. 2; May 2009). In "What's Visual about 'Visual Rhetoric,'" Paul Messaris reviews four works of scholarship on visual rhetoric published in 2007 or 2008.** In the process, however, he also poses the basic question included in his title. While his review offers a nice overview of what's happening in visual rhetoric scholarship, I was most interested in how Messaris framed his consideration of the texts he's looking at through the lens of four questions:

Do visual arguments need captions?
Are pictures more emotional than words?
Are words more informative than pictures?
Do photographs provide more trustworthy evidence than words or other types of pictures?

Messaris argues that the answers to these questions are "constantly changing as visual culture evolves. Visual rhetoric is a moving target, and, in an age of rapidly changing digital media, that target's movements are getting faster" (212). When I talk to people about my work on viz., I often find myself asked to explain what visual rhetoric is. The questions posed by Messaris, taken together, articulate a more cogent response than I have come up with so far.

The insights in either of these articles may not be news to everyone, but for me, they articulate very well the mission viz. has set for itself. As visual culture changes along with our rapidly evolving technologies, I hope this site can serve as a forum for articulating some answers to these questions. I also hope that we can provide instructors in visual rhetoric with the tools they need to pose these questions with and for their students in the classroom.