viz. - new social media

Presenting the Family: A Holiday Ritual

Calliope — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 17:31:45 +0000

Image Credit: minted.com

Choosing a holiday card is apparently a big deal. I was not aware of this until my sister (married with two children) called me in distress over designing her card. As we talked and I pressed her to explain how this could possibly be stressful, I learned that the tradition of sending out greeting cards around the holidays isn't just about spreading good cheer. The rise of the photocard has made holiday salutations into an important opportunity for families to make a positive visual impression on friends and relatives. This surprised me a little because I had naively assumed the intent was to express one's hot-cocoa-induced feelings for the cards' recipients. But considering that media today is increasingly social, targeted, and customizable, the practice of creating a visual brand for one's family and sharing it with others should come as no surprise at all.

Image Credit: minted.com

What's interesting about the way this tradition has evolved is its correspondence to an emphasis on carefully mediated photography in popular social media (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.). The photocard puts the family portrait front-and-center, replacing seasonal or religious iconography with family faces; and the photos that are included are often professionally taken, or at the very least posed, cropped, edited, and thoughtfully arranged. In my sister's circle of thirty-something friends, it's much more common to exchange customized photocards than store-bought cards with a candid snapshot thrown inside. Her friends use custom stationary sites like minted.com and tinyprints.com to create their distinct family look with carefully chosen photos and a prominent byline (see "The Jones Family 2012," and "The Laurants" above). Affixing the family name to a controlled, manufactured image of its members gives the card a corporate feel; the examples above could easily be ads for clothing stores (just replace "The Laurants" with Eddie Bauer or J. Crew).

These cards aren't very subtle about their aims. Their purpose is to construct a familial identity just as Facebook pages and online bios construct identities for individuals. The fact that they perform an authorized, identity-building function for families--groups as opposed to individuals--makes them fascinating and unique social objects. As I looked through pages of sample cards on the aforementioned sites, I tried to think of other widely-observed rituals or spaces in which families present carefully crafted images of themselves. Aside from engagement photos, and possibly birth announcements, which these photocards clearly draw upon, I could not think of many other occasions for publicly presenting a pre-fab image of the nuclear family. And then I remembered those stick figure families.

Image Credit: gorestruly.com

You know, the pictographic sticker-inventories of families displayed on the back of cars (see above). At first these bare representations might strike you as fundamentally different than the holiday photocards, which include a much more intimate portrait of the family. But I suspect that the decision to put these stickers on the back of one's car is related to the basic impulse behind the photocard: to advertise that you have a family, indicate its size, show that it is happy and thriving, and embrace group identity over individuality.

Image Credit: minted.com

Holiday cards that double as yearly newsletters seem to combine intimate presentations of the family with statements about their size, uniformity, group behavior. In the past, families might have sat down together during the holidays to write a long, usually humorous missive about what they experienced or accomplished that year. Now, sites like Minted encourage us to create and share infographics that measure our family's growth in stats and figures.

And now I will try my hardest not to leave you with an anti-commercialist, Grinch-like message, nor a moralizing one (even though these are two of my favorite postures). I will admit that after spending time on the virtual Hallmark aisle of our day, I can understand where my sister is coming from. Projecting an image of one's family is a delicate affair, and not an easy thing to opt out of. Almost any card, whether it's store-bought, handmade, digital, or photographic, will say something about how you want your family's values, traditions, class and lifestyle to be perceived. So choose wisely, and have a wonderful holiday season.

Everyone's an Activist, All 99% of Us. Right?

Calliope — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 23:34:59 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot capture of photograph by Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

The photograph above was featured this week in The L.A. Times' coverage of the Occupy Wall Steet movement's one-year anniversary. The caption provided beneath the photo states, "A man wanting to join the Occupy protesters on Monday is told to leave Wall Street." The image gives pause, not because a policeman is pictured confronting a protester, but because the man's ethos seems incongruous with that of the anarchist-inspired OWS movement. My recollection of the "Occupied" zone in downtown Austin last winter calls to mind the image of a different kind of a protester, one who looks as committed to battling the elements as he is to changing the status quo. This unidentified man, however, does not look prepared for the scene of mayhem he is allegedly trying to enter. With a cigarette balanced precariously atop his coffee cup, he looks like he's just popped down from the 20th floor to grab some more uppers. It's amusing (or disheartening, depending on your outlook) to imagine him scrawling "99%>1%" on a scrap of paper before venturing into the mob that separates him from the nearest Starbucks. But this is pure speculation. It's equally likely that the man in the photograph is an overworked reporter, or an analyst who has thousands of dollars of debt from student loans. Perhaps he was walking by the OWS demonstration, got inspired, and decided to join on a whim. Either way, the photographer caught him looking weary, unimpassioned, and in a moment of half-hearted negotiation with the police, which is why this photo provides a useful illustration of the phenomenon known as slacktivism.

Slacktivism (slacker activism) describes a distinctly inactive method of supporting a cause. The steps slacktivists take to achieve their supposed ideals require little effort, cost, or forethought (many are easily performed through social networks' approval systems and news/media sharing functions). Despite this, some have argued that the proper channeling of slactivism can lead to positive social change.

I want to suggest, in a very rough and cursory way, that the OWS man's paper-bag appeal to the 99% is similar to slacktivists' tags and tweets. The encompassing nature of Occupy's slogan--"We are the 99%"--has diluted the definition of an activist, and extended it to include anyone with a sign who wishes (temporarily? disingenuously?) to harness the power of an enormous group. Social media platforms can have the same effect. With the right virtual signage anyone can pose as an activist; anyone can reap the social and commercial benefits of participating in far-reaching online campaigns; and finally, anyone can avoid accountability for actions and purported views by maintaining distance between real and digital identities. (I might be accused of doing that in this very blog post.)

Yet on the other hand, the makeshift, handmade quality of the OWS man's sign marks it as an analog, not a digital, production. It has the appearance of a homeless person's battered highway sign--a text that demands attention because of the dissonance between its sensitive message and crude medium (i.e. cardboard). Thus, the OWS protester can claim a certain ethical connection to his sign that is unavailable to wielders of pre-made placards, like the attendees of the recent Democratic National Convention (below). Visuals from the DNC got me thinking about what it means, and what is argued, when one waves around a sign that is identical to hundreds of others nearby, and that was designed, manufactured and supplied to you by a political organization. In the landscape of a highly visible crowd such as the DNC's, one's voice is essentially reduced to one's sign. A crowd that enthusiastically agrees to broadcast a unified and pre-determined message is one that values a brand of solidarity over the opportunity to air personal sentiments or opinions. Or perhaps it is simply made up of individuals who are used to re-posting and re-tweeting ready-made internet memes and allowing those rhetorical texts to speak for them online.

Image Credit: occupyilluminati.com

In light of the eruption this month of violent demonstrations all over the Arab world, the question of how activism can and should evolve seems all important. I won't outline directions for that evolution here. But I will say that the kind of conviction that has mobilized thousands to take to the streets of Muslim countries, recasts the Occupy Wall Street photo (above), along with the possibility that progressive U.S. activism is becoming more dispersed and mainstream, in a sober light.

Gifs, gags, and digital nostalgia--the long wait for Breaking Bad season 5.2

Laura Thain — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 22:39:25 +0000

Image Credit: Breaking Gifs

I simply cannot resist a good topical tumblr. Of course, the orienting rhetorical principle of tumblrs like textsfromhillary (inspired by a single Reuters photo of the Secretary of State checking her smartphone on a C-17) or geraldoinahoodie (created in response to Geraldo Rivera's comments on the Trayvon Martin case) is undoubtedly kairos, and, as we might expect, these sites are often abandoned as quickly as they are generated, leaving nothing but a flurry of self-referential entries that lose their meaning the further they become removed from their rhetorical moment. As the creators of textsfromhillary assert in their final post, "As far as memes go – it has gone as far as it can go. Is it really possible to top a submission from the Secretary herself?"

Image credit: Reuters

Still, the lifespan of many other tumblrs increases considerably as the content within expands its field of references—surisburnbook, for instance, has become a celebrity blog of sorts, and fakecriterions has grown into a community art project that has even been offered its own gallery showings. Tumblr itself is a more sophisticated iteration of its precursors (like the short-lived Pownce) that, by differentiating itself from social media giant Twitter in terms of the user’s ability to integrate the visual and the audiovisual, has come to occupy a distinct space in the digital world.

Image Credit: XKCD

The latter category—those topical tumblrs which expand, rather than exhaust, their own possibilities—are of greater interest to me, particularly because the ways in which such expansion happens are often unpredictable and usually collaborative. The television actor and comedian Paul Sheer began breakinggifs—gifs inspired by the AMC hit tv show Breaking Bad—in April of 2012 during the long interlude between the fourth and fifth seasons. Sheer’s 8-bit color palette simultaneously evoked nostalgia for a long-abandoned digital interface and, I’d like to suggest, a show that had been off the air (and perhaps, off of viewer’s minds) for over six months.

Image Credit: Breaking Gifs

The tumblr went viral, and within months Sheer was able to coordinate a further outlet for fan-inspired Breaking Bad art. Capitalizing on the fan anticipation for the long-awaited fifth season, in May of 2012 Sheer announced the Breaking Bad Art Project via Breaking Bad actor Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring). The BBAP featured and distributed limited edition prints of Breaking Bad fan art throughout the summer, culminating in a wildly successful art show in Los Angeles last month. The project was managed through breakinggifs.com, a new website Sheer launched to help a community of artists share in his newfound tumblr fame.

While the website adapts with little variation creator Vince Gilligan’s “dark chemistry” aesthetic, few of the featured pieces take such little creative liberty. Here is my favorite from the Gallery 1988 showing of all 17 pieces in Los Angeles:

Image Credit: Gallery 1988

What is it about Breaking Bad that inspires this nostalgic return to 8-bit graphics and Saturday morning television? On a very superficial level, it certainly qualifies as simple juxtaposition, that is, that the print represents the (arguably) darkest show on network television translated into the register of childhood. That kind of juxtaposition produces, of course, humor, as artist Ian Glaubinger and Paul Sheer certainly recognize. Part of that we might attribute to an internet audience constantly inundated with information—this creates a disinterested sort of hostility easily dispelled by humor. (To put it simply, funny stuff gets the most hits.) But in examining Glaubinger’s print and Sheer’s tumblr together, perhaps we can read this juxtaposition of childhood and Breaking Bad with a more careful eye—is there something about the show and its disturbing refusal to set limitations on the darkness of its own contents that can be read as a militant stance of the id over the ego? In such terms, might we more closely associate Walter’s role as the anti-hero with the impulses, psychoanalytically speaking, of our own childhoods?

Pinterest and Panopticon: Self-representation Through Appropriation

David A. Harper — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 22:45:27 +0000

Hacked Leviathan Frontispiece. Image Credit: David A. Harper

In the coffee shop where I ‘m writing, there are two large bulletin boards in a high-traffic area (the hallway leading to the restrooms). We all know how bulletin boards and advertising work: once a provocative image draws you in, the text informs you, proselytizes you, or sells something to you. On a well-used board layers upon layers of images vie for attention, each individual post contributing to an unintentional artistic whole. Gathered on the same bulletin board, even the most antagonistic images are put into dialog as the physical wooden frame becomes a conceptual one. We find patterns in the noise. These old-fashioned bulletin boards have been on my mind this week while I explored the high-tech virtual pinboards of Pinterest.

Our predisposition to find order when confronted with a variety of images reminds me of Thomas Hobbes’s use of the “perspective glass” metaphor in Leviathan. These quaint seventeenth-century devices made one coherent (and often surprising) image out of a variety of disparate ones. In Leviathan, Hobbes claims that “passion and self-love” act as perspective glasses in reverse, making every obligation imposed by the state seem a multitude of divergent grievances, whereas “moral and civil science” act as a perspective glass properly reducing a multitude of potential miseries into one less-obnoxious obligation to the state (XVIII.20). Similar to well-constructed perspective glass images, Pinterest invites us to make meaning from a variety of images organized by users of the social media site. Displaying a variety of images, a Pinterest user invites an audience to decipher a composite image of self. However, while the perspective glass contained a lens carefully calibrated to reveal the underlying composite image, Pinterest leaves that task to the viewer.

Image Credit: www.toutfait.com

Pinterest is the latest social media addition to an ever-more layered palimpsest of media revising older forms of authorship. Email transformed the epistolary art. The personal webpage gave individuals a bully-pulpit. Facebook and its competitors created a hybrid of webpage, text-messaging, and email to allow people to engage in an ever-evolving conversation or exhibitionist performance. Now, Pinterest has created an online commonplace or scrap book. Pinterest users fill virtual corkboards with images from the web (or from other user’s boards), using it like a visual Twitter account. It is a new, visually-centered performance space that encourages self-representation primarily through images.

Image Credit: David A. Harper via Pinterest

In 2008, E.J. Westlake noted that performances of self on Facebook are “energetic engagements with the panoptic gaze: as people offer themselves up to surveillance, they establish and reinforce social norms, but always resist being fixed as rigid, unchanging subjects.”[1] Self-representation on Pinterest is both more public and more abstract than the text-based performances of Facebook. It is more public because Pinterest doesn’t allow the same level of audience customization as other social media. Every Pinterest user can view, comment upon, and repin every post. It is more abstract because it is visual. A simple browser plug-in allows users to easily pin any image they find on the web to boards they create and title with names like “Wants,” “Yummies,” or “Books I’ve Read.” Pinboards are categorized by choosing from tags such as “Art,” “Film, Music and Books,” “Cars and Motorcycles,” and “Geek.” A user’s collection of virtual pinboards comes to represent them to the Pinterest community. However, since captions are limited to 500 characters, it is the images rather than text which must bear the interpretive weight.

Like the coffee-shop bulletin board, Pinterest boards create narratives through the juxtaposition of images. However, unlike the unintentional artistry of accretions on a public bulletin board, personal Pinterest boards (not to be confused with those run by bots) are organized by the pinner to perform for the panoptic gaze. Neither linear nor constantly in motion like the Facebook timeline and newsfeed, Pinterest encourages viewers to construct meaning by considering the entirety of a user’s board or boards. And since the majority of the images were not created by the user, the site functions like an early-modern commonplace book into which readers copied out choice quotes from books they had read.

Image Credit: University of British Columbia Press

Just as the quotes in a commonplace book are not creations of the compiler, most images on Pinterest originate from a source outher than the pinner. It is thus not the artistry of the images themselves, but the skillful choice and categorization of them that tell the pinner’s narrative, performing self-representation through appropriation. A recent Mashable Infographic reports that 80% of Pinterest images are repins from other users, compared to Twitter where only 1.4% of tweets are retweets. Even the 20% of pins that aren’t repins are far more likely to be captured from web pages than to be original creations. The site is designed to encourage this appropriation. When a user repins an image, they not only fit it into their own categorization scheme, but they may enter their own description, replacing previous interpretations of the image with their own.

This mechanism of appropriation by repinning makes Pinterest a formidable advertising tool. Each new pin creates another link pointing back to the original source, increasing potential click-through traffic and the source’s visibility to search-engine algorithms. A quick look at some statistics suggests other reasons marketers love it:

Pinterest ranks among the top 30 U.S. sites by total page views.
Pinterest users are predominately female, ages 25-44, and well educated.
The fastest growing categories on Pinterest are “Food,” and “Style and Fashion.”

Image Credit: Bansky

Pinners aren’t only creating representations of self, but they are also sometimes unwittingly tailoring online catalogs driving traffic to ecommerce sites. An ecommerce company that sells home furnishings told CNBC that customers directed to their site from Pinterest spend 70% more than those from other social media. The Pinterest consumer has seen the product contextualized within another pinner’s self-representation (as a “want,” a “need,” a “lifestyle,” or perhaps as “art”) and already has a developed desire for the product. By giving product images contexts that integrate them into idealized frames, Pinterest users do the marketers’ work for them more effectively than a store catalog could.

Recently, Pinterest has been in the news because they joined with other social media to discourage content encouraging anorexia or other forms of self-harm. The move was sparked by the alarming number of “thinspiration” posts on the site. But because Pinterest encourages wide-scale appropriation, once an image is pinned it takes on a life of its own. Whatever contextualization was granted the image by its original caption and categorization may be obliterated or reversed by the first repin. Images that were pinned as part of an “anti-thinspiration” board may be re-categorized by the next pinner as “thinspiration” itself. Context may be everything, but on Pinterest it is transient at best, as the images themselves quickly become orphaned texts uprooted from any single, fixed context.

Image Credit: GrandForksHerald.com

In Leviathan, Hobbes defined “wit” as the ability to observe similitude and combine disparate things, while “judgment” was the ability to differentiate (VIII.3). Pinterest provides a rich field where we can exercise these faculties, both while gathering images and whether we are viewing a friend’s board or Barack Obama’s. Ultimately, meaning becomes a collaboration between the gatherer and the viewer; however, as the viewer becomes the gatherer, images that once formed part of our composite self-image drift across the landscape of Pinterest and the web, providing someone else raw material to use as they fashion their own self.

Works Cited

[1] Westlake, E.J. "Friend Me If You Facebook: Generation Y and Performative Surveillance." Drama Review. 52.4 (2008), 23.

Panem et Circenses: The Hunger Games and Kony2012

David A. Harper — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:31:21 +0000

Image Credit: BookDrum.com

I suspect I was one of very few people thinking of the First Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, as I watched The Hunger Games with my family last weekend. In particular, I was recalling how Shaftesbury lamented in 1711 that the English theater had come to resemble the “popular circus or bear-garden.”

It is no wonder we hear such applause resounded on the victories of Almanzor, when the same parties had possibly no later than the day before bestowed their applause as freely on the victorious butcher, the hero of another stage, where amid various frays, bestial and human blood, promiscuous wounds and slaughter, [both sexes] are… pleased spectators, and sometimes not spectators only, but actors in the gladiatorian parts.[1]

I found myself watching The Hunger Games at the urgent behest of my eldest daughter, a staunch tween member of “Team Peeta.” Before the movie, we had made a bargain that I would read the entire Hunger Games series and take her to the film if she would read Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It seemed like a good deal at the time. While The Hunger Games movie didn’t put her in mind of Shaftesbury, she did direct me to the image below:

Image Credit: iFunny.mobi

Like the best jokes, this one works on several levels. Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games series, makes the Roman “bread and circuses” connection explicit in the third novel when Katniss is informed that “in the Capitol, all they’ve known is Panem et Circenses.”[2] Indeed, “Panem” is the name of the fictional nation that uses the annual Hunger Games as a strategy of control. My initial assessment after reading the series was that Shirley Jackson’s famous 1948 short story “The Lottery” had mated with Stephen King’s prescient 1982 sci-fi novel The Running Man and produced dubious offspring. But I left the movie musing that it is somehow too easy to assess The Hunger Games as a commentary on a culture obsessed with cheap, voyeuristic reality TV. In a way the books never could, the movie takes advantage of the social and visual experience of going to the movies to breathe new life into the “bread and circuses” paradigm.

In an article for Huffington Post, Greg Garrett noted that The Hunger Game’s dystopia evokes both 1930’s Depression-era America and the Roman “bread and circuses” tradition. Garrett writes, “So long as we are distracted… we may forget for a moment about our own lives, our own hunger. We may forget that we live in a nation that is less free than it was a decade ago, a nation with fewer societal safety nets, a nation with fewer opportunities for young people.”[3] Well said. But let’s face it; the majority of Americans have never known anything more than metaphorical hunger. Turning our gaze toward our own very real problems is a start, but only a start. To do only that is to become a Panem Capitol dweller who realizes she lacks freedom. Breaking free of the thralldom imposed by our own enticing bread and circuses requires we turn our gaze outward and recognize responsibilities extending beyond the borders of self, town, state, or nation.

The theater where my family viewed The Hunger Games was a trendy one that serves meals during the show. While we waited for our group to be seated, the people in front of us consumed two pitchers of the theater’s own microbrew. Once inside, we were treated to a menu mimicking foods found in the books. No, not squirrel, berries, or any other survival food found in the impoverished districts or the arena. This was high-end Capitol fare, like lamb stew with plumbs and some purple melon wrapped in prosciutto. In typical American fashion, the portions were huge. All told, my family probably spent over $100.00 to sit in stadium seats watching a decadent society watch starving children kill each other for sport.

Image Credit: People.com

That purple prosciutto melon was a tip off to what sets The Hunger Games phenomenon apart. It casts the movie audience in the role of Panem Capitol dwellers watching the games. The effect is emphasized by how rarely the movie shows Capitol citizens reacting to the action in the arena. Instead, we stand in for that audience, watching the carnage directly or through the mediation of the charismatic game show host, Caesar. The outlandish Capitol fashion (think Eighteenth-century meets Lady Gaga) may be meant to distance these people from us, even dehumanize them, but as the movie rolls on we become them.

Shaftesbury recognized that the difference between being a “spectator” or an “actor” is perhaps only one of degree. The Hunger Games has us watch colonial children kill one another while we participate in our own consumer culture of excess. God forbid you were out refilling your eight-dollar popcorn tub and missed Thresh bashing little Clove’s head in against a giant metal cornucopia.

Image Credit: Netroots Foundation

The tricky thing about a movie about bread and circuses is that it can become simply another circus, particularly if the audience remains unaware of their complicity. What are we forgetting – what are we being distracted from – by this particular circus and by the more ubiquitous barrage of media white noise? I couldn’t help but reflect that only about a week prior to the release of The Hunger Games the viral social media campaign “Kony2012” had filled our feeds and prompted anxious articles in The Atlantic,[4] The New York Times,[5] ForiegnPolicy.com,[6] and in other mainstream media outlets. The rapidity with which critiques of Kony2012 surfaced revealed a deep mistrust for new social-media fueled activism, as well hinting at even less savory reasons for lashing out at the video.

For a moment, Kony2012 brought our attention to the plight of child soldiers, real starving children who kill one another. Of particular impact is the moment nine minutes into the film, where the filmmaker attempts to explain Joseph Kony to his own five-year old son. The moment has power precisely because, in order to expose the exploitation of children, the filmmaker exploits his own son. It is uncomfortable, but it is meant to be. When we watch fictional children fight in the Hunger Games arena, however, we are partaking in an entertaining diversion, both within the framework of the fiction that makes us a Capitol citizen, and in our role as real consumers of media. A little more discomfort might be in order.

Shaftesbury wasn’t arguing for the abolishment of the theater in 1711, no more than I am denying the value of entertainment. I study Renaissance and Eighteenth-century literature for most of my day, so for me to take such a stance would be absurd. But I do think we should reflect upon what it means to be identified not with the rebellious underdogs of District 11, but with the effete, privileged citizens of the Capitol who move from one distraction to the next as children kill each other and the temperature rises.

Works Cited

[1] Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Edited by Lawrence E. Klein. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 447.

[2] Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay. (New York: Scholastic, 2010), 223.

[3] Greg Garrett, "The Hunger Games: Why It Matters"

[4] Max Fisher, "The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012"

[5] Josh Kron and J. David Goodman, "Online, a Distant Conflict Soars to Topic No.1"

[6] Joshua Keating, "Guest Post: Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things)

Imaging the Republican Party

Andi — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:13:41 +0000

Screen shot of gop.com

This past week the Republican National Committee launched its new websiteand found itself mired in technical difficulties and contending with several scathing reviews. The website features a blog by chairman Michael Steele and several links to other forms of new social media as part of the GOP's most recent attempt to revamp its image. I, however, was drawn to two different galleries of photographs featured on the website: the "Patriots: American Heroes and Famous Republicans" page which seems to tell a particular history of the party through the several black and white photographs it features and the "Republican Faces" page which features the personal photographs and testimonials uploaded by visitors to the site.

The creators of the site collected the photographs of several prominent Republicans and placed them in the gallery of "Patriots: American Heroes and Famous Republicans." These images are all in black and white--both the portraits of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass (as, of course they must be) but also the portrait of Ronald Reagan--and are arranged beneath a glittering banner proclaiming those pictured heroes and above text that emphasizes the "rich history of men and women who fought for freedom and equality."

Screen shot of gop.com

In an attempt to characterize the party as having held a long history of diversity, thirteen of the eighteen portraits feature women or people of color. Critics balked at the inclusion of a portrait of Jackie Robinson, who helped campaign for Nixon but who was also a registered independent who expressed grave misgivings about the party's policies during the Civil Rights Era and the turn toward Goldwater in 1964. I was also intrigued by the narrative photographs construct in linking the 19th century Republican party of Abe Lincoln and Hiram Revels to the party of Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower. While it is true that all of these images depict Republicans, the layout of the images suggests that these illustrious men and women were all the same type of Republican and elides the massive changes within the party over the many decades documented in this "rich history."

Visitors to the site can find their way to the gallery of heroes by clicking on the "Learn" tab but they can also end up there by clicking on a 19th century photograph of Pinckney Pinchback (state senator of Louisiana in 1871) placed within a graphic so that it appears to be a polaroid. An anachronistic choice for a page that privileges the "history" of the party and an odd choice for a website that otherwise privileges social media.

Screen shot of gop.com

That emphasis on social media includes a section in which visitors to the site can upload their personal portraits and twitter feeds. The "Republican Faces" page includes a gallery not unlike that of the "Famous Heroes" and so suggests that this diverse and democratic (small "d") collection of party members falls in line with the longer narrative of the history of the party. Moreover, the banner on the homepage features a constantly changing "face of the party" within the "O" of the GOP and the portraits there are pulled from both the historical and the contemporary galleries. Interestingly, the link on the homepage to the page of "Republican Faces" is currently centered beneath a call from Michael Steele to submit a personal photograph and a testimonial as why one is a Republican. To participate viewers select a button labelled "Take Action." While I have my misgivings about whether uploading personal photography can be a form of social action, and about the narrative of inclusion and diversity depicted on the site, I can certainly appreciate the rhetoric at work here.