In Anne Wysocki’s fifth chapter of The Multiple Media of Texts, she provides three elements for analyzing the visual aspects of texts: name the visual elements, name the designed relationship among those elements, consider how those elements connect with different audiences, contexts, and arguments. The visual aesthetics of a social media post are crucial for its success. Therefore, someone that is analyzing a post that can only name poor visual elements, typically won’t bother to analyze its other parts. This also plays into how those elements connect with each other to create a visually appealing post. There can be certain parts of a post that are excellent, but fail to complement other parts of it. Finally, the analyst has to contextualize the information and imagine what the designers intended to convey to the audience. A designer can produce great material, but without a target audience it means nothing.
She ends her chapter by illustrating the importance of analyzing content. She explains that rhetoric, entertainment, and visual configuration is not just for an audience’s entertainment, but is “of particular use when they help us see how we have become and continue to be who we are” (Wysocki). She wants to show to her audience that this content is more than someone trying to gain popularity. It is a reflection on a societies interest, values, humor, etc. Analyzing this material can help us gain a better understanding of what makes people happy, what makes them sad, and how to educate an audience on important issues.
In Cristina Tardagulia’s article on spotting fake images on the internet, she provides the audience with questions to consider when looking at an image. Most of them relate to when the image was taken and why it is showing up now. She gives us three tools that can answer those questions: google reverse image search, TinEye, and Yandex. In today’s cycle of fake news, as she mentions “military conflicts that are usually surrounded by false images” (Tardagulia) as inspiration for her article, it is especially crucial to consider using these websites.
ENG/IMS 224 C 