Tugas PTKOM: Visual Communication Theories

Oke guys kali ini saya akan memposting tentang teori komunikasi yang saya ambil dari Communication Encyclopedia dan ini versi bahasa inggrisnya.

Visual Communication

Theories

In the 21st century, visual modes of communication will become more dominant and more important to cultural functioning than verbal modes. Indeed, many developments in visual technology throughout the 20th century have laid the groundwork for this revolution. Visual media are more available, less expensive, and almost impossible to censor, and the culture is increasingly embracing the use of visual media for entertainment, education, and communication. The sheer quantity of visual representations is now such that the number of images encountered by an average person in an average day could hardly be counted. Scholars commented on the increasing visualization of communication throughout the 20th  century, but the study of the communicative function and rhetorical power of images has expanded dramatically over the last 2 decades.

Visual communication studies are distinct from other theories of communication not so much by their theoretical background or methodology as by their targets of analysis. Since literally everything that can be seen can be analyzed and interpreted, the types of visual phenomena studied continue to expand. A brief list of the types of visuals that have received the most scholarly attention would include fine art, news photography, technical and scientific graphics, images in advertising, moving pictures (fictional, documentary, news), and still images— and more recently, video, disseminated through the Internet.

Theories of visual communication do not so much compete as offer complementary angles from which to view the many communicative aspects of visual representations. Visual communication scholars are less interested in debunking or overthrowing older theories than in developing new methods for shedding more light on the many complex ways in which images mean.

Semiotics

A starting point for any theory of visual communication is the understanding that virtually any image can be analyzed as a type of sign. Semiotic theories are based on the assumption that virtually anything can be a sign or symbol, which means that it stands in for and elicits in the viewer’s mind an object, person, or concept separate from the sign itself. Even visual phenomena that occur naturally, without communicative intent, can be interpreted as signs. An example of such a natural sign or indexical sign would be a tree bending in the wind, which one might interpret to mean that a storm is approaching. However, nearly all semiotic analysis of visuals is centered on those that are constructed by humans and intended to represent something that the viewer presumably will recognize.

What makes semiotics so applicable to the study of visual communication is the further assumption that signs can have (some say inevitably have) a complex and subtle array of direct, indirect, concrete, and abstract meanings. A flag, for example, stands for a particular nation, but it can also stand for patriotism or nationalism and for victory on the battlefield. Semiotic analysis works to tease out these complex and more subtle meanings and to determine the ways in which viewers’ responses are influenced by visual elements that draw on established (if implicit and never directly expressed) cultural codes, values, and icons.

For example, Roland Barthes distinguishes between an image’s denotation and its connotation. An image’s denotation is simply the content of the image. The connotation, on the other hand, includes all of the values and emotions that the image may trigger in a viewer. The denotation of a picture of a mother and child is simply the two human beings, along with any other concrete objects contained within the frame. Its connotations, however, may include motherhood, protectiveness, comfort, or anxiety, among many others, depending on the viewer. The possible connotations of any image are influenced by its framing, composition, colors, and

so on, along with the content itself. However, the connotations a viewer perceives from an image are at least equally driven by the internalized social and cultural codes that the viewer brings to bear when responding to the image.

As Barthes points out, photographs can be classified as indexical signs because just as a tree bending is a physical result of the wind acting against it, photographs are the physical result of light striking an object and reflecting back into the camera lens. In other words, although one can paint a person or object purely from imagination—in fact, one can paint pictures of objects that have never existed, such as unicorns—a photograph cannot exist without the existence (or previous existence) of the person or object that it portrays. A photograph of my brother sitting in my kitchen proves that, at some point in time, my brother was actually sitting in my kitchen. Unlike paintings or drawings, the photograph proves the reality of what it represents.

 Of course, the previous two sentences seem naively anachronistic, given the relative ease with which anyone with a PC and Photoshop can manipulate images in a manner once available only to the highly skilled professional. At the high end of the technological spectrum, entire buildings,  ities, and landscapes are created in the computer, and live actors not only move against these backgrounds, but interact with them in often convincing ways. Although the viewer is aware, of course, that the film being viewed consists of actors in a fictionalized representation, he or she may not be aware that the boulder crashing down the hill past the actors never actually existed except as a digital creation. The inherent link between the photograph and the historical reality that it purports to represent has been irrevocably severed. Others have pointed out, however, that through staging, cropping, and darkroom techniques, photographic images have been manipulated since the invention of the medium. Ansel Adams, certainly the most famous naturalistic American photographer, spent countless darkroom hours, manipulating the play of light and shadow in his nature photographs.

Perception Theory

Perception theory is a term applied by Ann Marie Barry to theories based on neurological research. Such research was once limited to the study of how individuals perceive patterns when faced with visual phenomena. However, with the advent of increasingly sophisticated magnetic imaging technologies, researchers can now see, in real time, how individuals’ brains respond to specific visual stimuli. By mapping the areas of the brain in terms of their primary functions and seeing which parts of the brain light up with electrical activity in response to different visual stimuli, researchers can determine how individuals are responding both cognitively and emotionally to a variety of images.

The term perception theory can also be applied to the far more speculative and wide-ranging work of theorists such as James Elkins and W. J. T. Mitchell. Elkins and Mitchell, both professors of art history, often range beyond their home discipline to discuss questions about how people respond to a variety of image types, along with questions about how, why, and when people interpret a series of dots, lines, and colors as a picture, or representational image, of something recognizable. Indeed, no comprehensive theory of visual communication will get far without addressing the fundamental questions of how individuals perceive, interpret, and respond to images.

A basic assumption behind all types of perception theory is that the physical world does not consist of coherent visual patterns that we humans simply pick up with our eyes as we go  hrough life. Rather, these patterns (which we recognize as representational images) are constructed within the human brain; they both reflect and reinforce individuals’ existing assumptions about the nature of reality, and they are driven by social and cultural assumptions as much as by the hard-wiring of the human brain.

Visual Rhetoric

With its interdisciplinary nature and its borrowing from areas such as media studies and cultural studies, the field of rhetoric spent much of the 20th century expanding its sphere of analysis beyond speeches and other explicitly persuasive— and almost entirely verbal—texts to study a much wider range of symbols. If semioticians could argue that a wide range of phenomena could be considered symbolic, hence communicative, certainly rhetoricians could argue that just as wide a range of phenomena could be said to potentially influence the beliefs, opinions, and/or behaviors of those who were exposed to them. In other words, all of these phenomena could rightly be called rhetorical.

Much of the work in visual rhetoric uses concepts originally developed to analyze verbal discourse, including the rhetorical figures of metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche and attempts to demonstrate how these figures work in rhetorical images. The goal is to use these well-established and long-studied concepts as tools to help scholars understand how images work rhetorically. Other visual rhetoricians argue that it is fallacious to apply verbal concepts to images and that we need to create new concepts and methodologies for the study of visuals. The work of both schools is accomplished by critically analyzing a wide variety of images, by examining the responses of viewers, and by studying the ways that the images being analyzed appear to draw on the influences of other, often famous and iconic images. Both kinds of visual rhetoric scholarship, perhaps because of the relative newness of the enterprise, are inductive, consisting largely of analyses of individual visual texts, and the discipline is just beginning to build on these individual analyses to develop more comprehensive theories of how visuals work rhetorically.

Cultural Studies

Nearly all current approaches toward the study of visual communication take into account the social and cultural factors that influence individuals’ responses to images. But the study of images as cultural artifacts goes further, examining images and viewers’ responses to them and using both to learn more about the culture within which the images are produced, disseminated, controlled, viewed, and valued.

Sometimes the term visual culture is used to indicate the study of highly valued visual art and of how that art is valued, consumed, and used to influence and reinforce particular cultural values. However, a major motivation behind the initial genesis of the

field of cultural studies was the desire to erase distinctions between high and low culture. To a cultural theorist, visual culture consists of all the visual aspects of a culture, and most cultural theorists believe that more can be learned about a culture by studying its common, mass-produced images than by studying museum pieces that the vast majority of the population never sees firsthand.

Popular commentators often argue over whether mass media images influence people’s values and behaviors, or whether such images merely reflect the culture’s preexisting attitudes and values. From a cultural studies perspective, this is a false dichotomy. Images that are either individually famous or representative of a popular type (e.g., thin young women in cosmetic and fashion advertising) both reflect and reinforce preexisting values. Such images are used to control the attitudes and assumptions of the populace and to reinforce the values that allow existing power structures to remain unchallenged.

Stuart Hall, one of the founders of cultural studies as a unique discipline, was one of the first to argue that mass media images not only influence our cultural assumptions, but in the process, they actually create our social reality. At the same time, he insisted that the viewers of mass media images do not always soak up these images uncritically. He describes three types of responses to mass media images: dominant or preferred readings, which reproduce the meaning that the producer of the image intended to encode within it; negotiated readings in which the viewer largely accepts the dominant reading, but changes it to reflect his or her own personal, localized experiences; and oppositional readings, which argue directly against the dominant reading of the image.

By studying influential mass media images, then, as well as viewers’ various responses to them, cultural studies theorists draw conclusions about the power relations at work within the culture. Power, social class (which in the United States—and increasingly in Europe—is closely interwoven with issues of race), and ideology (the culture’s dominant yet unexamined values and assumptions) are important aspects of cultural studies work.

The Gaze

An influential concept for explaining the relationship between visual phenomena (or more specifically, the practice of looking) and power relations has been the gaze. Widely discussed and expanded upon by a variety of feminist and postmodern scholars, the gaze emphasizes the subject–object relationship that exists when one person gazes at another. In feminist and postcolonial work, those being looked at (or portrayed in a picture or film for others to look at) are subordinate to those who are looking. Film scholars examine the many ways that women are portrayed as being gazed at by male characters in films and displayed for the pleasure

of male viewers of those films (often simultaneously). Scholars of literature, advertising, and so on examine their texts in similar ways.

The power of the gaze is not operative solely during the act of looking. Due to a variety of societal and media influences, young women tend togrow up to think of themselves and all females at least partly as objects to be gazed at. This influences the ways in which females view and judge themselves and other women. Girls and women therefore become participants in the practice of their own objectification because of the nonstop barrage of images and messages insisting on the importance of female beauty and on the relative role of men and women as gazers and as objects to be gazed at.