Essential Questions:
- How do the images that accompany text change the text’s meaning?
- What impact do the images used in advertisements have on students?
- Do the pros of social media advertising outweigh the cons?
Text takes on many roles. It tells a story, describes, summarizes, entertains, informs, sells. We can see many instances where images that accompany text changes the text’s meaning. If you ask students their opinions when a chapter book they have read is made into a movie, they are likely to respond, “It wasn’t the way I pictured it to be.” Before seeing the edited images, readers use their imaginations to visualize the narrative. The pictures assigned to the text change the meaning of the text that the reader has constructed in his or her mind.
Steve Richards writes in his article The Power of Pictures in Social Media Marketing that pictures tell a story and encapsulate emotion. With the rise of social media and the accessibility to content via smart phones, these images spread like wildfire. Even brands with 'non photogenic' images have impact as they focus on other elements of the product's story; Maersk is able to make even shipping containers glamorous and exotic by channeling our emotions about the sea, history, and excitement that travel around the world evokes. (Richards, 2013)
I love looking at images that tell a story, with or without captions. Nicholas Nixon shares a photo series of his wife and her three sisters that spans forty years. There are no words, no descriptive elements, no setting the stage. Just images. And the story is still powerful. There is intimacy, privacy and strength in the images. Would the sisters’ story be different with text?
Students, I believe, are even more vulnerable to this divide between the reality of the construction and the make-believe person or image that is presented. On a cognitive level, I can understand that Russel’s successes are built upon the fact that she “benefits from the deck stacked in her favor” as well as on the “gender and racial oppression” that allow her these successes. I don’t fully believe that students can. They are the same group, after all, that when asked what they want to be when they grow up, answer with an emphatic, “Professional athlete!” The statistics for Pro Football are fairly representative of other professional sports; 1.7% of college football players go on to play professionally, whereas only 0.08% of high school players do. (Manfred, 2012)
Not all use of images and social media is negative. Businesses use social media all the time to reach a broader customer base and provide real-time information about products, specials and news. I live in Durham, which is a pretty small town with a very active small business community. Many of my friends own their own businesses, and the use social media on a daily and sometimes multiple-times-per-day-daily basis. The pros definitely outweigh the cons for these proprietors. Take for example, my friend, Katie, who owns Durham’s Perk on Main. She posts daily specials, events, and places her food truck will be. This clearly works to her advantage - and to the advantage of her customers, so much so that they check Facebook and Twitter to see what the soup-of-the-day is before they come in to order.
Our job as educators must be to help our students become aware that imagery is often used in advertising to sway consumers to buy products, lifestyles and experiences. We must show them how they, too, can manipulate and construct images to tell stories of their own. We need to scaffold solid inquiry experiences for students so that they ask good questions of what they encounter online. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that just about everything online has a bias or angle of some sort. Blogs are opinion pieces, news media giants are curated, advertisements are trying to sell you products….even Fair and Balanced can be unfair and unbalanced. By empowering students to see the online images and social media images as what they are - constructions that represent an imaginary place/person/thing - they will be more prepared to glean facts and accurate information from the wealth that surrounds them online.
I find it ironic (interesting?) that in an assignment about text and imagery, I chose to respond in a primarily written format and used images and video to support my text….did that change the meaning of my writing? Or did it enhance it? If I posted a simple written document, it may have lacked some of the visual explanation I wanted to include. A response solely comprised of images may have been inadequate. Perhaps my writing and use of images to supplement it shows a subconscious bias on my part that I want to communicate to my audience. I doubt my intentions were that complex, however.
Resources:
Manfred, Tony. "Here Are The Odds That Your Kid Becomes A Professional Athlete (Hint: They're Small)." Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 10 Feb. 2012. Web. 16 Oct. 2014.
Nixon, Photographs Nicholas. "Forty Portraits in Forty Years." The New York Times. The New York Times, 02 Oct. 2014. Web. 3 Oct. 2014.
Richards, Steve. "The Power of Pictures in Social Media Marketing."Brandwatch. N.p., 31 Jan. 2013. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
"The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak." YouTube. YouTube, 30 Sept. 2014. Web. 1 Oct. 2014.
"Looks Aren't Everything. Believe Me, I'm a Model." Cameron Russell:. TED, n.d. Web. 4 Oct. 2014.