Image, Race, and Rhetoric: The Contention for Visual Space on Twitter
Keywords:
Social Media, Twitter, Visual Rhetoric, Race, Public Sphere, Image and Identity, Cultural LandscapeAbstract
This study examines photographs associated with the Twitter hashtag “ifiweregunneddown” through the lens of visual rhetoric, concluding that social media users engaged in a protest against mainstream media by using images of themselves to reassert their identity. The study examines and discusses identity within the context of photographic media portrayals of African-Americans, including the historical Emmett Till murder, in which image played a key role in the national discussion over race. Data from this study was examined through the theory of the public sphere, suggesting that societal members use information available to them to debate and determine meaning. Results found eight patterns in the photos associated with the hashtag: five were considered negative or undesirable, and three were considered positive or socially acceptable. This study also borrows theory from geography and the concept of contested space.
References
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Booth, P., & Davisson, A. (2008). Visualizing the rhetorical situation of Hurricane Katrina: Photography, popular culture, and meaning in images. American Communication Journal, 10(1), 4. Retrieved from http://www.ac-journal.org/
Bulmer, S., & Buchanan-Oliver, M. (2006). Visual rhetoric and global advertising imagery. Journal of Marketing Communications, 12(1), 49-61.
Chaudhry, I. (2015). #Hashtagging hate: Using Twitter to track racism online. FirstMonday, 20(2), 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i2.5450
Chidester, P. (2008). May the circle stay unbroken: Friends, the presence of absence, and the rhetorical reinforcement of whiteness. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(2), 157-174. doi:10.1080/15295030802031772
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Cohen, D. (2017, March 22). How Much Time will the Average Person on Social Media During Their Lifetime? Adweek, Retrieved from http://www.adweek.com/digital/mediakix-time-spent-social-media-infographic/
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Douai, A., & Nofal, H. K. (2012). Commenting in the online Arab public sphere: Debating the Swiss minaret ban and the 'ground zero mosque' online. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 17(3), 266-282. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01573.x
el-Nawawy, M., & Khamis, S. (2012). Divergent identities in the virtual Islamic public sphere: A case study of the English discussion forum 'Islamonline.’ Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, 5(1), 31-48. doi:10.1386/jammr.5.1.31_1
Foss, S. K. (1994). A rhetorical schema for the evaluation of visual imagery. Communication Studies, 45(3/4), 213–224. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10510979409368425
Foss, S. K. (2005). Theory of visual rhetoric. In K. Smith, S. Moriarty, G. Barbatsis, & K. Kenney (Eds.), Handbook of visual communication: Theory, methods, and media (pp. 141-52). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Fry, K. G. (1998). A cultural geography of Lake Wobegon. Howard Journal of Communications, 9(4), 303-321. doi:10.1080/106461798246925
Goodings, L., & Tucker, I. (2014). Social media and the co-production of bodies online: Bergson, Serres and Facebook’s timeline. Media, Culture & Society, 36(1), 37-51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443713507813
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Habermas, J., & Derrida, J. (2003). February 15, or what binds Europeans together: A plea for a common foreign policy, beginning in the core of Europe. Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory, 10(33), 291-297.
Hamdy, N., & Gomaa, E. H. (2012). Framing the Egyptian uprising in Arabic language newspapers and social media. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 195-211.
Harold, C., & DeLuca, K. M. (2005). Behold the corpse: Violent images and the case of Emmett Till. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 8(2), 263-286. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/rap.2005.0075
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Hope, D. S. (2006). Memorializing affluence in the postwar family. Visual Communication: Perception, Rhetoric & Technology, 91-109.
Isaksen, J. L. (2012). Resistive radio: African Americans’ evolving portrayal and participation from broadcasting to narrowcasting. Journal of Popular Culture, 45(4), 749-768.
Jackson, S. J., & Banaszczyk, S. (2016). Digital Standpoints. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 40(4), 391-407.
Jenkins, E. S. (2014). The modes of visual rhetoric: Circulating memes as expressions. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 100(4), 442-466.
Kobayashi, A. (2004). Critical ‘race’ approaches to cultural geography. In J. S. Duncan, N. C. Johnson, & R. H. Schein (Eds.), A companion to cultural geography (pp. 238-247). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.
Lamp, K. S. (2011). A city of brick: Visual rhetoric in Roman rhetorical theory and practice. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 44(2), 171-193.
Landau, J. (2009). Straightening out (the politics of) same-sex parenting: Representing gay families in U.S. print news stories and photographs. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26(1), 80-100.
Leib J. I. (2002). Separate times, shared spaces: Arthur Ashe, Monument Avenue and the politics of Richmond, Virginia’s symbolic landscape. Cultural Geographies, 9(3), 286–312.
Lim, M. (2012). Clicks, cabs, and coffee houses: Social media and oppositional movements in Egypt, 2004-2011. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 231-248.
Lumsden, L. (2010). Striking images: Visual rhetoric and social identify in the radical press, 1903-1917. Visual Communication Quarterly, 17(4), 225-240.
Lunt, P., & Stenner, P. (2005). The Jerry Springer Show as an emotional public sphere. Media Culture & Society, 27(1), 59-81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443705049058
Mace, D. (2014). In remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional stories and media responses to the Black freedom struggle. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.
Maurantonio, N. (2014). “That photo:” Journalism and bearing witness to history. Western Journal of Communication, 78(4), 500-521. doi:10.1080/10570314.2013.845687
McKittrick, K., & Woods, C. A. (2017). Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Toronto, Ontario: South End Press.
Merskin, D. (2010). The s-word: discourse, stereotypes, and the American Indian woman. Howard Journal of Communications, 21(4), 345–366.
Mitchell, D. (2000). Cultural geography: A critical introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, p. 13.
Nayak, A. (2011). Geography, race and emotions: Social and cultural intersections. Social and Cultural Geography, 12(6), 548-562.
Ndlovu, M. & Chilombo, M. (2013). Facebook, the public sphere and political youth leagues in South Africa. Journal of African Media Studies, 5(2), 169-186.
Neely, B., & Samura, M. (2011). Social geographies of race: Connecting race and space. Ethnic & Racial Studies, 34(11), 1933-1952. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.559262
Papacharissi, Z. (2002). The virtual sphere: the internet as a public sphere. New Media & Society 4(1), 9.
Patterson, R. E. (2011) The ‘Beer Summit’ and what’s brewing: Narratives, networks, and metaphors as rhetorical confinement in the age of Obama. Communication Studies, 62(4), 439-455.
Penney, J., & Dadas, C. (2014). (Re)Tweeting in the service of protest: Digital composition and circulation in the Occupy Wall Street movement. New Media & Society, 16(1), 74-90.
Rhodan, M. (2012, April 2) ‘Do I look suspicious?’ Howard students’ video goes viral: A group of students from the iconic HBCU come together to fight racial profiling and demand justice for Trayvon Martin. Ebony. Retrieved from http://www.ebony.com/news-views/do-i-look-suspicious-howard-students-video-goes-viral#axzz3NgB9f0bM
Rice, J. (2004). A critical review of visual rhetoric in a postmodern age: complementing, extending, and presenting new ideas. Review of Communication, 4(1/2), 63-74.
Rose, G. (2012). Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
Schein, R. H. (1999). Teaching “race” and the cultural landscape. Journal of Geography, 98(4), 188-190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221349908978881
Schill, D. (2012). The visual image and the political image: A review of visual communication research in the field of political communication. Review of Communication, 12(2), 118.
Seo, K., Dillard, J. P., & Shen, F. (2013). The effects of message framing and visual image on persuasion. Communication Quarterly, 61(5), 564-583.
Sloan, T. O., Gregg, R. B., Nilse, R. R., Rein, L. J., Simons, H. W., Stelzner, H. G., & Zacharias, D. W. (1971). Report of the committee of the advancement and refinement of rhetorical criticism. In L. F. Bitzer & E. Blacks (eds.). The prospect of rhetoric: Report of the National Developmental Project (pp. 220-227). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
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Stache, L. C. (2015). Advocacy and Political Potential at The Convergence of Hashtag Activism and Commerce. Feminist Media Studies, 15(1), 162-164.
The New York Times. (2012). Times topics: Trayvon Martin. Retrieved from http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/trayvon_martin/index.html
Thornton, D. J. (2013). The rhetoric of civil rights photographs: James Meredith’s march against fear. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 16(3), 457-487.
Tonn, M. B. (2011). 'From the eye to the soul': Industrial labor's Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones and the rhetorics of display. RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 41(3), 231-249.
Tyner, J. (2006). The Geography of Malcolm X: Black Radicalism and the Remaking of American Space. New York, NY: Routledge.
van Leeuwen, T., & Jaworski, A. (2002). The discourses of war photography: Photojournalistic representations of the Palestinian-Israeli war. Journal of Language & Politics, 1(2), 255-275.
Wahl-Jorgensen, K., & Galperin, H. (2000). Discourse ethics and the regulation of the media: The case of the U.S. newspaper. Journal of Communication Inquiry 24(1), 19-40.
Walsh, M. (2014, August 12). #IfTheyGunnedMeDown protests portrayal of black youth after Michael Brown’s death. New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/iftheygunnedmedown-protests-portrayal-black-youth-michael-brown-death-article-1.1900415
Whitaker, H. S. (2005). A case study in southern justice: The murder and trial of Emmett Till. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 8(2), 189-224.
Young, I. (2002). Inclusion and Democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Zeng, L., & Akinro, N. A. (2013). Picturing the Jos Crisis online in three leading newspapers in Nigeria: A visual framing perspective. Visual Communication Quarterly, 20(4), 196-204.
Bloch, L. R. (2000). Setting the public sphere in motion: The rhetoric of political bumper stickers in Israel. Political Communication, 17(4), 433-456.
Booth, P., & Davisson, A. (2008). Visualizing the rhetorical situation of Hurricane Katrina: Photography, popular culture, and meaning in images. American Communication Journal, 10(1), 4. Retrieved from http://www.ac-journal.org/
Bulmer, S., & Buchanan-Oliver, M. (2006). Visual rhetoric and global advertising imagery. Journal of Marketing Communications, 12(1), 49-61.
Chaudhry, I. (2015). #Hashtagging hate: Using Twitter to track racism online. FirstMonday, 20(2), 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i2.5450
Chidester, P. (2008). May the circle stay unbroken: Friends, the presence of absence, and the rhetorical reinforcement of whiteness. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(2), 157-174. doi:10.1080/15295030802031772
Everbach, T., Clark, M., & Nisbett, G. (2017). #IfTheyGunnedMeDown: An Analysis of Mainstream and Social Media in the Ferguson, Missouri, Shooting of Michael Brown. Electronic News. 12(1), 23-41.Published Online March 2017.
Cohen, D. (2017, March 22). How Much Time will the Average Person on Social Media During Their Lifetime? Adweek, Retrieved from http://www.adweek.com/digital/mediakix-time-spent-social-media-infographic/
Curran, J. (1997). Rethinking the media as the public sphere. In P. Dalhgren & C. Sparks (Eds.), Communication and citizenship: Journalism and the public sphere (pp. 27-57).London: Routledge.
Douai, A., & Nofal, H. K. (2012). Commenting in the online Arab public sphere: Debating the Swiss minaret ban and the 'ground zero mosque' online. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 17(3), 266-282. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01573.x
el-Nawawy, M., & Khamis, S. (2012). Divergent identities in the virtual Islamic public sphere: A case study of the English discussion forum 'Islamonline.’ Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, 5(1), 31-48. doi:10.1386/jammr.5.1.31_1
Foss, S. K. (1994). A rhetorical schema for the evaluation of visual imagery. Communication Studies, 45(3/4), 213–224. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10510979409368425
Foss, S. K. (2005). Theory of visual rhetoric. In K. Smith, S. Moriarty, G. Barbatsis, & K. Kenney (Eds.), Handbook of visual communication: Theory, methods, and media (pp. 141-52). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Fry, K. G. (1998). A cultural geography of Lake Wobegon. Howard Journal of Communications, 9(4), 303-321. doi:10.1080/106461798246925
Goodings, L., & Tucker, I. (2014). Social media and the co-production of bodies online: Bergson, Serres and Facebook’s timeline. Media, Culture & Society, 36(1), 37-51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443713507813
Grancea, I. (2014). Visual rhetoric and framing strategies in advertising word-based product categories. Argumentum: Journal of the Seminar of Discursive Logic, Argumentation Theory & Rhetoric, 12(1), 146-162. Retrieved from http://www.fssp.uaic.ro/argumentum/
Habermas, J. (1962/1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Habermas, J., & Derrida, J. (2003). February 15, or what binds Europeans together: A plea for a common foreign policy, beginning in the core of Europe. Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory, 10(33), 291-297.
Hamdy, N., & Gomaa, E. H. (2012). Framing the Egyptian uprising in Arabic language newspapers and social media. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 195-211.
Harold, C., & DeLuca, K. M. (2005). Behold the corpse: Violent images and the case of Emmett Till. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 8(2), 263-286. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/rap.2005.0075
Held, K. S. (2014, November 26). Mike Brown being misidentified on social media. KSDK, St. Louis. Retrieved from http://www.11alive.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/11/26/mike-brown-being-misidentified-on-social-media/19560333/
Hope, D. S. (2006). Memorializing affluence in the postwar family. Visual Communication: Perception, Rhetoric & Technology, 91-109.
Isaksen, J. L. (2012). Resistive radio: African Americans’ evolving portrayal and participation from broadcasting to narrowcasting. Journal of Popular Culture, 45(4), 749-768.
Jackson, S. J., & Banaszczyk, S. (2016). Digital Standpoints. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 40(4), 391-407.
Jenkins, E. S. (2014). The modes of visual rhetoric: Circulating memes as expressions. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 100(4), 442-466.
Kobayashi, A. (2004). Critical ‘race’ approaches to cultural geography. In J. S. Duncan, N. C. Johnson, & R. H. Schein (Eds.), A companion to cultural geography (pp. 238-247). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.
Lamp, K. S. (2011). A city of brick: Visual rhetoric in Roman rhetorical theory and practice. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 44(2), 171-193.
Landau, J. (2009). Straightening out (the politics of) same-sex parenting: Representing gay families in U.S. print news stories and photographs. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26(1), 80-100.
Leib J. I. (2002). Separate times, shared spaces: Arthur Ashe, Monument Avenue and the politics of Richmond, Virginia’s symbolic landscape. Cultural Geographies, 9(3), 286–312.
Lim, M. (2012). Clicks, cabs, and coffee houses: Social media and oppositional movements in Egypt, 2004-2011. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 231-248.
Lumsden, L. (2010). Striking images: Visual rhetoric and social identify in the radical press, 1903-1917. Visual Communication Quarterly, 17(4), 225-240.
Lunt, P., & Stenner, P. (2005). The Jerry Springer Show as an emotional public sphere. Media Culture & Society, 27(1), 59-81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443705049058
Mace, D. (2014). In remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional stories and media responses to the Black freedom struggle. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.
Maurantonio, N. (2014). “That photo:” Journalism and bearing witness to history. Western Journal of Communication, 78(4), 500-521. doi:10.1080/10570314.2013.845687
McKittrick, K., & Woods, C. A. (2017). Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Toronto, Ontario: South End Press.
Merskin, D. (2010). The s-word: discourse, stereotypes, and the American Indian woman. Howard Journal of Communications, 21(4), 345–366.
Mitchell, D. (2000). Cultural geography: A critical introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, p. 13.
Nayak, A. (2011). Geography, race and emotions: Social and cultural intersections. Social and Cultural Geography, 12(6), 548-562.
Ndlovu, M. & Chilombo, M. (2013). Facebook, the public sphere and political youth leagues in South Africa. Journal of African Media Studies, 5(2), 169-186.
Neely, B., & Samura, M. (2011). Social geographies of race: Connecting race and space. Ethnic & Racial Studies, 34(11), 1933-1952. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.559262
Papacharissi, Z. (2002). The virtual sphere: the internet as a public sphere. New Media & Society 4(1), 9.
Patterson, R. E. (2011) The ‘Beer Summit’ and what’s brewing: Narratives, networks, and metaphors as rhetorical confinement in the age of Obama. Communication Studies, 62(4), 439-455.
Penney, J., & Dadas, C. (2014). (Re)Tweeting in the service of protest: Digital composition and circulation in the Occupy Wall Street movement. New Media & Society, 16(1), 74-90.
Rhodan, M. (2012, April 2) ‘Do I look suspicious?’ Howard students’ video goes viral: A group of students from the iconic HBCU come together to fight racial profiling and demand justice for Trayvon Martin. Ebony. Retrieved from http://www.ebony.com/news-views/do-i-look-suspicious-howard-students-video-goes-viral#axzz3NgB9f0bM
Rice, J. (2004). A critical review of visual rhetoric in a postmodern age: complementing, extending, and presenting new ideas. Review of Communication, 4(1/2), 63-74.
Rose, G. (2012). Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
Schein, R. H. (1999). Teaching “race” and the cultural landscape. Journal of Geography, 98(4), 188-190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221349908978881
Schill, D. (2012). The visual image and the political image: A review of visual communication research in the field of political communication. Review of Communication, 12(2), 118.
Seo, K., Dillard, J. P., & Shen, F. (2013). The effects of message framing and visual image on persuasion. Communication Quarterly, 61(5), 564-583.
Sloan, T. O., Gregg, R. B., Nilse, R. R., Rein, L. J., Simons, H. W., Stelzner, H. G., & Zacharias, D. W. (1971). Report of the committee of the advancement and refinement of rhetorical criticism. In L. F. Bitzer & E. Blacks (eds.). The prospect of rhetoric: Report of the National Developmental Project (pp. 220-227). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (2014). Special reports from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Michael Brown. Retrieved from http://www.stltoday.com/news/special-reports/michael-brown/
Stache, L. C. (2015). Advocacy and Political Potential at The Convergence of Hashtag Activism and Commerce. Feminist Media Studies, 15(1), 162-164.
The New York Times. (2012). Times topics: Trayvon Martin. Retrieved from http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/trayvon_martin/index.html
Thornton, D. J. (2013). The rhetoric of civil rights photographs: James Meredith’s march against fear. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 16(3), 457-487.
Tonn, M. B. (2011). 'From the eye to the soul': Industrial labor's Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones and the rhetorics of display. RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 41(3), 231-249.
Tyner, J. (2006). The Geography of Malcolm X: Black Radicalism and the Remaking of American Space. New York, NY: Routledge.
van Leeuwen, T., & Jaworski, A. (2002). The discourses of war photography: Photojournalistic representations of the Palestinian-Israeli war. Journal of Language & Politics, 1(2), 255-275.
Wahl-Jorgensen, K., & Galperin, H. (2000). Discourse ethics and the regulation of the media: The case of the U.S. newspaper. Journal of Communication Inquiry 24(1), 19-40.
Walsh, M. (2014, August 12). #IfTheyGunnedMeDown protests portrayal of black youth after Michael Brown’s death. New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/iftheygunnedmedown-protests-portrayal-black-youth-michael-brown-death-article-1.1900415
Whitaker, H. S. (2005). A case study in southern justice: The murder and trial of Emmett Till. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 8(2), 189-224.
Young, I. (2002). Inclusion and Democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Zeng, L., & Akinro, N. A. (2013). Picturing the Jos Crisis online in three leading newspapers in Nigeria: A visual framing perspective. Visual Communication Quarterly, 20(4), 196-204.
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