I keep coming back to the issue of Audience with my Charts and Graphs. The Audience will have a huge impact on what and how you present you information. After a lot of thought, I realized the large amount of variables one would have to account for when creating a chart or a graph:
Education
Sub-Culture
Media Outlets
Region of Population
Age Groups
There is a lot to account for and the individual will interpret the data how they see fit. There is a lot to be said for the image itself though and how it is constructed.
Richard,
ReplyDeleteI think your chart 2.0 is a really nice improvement both in terms of content and presentation—it looks much cleaner, and I could parse the connections more easily. As weird as it may sound, the theorists I most see informing your chart are Adorno & Horkheimer, Debord, and Acconci. To explain, I see your chart as approaching the rhetorical struggle that happens via media. There is a tension between trying to manipulate our audience with spectacle and trying to meaningfully negotiate our audiences’ commitments with our own. Your address of the ethics of this situation is something unique, I think, insofar as we tend to look at issues of power and media, but not necessarily issues of right and wrong.
I would like to see the ethical component of what you are doing more foregrounded because, as I said, I do not think we have really discussed the ethics of mediation thusfar. How would this look? Which ethical systems would be used? I think it would be interesting to look back at some of the theorists that we have read and explore how they position themselves in terms of normativity: are they concerned with ethics, or are they merely concerned with power differentials? Is there an ethical subtext when we are talking about power differences, or is there merely one group’s interests versus another’s?
I think it should be clear from my response, but one thing that your chart helps me to see that traditional academic writing might not be able to articulate is that media are ethically ambiguous. It is easy to think about media rhetorically, but my brain starts to revolt when I try thinking about media ethically. It hurts in a good way. Thanks!