Visually Arguing Ethically and Unethically

Last Saturday I was traveling now North Avenue coming back from the Farmer's Market. As I was driving, I saw a man holding a peculiar billboard sized sign. It read something like "Warning: Planned Parenthood Atrocities Revealed Ahead." Immediately, I thought "Oh Geez...Here we go again." My initial reaction was correct. Once again, another religious group, had taken it upon themselves to "reveal" the "atrocities" of abortions. The message was clear: Planned Parenthood kills babies. No fewer than 20 billboard sized pictures of dead babies were being displayed alongside each road. This fact I could deal with. I've seen this type of protest before. However, it was the fact that the protestors were using young kids to hold up signs that were bigger than them that appalled me. It was at this point that I decided I need to explore through blogging the issue of ethical and unethical visual arguments. In this post, I will discuss the possibilities of assessing the ethics of a visual argument. While I understand these assessments and interpretations are strictly from my subjective viewpoint, I think it is an extremely important issue that needs to be explored. It seems that with each year, visual rhetoric is being used more frequently to communicate. Thus, for the protection of society, for the advocacy of social justice, and for the sheer influential nature that visuals have on audiences, we, as rhetoricians and members of society, must fight for ethical and appropriate employment of visual rhetoric.

Ironically, the night that I had witnessed the dead baby protest (a.k.a. D.B.) I also read an article in one of my "guilty pleasure" magazines that showcased, in my opinion, an ethical and appropriate use of visual rhetoric. This month's Marie Claire magazine discussed a campaign that has been gaining widespread attention since its introduction onto the world wide wed. Operation Beautiful, as the campaign is called, began when a 26 year old female caught herself questioning her image in the mirror of a public bathroom. At that moment, she wrote "you are beautiful" on the mirror, took a picture of the image, and posted it on a website. Her 'post-it' encouraged other women to create positive messages for other women in the United States. Millions of women are now constructing "post-its" and displaying them in various places to promote the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of females. The campaign is largely dependent upon women taking photographs of their messages and posting these online. Thus, the arguments embedded within Operation Beautiful all center on the idea that women should value who they are despite what society says about their weight, looks, intellect, etc. The visual messages communicate a sense of well-being and contentment in who a woman is as a person not what she looks like. Several magazines have covered the campaign and the press are now deeming it a "social movement." On the Operation Beautiful website, numerous testimonials illustrate the positive reinforcement that the visual rhetoric has had on their daily lives. This, to me, is an ethical and appropriate use of visual rhetoric.

To conclude, when comparing the D.B. act with the Operation Beautiful campaign, I cannot help but be struck at the shark difference in purpose, consequence, and use of a visual message. In the case of the D.B. pictures, the protestors were avocating for the abolotion of abortion. They were fighting to ultimately "save babies," yet to do so they forced kids (some looked as young as 5) to hold signs that displayed photographs no adult should even see. What was the purpose? Was it to evoke feelings of guilt and lamentation? Or, was it simply to shock? Whatever the purpose, I feel it was unethical. Thus, this leads me to the questions: "Can visual arguments be unethical? Should visual rhetoric be assessed in terms of ethics or would this assessment force too much of a subjective perspective on the rhetors?"

Whatever the answer, I am avoiding North Avenue for the time being and instead learning more about Operation Beautiful.

Intro to the Disco Sphere

Hello Followers-

In my part of cyberspace, I will be identfying and analyzing visual arguments. For rhetoricians, there is an ongoing debate about whether or not a visual text can stand alone as an argument, or if to be considered an argument it must be accompanied by written text. Currently, I am of the thinking that a visual text can stand alone because of enthymemes, but I look forward to exploring this topic further and perhaps changing my opinion. I have yet to decide what particular case/context/artifact I will be analyzing for the final project. It is possible that I will use this blog to "try out" a few different ideas. I have been working on a paper about the "How Can you Sleep" campaign by the Pathfinders organization in Milwaukee. The campaign utilized billboards and life-sized stickers that featured homeless youth sleeping in various places around the city. These artifacts were an attempt to provoke feelings of lamentation from the audience, which would eventually influence society to donate more money to helping homeless youth. I am seriously considering using this campaign as an artifact, but am not ready to commit this early. I look forward to reading other blogs and hope that a productive discussion occurs on mine. Cheers!