Reading Blog 1

I thought this article was an interesting dive into Web 2.0 contribution to our visually-dominant society today and what constitutes visual literacy in the modern age. The article stated that “deconstructing and understanding the world in purely linguistic terms is neither satisfactory nor adequate any longer.” The possible drivers of this phenomena that immediately stuck out to me are the image-rich world that has been promoted by the rise of the internet (or Web 2.0), the increased globalization of the world, and the increasingly competitive landscape of advertising and branding. The article then goes on to say that “living in an image rich world…does not mean students (or faculty and administrators) naturally possess sophisticated visual literacy skills.” This is evidenced as true in the United States by the modern effectiveness of misleading or untrue imagery in the media, which has leveraged society as a whole’s lack of visual literacy to propel agendas and increase polarization in American society.

This discussion of increased visualization of the world without a corresponding increase in visual literacy reminded me of the work of an artist by the name of Simon Menner. I viewed pieces from his “Role Models” project on display at the Urban Nation gallery in Berlin. he describes the project as follows:

“I have searched through islamist propaganda videos for gestures that origin in (western) media and paired them with similar gestures from within a western context. These gestures are part of our language and are very much influence by a common media consumption. I find it quite fascinating to see these gestures used in propaganda that aims at the destruction of the west.”

I made the connection between the article and this project because of the power the original imagery manipulated by Menner holds in its respective nations, and how when Menner strips away the excess to reveal how similar the imagery is on either side of the same conflict, he reveals the importance of being visually literate when viewing the imagery in isolation or when presented by a certain party. Menner's work shown below: