Visual Communication. Janis Teruggi Page

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When you meet a stranger at a bar, you automatically draw conclusions about the person's age, gender, and their differences or similarities to yourself. You process a huge amount of information almost instantaneously and use shortcuts to assign that person to certain categories. Are they a student, professor, office worker, soldier, athlete, other? Of course, you may be mistaken in this process, thinking that an old‐looking individual is a teacher when he's actually a student, or the heavily tattooed woman who looks like a Goth may actually be a social worker or a business executive (tattoos are no longer taboo in many corporate offices).

      We also use physical and visual cues to identify that a truck is a type of motorized transportation, that an apple falls into the category of fruit, and that a starling is a species of bird. This quick categorization is an evolutionary adaptation and helps us conserve cognitive resources. By that we mean that every time you encounter a phenomenon, you don't need to think a lot about what it is and what it means to you. Trying to understand others' intentions toward oneself is a crucial survival skill, and visual cues are the primary means we use to make evaluations.

      Sometimes, however, we are influenced by unconscious bias and make faulty snap judgments, raising ethical concerns. Inferences we make about people may lead us to make bad choices when evaluating them. The ethical questions raised with this impulse to judge begins our study of routines and practices in our daily and professional lives that concern visual ethics.

       Key Learning Objectives

      After engaging in this chapter, you'll be able to:

       Chapter Overview

In this chapter, we'll outline useful approaches to ethical decision‐making in creating and consuming visuals. You’ll see real‐world examples including the ethics of using graphic photos and videos, issues related to memes and remixes as well as photo manipulation, and stereotyping. We'll discuss visual framing, the concept that any image or video is created and presented in ways that highlight some aspects of a phenomenon or event while downplaying or eliminating other aspects. These frames thus present readers and viewers with different meanings. A related issue is that of visual metaphors where viewers are invited to see one thing in terms of another. For example, a Nike ad showing a tennis star serving a grenade instead of a tennis ball highlights not only the star's explosive serve, but the Nike brand gear that presumably enables it. Finally, we work through a concrete example of applying an ethical framework to a health communication issue and introduce you to the Potter Box, a well‐known and frequently used approach to media ethics questions.

HOW VISUALS WORK: ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS

      LO1 Understand the ethical dimensions of visual communication

      You can imagine how our quick assessments of others and their possible intentions toward us can be either adaptive or damaging. These instant evaluations are heuristics, or shortcuts, in thinking. They may also be forms of stereotyping. We may conclude that an older person is unimportant, an unattractive individual is less competent, or a member of a minority is somehow threatening (Belluck, 2009).

      You likely have seen images of American indigenous people appropriated in professional and college sports logos, essentially promoting a warrior identity as well as commodifying it. In their edited volume, Images that Injure: Stereotypes in the Media, Ross and Lester provide a compilation of images and critiques on gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, religion, and nationality (Ross, 2011, p. 3). Sexualized stereotypes of both women and men have been heavily used in advertising.

      Significantly, much research on visuals and stereotyping suggests that media depictions are more likely to stereotype African Americans as violent criminals, and people draw negative conclusions from those stereotypes (Welch, 2007). Some studies show that video newscasts are more likely to show African American men as angry and handcuffed, and others conclude that crime reporting often demonizes African Americans (Anderson, 1995; Gerbner, 2003). Welch (2007) writes, “these images are so widespread that it would not be surprising if much of American society has subconsciously come to accept the visual portrayal of Blacks as criminals in contemporary society” (p. 281–282). This doesn't mean that news media workers are purposely portraying minorities in a negative way. It does mean that they are likely interpreting events through stereotypes and shortcuts.

      In the same vein, visuals have important political implications, particularly in an age of easily shared photos, symbols, and mashups. Research shows that looks matter. Ballew and Todorov (2007) asked participants to quickly glance at photos of real candidates who were unknown to the participants and then choose their favorites. It turned out that even though people in the study had no knowledge of the candidate they selected, their snap judgments predicted almost 70% of the winners of US House and Senate races. Thus, as Page and Duffy (2018) point out, in a world increasingly dominated by visual messages distributed largely in online settings, we tend to draw critical inferences about people based on very little real information.

The power of images to be interpreted as evidence of what's real and true also can be used for unethical purposes, intentionally, or unintentionally. Visuals embrace us, excite us, strike us, hurt us, lift us up, and make us yearn. The power of visuals and their representation of what looks like reality makes them particularly interesting and important to study from the standpoint of ethics.

      Ethical issues in any field – and especially in media – arise when different interests and intentions collide. As Patterson and Wilkins (1997) put it, “Ethics is less about the conflict between right and wrong than it is about the conflict between equally compelling (or equally unattractive) values and the choices that must be made between them” (p. 3).

      For example, a journalist may take a compelling photograph or video of a person who has been hurt or injured because they wish to highlight an important event or social issue or simply because it appears to be newsworthy. Some may argue that the most important ethical value in this situation is the journalist's duty to depict the truth. Others may say that showing graphic images is offensive and may invade the privacy of an individual or their family and thus would be ethically questionable.