Week One

1. In the PL the authors claim "our lives are increasingly dominated by the visual" (p. 1) since we depend on our electronic devices to make us feel connected to our surrounding culture. Even though we rely on images, we know that they cannot always communicate the whole story so we depend on print to fill in the rest of the information. While images have different meaning to each viewer, print is less open to interpretation since the author has a better opportunity to explain what she means.

2. Culture is defined as "a whole way of life" (p. 3) and classifies people according to their activities and interests. Visual rhetoric is made up of the images that are exchanged within a culture. In order to understand visual rhetoric one must understand that different cultures may perceive the same image in very different ways.

3. Sturken and Cartwright offer three approaches to their audience as ways to understand the text (p.). The first is to use theory when studying images and meanings. The second uses psychology and social patterns to examine responses to visuality. The third approach mentioned encourages us to look across cultures to see how the meanings of different media change.

4. Connotative meaning describes how an image can be interpreted different ways depending on what the image means to each person, according to their cultural makeup and historical knowledge of the image. The denotative meaning of an image is more specific and less open to interpretation since it is a literal meaning of an image.

5. Ideologies are a culture's system of beliefs. Sturken and Cartright argue that by darkening O.J. Simpson's skin tone Time was influencing the public because the same practice was used in the entertainment industry to portray villains, during the nineteenth century.

6. An image is considered to have value if it has social, cultural or historical meaning. Social value refers to the popularity of the work and the image's monetary worth. An image is culturally valuable if the audience is able to relate to the work and feel that the image has a significance in relation to their set of values. When an image captures a historical moment the work is considered valuable to that culture as well.

7. There is no fail proof way for a producer to ensure their message is received as they intended. Some of the variables that prevent this can be how the ads are juxtapositioned against others, or the context in which a viewer receives the image.

8. According to Karl Marx, the people that "own the means of production are also in control of the ideas and viewpoints produced and circulated" (p. 69).

9. Hegemony means that "power is negotiated among all classes of people" rather than being upheld by one class over another (p. 70). For a society to have hegemony there would have to be negotiations regarding meanings, laws and social relationships.