Visual Rhetoric of the Great Depression and the Great Recession

In this post I am going to compare and explore the differences in visual rhetoric from the Great Depression of the 1930’s to the visual rhetoric of the great recession of the 2000’s. It is often stated that a picture is worth a thousand words, so clearly photographs have a huge influence on us as people. They have the ability to make us feel a certain way and impact our choices. While photography has come a long way since the 30’s, it is still a creative form of expression that impacts how we think and feel about something.

Look at the above photograph; it is one of the most iconic pictures of the Great Depression. You probably have no idea how much of an impact this one photograph had. Let’s think of the original context of this picture, this captured life at one of the many FSA farms across the country. What you probably don’t realize is that the photographer was only one the farm because her family’s car broke down. You probably also didn’t know that this particular farm received 20,000 pounds of food from the federal government because of this picture. The headlines read that thousands were starving in these camps and the photo was there to cause an emotional response. This photo put a personal face with one of the hardest times in American history. This iconic photo is still used today and it defines an important period of our history.

The photographer appealed to pathos in this picture and it worked. She made the audience feel bad for the people at these farms and it resulted in help from the government. The photos used today to document the great recession are doing the same thing. They show people standing in long unemployment lines and pictures of children growing up in poverty. Photo editing software has also given people the ability to alter the original photos to make a greater appeal to you emotions. The technology has changed a great deal since the depression, but photographers are still appealing to your emotions and are able to impact your decisions with a single photograph. Next week I might explore more visual rhetoric focusing more on the great recession.

Sources used:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_Mother

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://0.tqn.com/d/history1900s/1/0/a/gd45.gif&imgrefurl=http://history1900s.about.com/od/photographs/tp/greatdepressionpictures.htm&h=600&w=462&sz=84&tbnid=hS0XmT_f8_5flM:&tbnh=84&tbnw=65&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dgreat%2Bdepression%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=great+depression&docid=rSFwaAIKCZDX0M&hl=en&sa=X&ei=C4R_Tq2cCOzfsQKdwNke&sqi=2&ved=0CF0Q9QEwBQ&dur=278

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html

Where is Creativity Going in the Digital Age?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines creativity as “the ability to make new things or think of new ideas.” So in the age of computers what does it mean to be creative? Does making a YouTube video classify you as creative? Does using Photoshop or editing software to do something unique to a photo mean that you are creative? Where does blogging fall in the realm of creativity? These questions affect us all on a daily basis. It is easier for “Digital Natives” to be creative than any other generation before. The formality of being able to get your creative work to the masses has dissolved.

Take writing for example; being a writer in the nineteenth and twentieth century was hard work. An aspiring writer had to write their manuscript, most of the time by hand, and then take it to a publisher. The publisher then got to decide whether or not your work was worth being published. All of the books you see in bookstores still follow this convention, but eBooks are now an entirely different story. Barnes and Noble have come out with a free service called PubIt! This essentially eliminates the middleman. The idea is that you can log into this web portal and self publish your work and sell it in their eBook store. This is a prime example of how the digital world has lowered the barriers of creativity. You could also look at this with regards to the music industry and YouTube. So, are we more creative than the generations before us or are there simply less obstacles in our way?

Sources:

http://youthandmedia.org/wiki/Portal:Digital_Creativity

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/search/creativity

http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com/pubit_app/bn?t=support

Creativity, Piracy, and Intellectual Property

I have selected Creativity, Piracy, and Intellectual Property as my inquiry area. This topic stood out the most to me from the list. I think that the growth of the digital world has drastically changed the way people express themselves. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace have changed what it means to share and be creative. Piracy is also a growing problem in the music and movie industries. Computers have made it somewhat easy to share and copy files. Moral lines are blurred when it is so easy to attain illegal material.

I aim to explore all of these issues in depth this semester. I hope to explore how this is impacting the culture of “Digital Natives”. I also hope to look how it is affecting society as a whole and the global implications. How do people in other parts of the world look at the issues? Do “Digital Natives” ideas of what is right and moral differ from their parent’s views? Should blogging always be considered a form of creativity? I also wish to look at the impact that this inquiry area is having on education. I believe that this will be a relevant topic for a very long time as technology improves and ease of access increases.

Sources Used:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/youthandmedia/digitalnatives/areasofinquiry

http://www.borndigitalbook.com/