Abstract
This article reviews literature on visual rhetoric in political campaigning and synthesizes several strands of current research devoted to the rhetorical potential of communicating with visuals in online environments. It uses rhetorical concepts of identification and manoeuvring, as well as the category of topos, to discuss the implications of an abductive analysis of a coded corpus of 1976 Instagram images posted during 2019 election to the European Parliament campaign in Poland. On this basis, the article offers recommendations related to the awareness of topoi in visual rhetoric to foster users’ creative inventory. In the context of increasingly strategically designed and creative online political communications, scholarship should offer guidance on how to parse images according to how they (mis)represent political reality to fit the purposes of elite communicators, and how to challenge them.
Highlights
By analogy to media literacy (Livingstone, 2004), visual literacy is the ability to find, access, analyze and use images, be they photos, videos, animations or infographics, efficiently and responsibly for the purposes of study, work, and civic action
The following presentation includes our interpretation of emerging patterns of political campaigning in relation to: Instagram’s photographic affordances, the dominant profile types, party-specific presentational strategies, individual self-promotion techniques and identitybased persuasion, as well as the uses of stock imagery, various ideology-laden topoi
We focus on the questions if and how these topoi are creatively reconstructed in the new medium of Instagram
Summary
By analogy to media literacy (Livingstone, 2004), visual literacy is the ability to find, access, analyze and use images, be they photos, videos, animations or infographics, efficiently and responsibly for the purposes of study, work, and civic action. Rhetorical visual literacy would include the ability to parse imagery in order to identify the persuasive potential of visual affordances used to express arguments and stances in the public domain (Conole & Dyke, 2004). Visual rhetorical literacy – as a set of complex competences – extends to the domains of artistic creativity and media-savviness. This article reviews the literature on visual persuasion in political communication and synthesizes several strands of current research devoted to the rhetorical potential of photographic images. We are not oblivious to the multitude of creative, pro-democratic uses of images in online political communication; neither do we assume a completely visually and rhetorically illiterate public. With the advent of new visualization technologies, new research on psychology of media influence, or new strategies of targeting through algorithms, the general public may not have much chance to resist this manoeuvring in political campaigning
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