Visual Rhetoric in Wechat Moments—A Research Based on Virtual Ethnography

Abstract

As a typical representative, Wechat Moments highly integrates virtual sapce and real life, within which the communication mostly takes place between acquaintances. Therefore, Wechat Moments has become an important stage for individuals, especially college students, to express themselves and establish and manage their personal images. Self-compiled information, including various visual elements such as texts, photos, emojis, pictures etc. in Wechat Moments is often carefully designed and selected, which will have an ideological influence on the reader. Therefore, this paper takes the visual rhetoric theory as the theoretical framework, and the virtual ethnography as the research method, to investigate the behavior of college students in using Wechat Moments to achieve rhetorical purposes to establish their personal images. The results of the categorical analysis indicate that most of the people's Wechat Moments is about their daily life, generally for sharing or remembering, wanting to show their positive side of life. Then, the content analysis suggests that both the denotative meaning and the connotative meaning of the visual elements should be noticed. Finally, the rhetorical analysis provides an interpretation of the connotations of posting Wechat Moments.