Rhetorical Strategy and Visual Art

I was recently at the hospital (for my little brother who broke his thumb snowboarding), where I noticed a sign that said "ANTIBIOTICS... kills bacteria NOT viruses." But it wasn't the caption that caught my attention, it was the visual animation it was displayed upon. The visual image was a cartoon. It had pictures of cartoon bacteria getting killed by antibiotics and cartoon viruses with a shield, showing that they are immune to the effects of the antibiotics. So below, I have some pictures similar to the cartoon I saw in the doctor's office, and then I also have pictures of what bacteria and viruses actually look like under a microscope.

Here's what viruses look like in the doctor's office:

Here's what viruses really look like:

Here's what bacteria looks like in the doctor's office:

Here's what bacteria really looks like:

Here’s what N1H1 looks like at the doctor's office:

Here’s what N1H1 really looks like:

So the way I see it, is that by reducing the immediacy of the images presented to patients, you essentially "euphemize" an image, or make what is really scary and essentially deadly, appear almost silly and controllable; that is a rhetorical strategy employed in visual art.

Kids get introduced to Technology so young :)

This video has more of a point than just being simply adorable! :) That is my nephew, Jacob. He is 3 months old there, and yes, he is having a blast on the computer. In fact, that baby has used a computer, pushing a particular set of keys for a particular reaction (either noise or lights), before he has said his first word, or used the potty. It seems that modern humans are innately attracted to computers, simply because computers are a remediation of the past, and I wonder how much more of an advantage children who are born into a techno-savvy world have over the generations like mine, and those that came before, who had to learn had to learn how to adapt as opposed to having it immediately available?

Immediacy and Film Censorship

Bolster, David Jay and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT P., 2000:
99-112.

Bolster and Grusin make a cool point about immediacy and censorship when they state: "Books are not censored as strictly as film and television because for our visual culture the written world does not have the immediacy that a moving picture has" (99). So while pornographic novels may fall just under the radar of cultural scrutiny, when it comes to photographs, which attempt to mimic the real, "the cultural line is clearly crossed" (99). Moreover, the idea that because movies and television are "photographs in motion" (99), explains why pornographic film and photography is deemed scanty. It seems to me that the immediacy of the photos and film is what alters the cultural acceptation and reception of erotica.; nonetheless, it is all a remediation of what came before; pornographic flip- books, now that's techno-savvy :).

Video Games are Patriotic :)

Bolster, David Jay and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT P.,
2000.

Video games attempt to mimic the real; through transparent immediacy they literally "get into the heads" of players," which may be why many "gamers" have that foggy stare with gapping mouths as they are consumed in their virtual life :). For me the transparent immediacy and the mental consumption that many video games possess is terrifying, especially given that so many of the popular games today are saturated with death, devastation, violence and war. Yet despite the collective goal of violence and destruction that many popular games now promote, Bolster and Grusin claim that "ideologically the player is asked to defend or reestablish the status quo, so that even though the violence of the games appears to be antisocial, the ultimate message is not" (91); which is an interesting thought given that I had believed prior that war video games only sprouted mini-spawns of Satan. .So maybe video games aren’t from the devil after all; I only look forward to examining the cultural affect interactive games seem to have upon people.