Poster, The - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2017

This article compares Nazi propaganda items to fake news published on Italian social media. Propagandistic fake news in Italy is a hot topic highlighted globally by The New York Times and other international media, as it is widely recognized that this issue is compromising the correct development of political communication. Drawing on propaganda studies, multimodality, Van Leuween’s categories of social semiotic inquiry and Stuart Hall’s analysis of photography, the article analyses propagandistic items published in the Nazi magazine Der Stürmer from 1928 to 1942, and memes published on Italian social media and gathered by the website www.bufale.net. The results show that in the Nazi item drawings had the function of inventing reality, while photographs did not lie at the visual level. It was the caption, instead, which invented reality. By contrast, the analysis of the Italian propagandistic items demonstrates that photographs ‘fabricate’ reality, as drawings did in the Nazi case. To quote Stuart Hall, in the past each Nazi photograph did not lie, but showed various potential meanings, while the caption selected one of them to stress it. In the Italian case, photographs lie, as they present a reality that is invented and falsely connected to the topic of the meme. It is the caption, instead, that constructs the propagandistic meaning. In conclusion, the article underlines how propagandistic photographs have changed the relationship between image and caption.

Colin Kaepernick takes a knee during the singing of the national anthem at an NFL game, and the digital midwife helps birth a movement. Mike Pence is called out from the stage at a performance of the smash-hit musical, Hamilton, and the President of the United States takes to Twitter in rebuttal. New York’s Public Theater and its acclaimed artistic director, Oskar Eustis, stage a thinly veiled parable of the Trump presidency in their Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of Julius Caesar. Images of the performance are alternatively venerated and eviscerated on social media, frightened sponsors pull out and audiences attack the stage. Welcome to the new arena, where the theatre and the stadium have once more taken their places as flashpoints for political protest, and where digital media are not mere witnesses, but powerful participants. This article deploys these examples to ‘re-image-ine’ classical notions of the epideictic as rhetorical display. Engaging with William Beale’s 1978 rhetorical performative update to this classification, along with theorizations of performance and technical images, I argue the epideictic has the unique ability to reflect the values of the community in the moment, activating audiences and speakers in new ways. Modern audiences, informed by digital technologies and evolving relationships to the live event, have entered new areas of interaction and performance that invite new scholarship and explication. How can epideictic performance, (conceived as display and ceremony, but also as live in ways that deliberative and forensic rhetoric are not) act as a useful theory for understanding digital realities and moments of disruption and resistance?

The image-sharing social media platform Instagram has become a site for political discourse that combines visual and textual elements. These political conversations often take place in the form of memes or popular graphic sentiments intended for redistribution. Scholars have identified memes as markers of subcultural knowledge that may be used to reinforce beliefs and norms, define social boundaries and disparage outgroups. Gun rights activism in the United States has intensified in an increasingly partisan environment. We examined memes shared via Instagram to popular gun culture hashtags between June 2016 and February 2018. Insofar as memes act as vehicles for subcultural beliefs and values, here they may be seen as representing multiple realities from the perspective of Second Amendment enthusiasts: descriptions of their perceived reality, justifying the need for guns and conservative political positions; the construed reality of what the meme creators and sharers believe to be liberal attitudes; and the aspirational reality of a world that offers unobstructed support for their priorities. In other words, these memes can collectively be said to represent both the truth about the world, as seen by these users, and cultural messages to set power differentials and identity boundaries with Others.

A combination of image, text, historical reflection and political commentary, this graphic research article explores the use and abuse of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address within the US public sphere. In 155 years since Lincoln gave this speech, his words have been subsumed into all manner of heated debates on issues such as race, class, international relations and the Civil War’s legacy. Indeed, as Barry Schwartz argues, the Address’s figurative power lies not in a single interpretation, but in the way in which successive generations reinterpret it ‘in light of new situations and challenges’. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, it has continually served as a rhetorical battleground upon which arbiters of various political persuasions wage war over the meaning of American democracy – past, present and future. When soon-to-be President Trump delivered his ‘Contract with the American Voter’ at Gettysburg in October 2016, he was but the latest in a long line of politicians to put the Address’s symbolic power in the service of his own ideological ends. ‘Every salesman needs a pitch’ writes the historian Jared Peatman. ‘And over time, increasing numbers of Americans came to see the Gettysburg Address as the most effective way to sell the ideals of this country, both internally and externally’. A collaboration between a graphic designer and visual culture historian, Gettysburg Inc. is a satirical rendering of the Gettysburg Address for the contemporary era. Taking the form of a sleek corporate brochure, this article explores the disconnect between words and deeds, truth and fiction, democratic ideals and the political process. Visually, we draw on the ‘hand of Lincoln’ motif, central to the president’s visual mediation in historical paintings, sketches, political campaign posters, advertisements and sculptures. Appropriating and reframing words, images and events from the recent past, we engage with ideas on the politics of collective memory, and the symbiotic relationship between memory and ‘forgetting’. A piece of critical design, Gettysburg Inc. is a reflection on the unstable nature of collective memory, and an exploration of the ways in which graphic design can engage with, and offer new perspectives on, history and politics.

In November of 2016, the US elected its first post-truth candidate. In the wake of the turbulent election and media cycle, it is crucial to take stock of the political, cultural and technological developments that brought us to this point. I argue that the rise and success of a candidate such as Donald Trump is an inevitable upshot of a PR-steeped media environment. This article examines recent trends in PR and digital media that have contributed towards a post-truth social and political paradigm in the United States. I identify candidate Trump as the quintessential post-truth candidate, highlight the deleterious effects of exposure to PR-speak on the electorate’s media literacy and discuss the various PR tactics that Trump used to exploit the schismatic fertile ground laid by decades of corporate PR strategy. I consider the dangers of a public inexperienced in critical media evaluation and further fragmented by social media bubbles that promote groupthink and make citizens more susceptible to falsehoods. Further, I address Russia’s recent disinformation campaign that worked to help elect Trump and illustrate how PR strategies originating in advertising are being used not only by political candidates but also by foreign powers seeking to influence US elections. All of these developments related to PR and media technology have corroded national political discourse and culminated in an attack on US democracy in the twenty-first century.