Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture

Book Synopsis: In today’s digital media environment we are creating and consuming more images than ever before. From the importance of image in politics, to the ubiquity of the ‘selfie’ across social media platforms, visual communication is increasingly central to our everyday mediated lives. It is more important than ever to examine the social and cultural implications of mediated images – but how can we really interrogate the work that images do? Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture provides a theoretical and empirical toolkit to do just that. It explores a range of approaches to visual analysis, while also providing a hands-on guide to applying a diverse range of methods to your own work.

The book:

• Illustrates multiple perspectives, from content analysis and semiotics, to multimodal and critical discourse analysis.
• Explores the centrality of images to issues of identity and representation, politics and activism, and commodities and consumption.
• Brings theory to life with a host of original case studies, from celebrity videos on YouTube and civil unrest on Twitter, to the lifestyle branding of Vice Media and Getty Images.
• Shows you how to combine approaches and methods to best suit your own research questions and projects.

An invaluable guide to analysing contemporary media images, this is essential reading for students and researchers of visual communication and visual culture.