English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Morgan, this idea has gotten me thinking about the ways that people use computers to construct (non-academic) knowledge. Before meeting my soon-to-be sister-in-law’s new baby, I had received dozens of emails with links to online photo albums containing pictures of her new baby. Without having met her child, these pictures were the only way I could be introduced to the new addition to their family. These pictures froze images of her sleeping, eating, crying, laughing, and playing, pictures of her in the bathtub and getting her clothes changed, pictures of her with her mom, dad, grandparents, dogs, friends, aunts and uncles, pictures of her clean and dirty, pictures of her sitting up, lying down, on her stomach, on her back, and thousands of other ones. By the time I finally did meet her, I felt like I already knew her! To what degree can images, and the transmission of those images, be responsible for making me feel like I know her? (For me, this calls up the discussions we had about the avatars.)