Article
Unlocking the power of visual grammar theory: analyzing social media political advertising messages in the 2016 US election
Journal of Visual Literacy
(2017)
Abstract
Social media advertisers often use visuals in their ads to capture their audience’s attention. Walter and Gioglio (2014) find that social media directly reduces the audience’s attention span, which they call the new commodity. In this context, visuals are our new currency. However, the subject of visual grammar theories has not been fully examined in relation to the design of advertising messages found in social media. During the 2016 US presidential election, social media conveyed the two leading candidates’ messages. We conduct a comparative analysis to evaluate two leading visual grammar theories, those of Kress and van Leeuwen (2002) and Wilkinson (1999), and report that Kress and van Leeuwen’s theory leads to a better in-depth analysis of the visual messages found in two political ads from the U.S. presidential race of 2016.
Keywords
- Visual grammar theory,
- Kress and van Leeuwen theory,
- Wilkinson theory,
- 2016 US presidential election,
- D. Trump,
- H. Clinton,
- social media,
- political advertising
Disciplines
Publication Date
Winter February 24, 2017
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1051144X.2017.1379758
Citation Information
Alon Friedman and Shlomi Ron. "Unlocking the power of visual grammar theory: analyzing social media political advertising messages in the 2016 US election" Journal of Visual Literacy Vol. 36 Iss. 1 (2017) ISSN: 1051-144X Available at: http://works.bepress.com/alon-friedman/24/
Creative Commons license
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY International License.