We looked over this article in my Visual Rhetoric class over the summer, from a different viewpoint of course and that is what I find most interesting about this article. Before I was looking at how these things really work visually rather than how they function as a part of language, and now that I approached this article in such a way I found an immediate connection to agency. Using the idea of amplification through simplification, by simplifying the agent the theory is that the meaning will become clearer or more easily evident. Just as we are able to see ourselves in an image that is less clear because it is universal, are we not able to relate with an agent that we know less about? If we only know a basic background about them or just what they believe in or a little bit of their struggles rather than a full blown biography we can look at things in our own way rather than through their eyes. The message and meaning become more personal to us in this way, thus there is "amplification through simplification."
1 comment:
I agree with the idea that we can identify with the simplistic. The example of the stick figure sketch is easily identifiable because we can easily juxtapose the image of ourselves into a stick figure. On the other hand the more specific and intricate a sketch gets the less we can see ourselves in it; therefore we cannot identify with it.
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