ABSTRACT
Visual content has come to dominate the social media platforms. As a consequence, users are engaging, near constantly, with photos and video and graphics: they are deciding what to watch, what to post, what to like, what to retweet, what to meme. Looking at images is a partisan act. Images are not neutral nor is the reception of them, and certainly engagement with photos and videos and gifs is fraught with political implications. But the act of liking or sharing often occurs reflexively. Ordinary individuals, cocooned in the implicit assumptions that others hold similar perspectives as themselves, can be oblivious to the political force of liking or sharing an image. How to make individuals more conscious of the impact of their choices? How to make visible to individuals that even like-minded consumers and producers of images may “see” images differently? In this essay, Susan Moeller details visual exercises used in the hyper-diverse classrooms at the Salzburg Academy—exercises that demonstrate that seemingly like-minded students may evaluate visual information differently from each other, while distinctive “others”, who appear to have little in common, may in fact share common ways of seeing.
