ABSTRACT
xixThe development of new technologies in the post-war period of the 20th century has both democratised and enhanced visual practices. This in turn has led to a gradual re-evaluation of visual communication, which has gained added momentum at the start of the 21st century with the co-emergence of smartphones and social media. Sharing pictures online has enabled people to enter into predominantly pictorial dialogues. This chapter takes a brief look at how the visual turn occurring in the second half of the previous century constitutes a re-appreciation of visual communication. This new approach relates to a “new visual literacy” which can be contrasted with the preceding structuralist and modernist “old visual literacy” approach, in which the visual is both subservient to, and fully dependent on, linguistic systems. Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram were largely created to focus on visual content or adapted at a later stage to accommodate such content to attract higher rates of user engagement. Avoiding a techno-deterministic approach to these platforms, this chapter instead touches upon the contexts in which users interact with platform affordances, leading to specific conventional practices on different social media and to platform-specific vernaculars. Political actors and social movements have long since recognised the power of the visual as a communicative tool, as evident at present in their strong visually based social media presence. While citizens’ expressions in the context of social movements and concrete political events have gained much scholarly attention, the practices of citizens’ civic expression elsewhere remain largely understudied.
