The City of Toronto has become infamous of late due to the antics, politics, and visual presence of its mayor on major TV talk shows. There is no lack of Rob Ford’s visual presence from incriminating videos to Jimmy Kimmel’s late night talk show to bobble head dolls. However, how has this media circus that began online affected prominent individuals who must construct an online presence in their bid to run a credible and respectable campaign for Ford’s seat? How are these politicians developing their own visual presence online in terms of gaining the sympathy, respect and trust of voters? Images operate as rhetorical tools through their persuasive impact on particular audiences. The digital age however, offers new environments where as La Grandeur (2003) laments, “we are easily awed by fancy-looking images, [partly because of] the wizardry those images convey….so professional, so polished, so authoritative – yet easy to manipulate” (p. 130). And as Le Grandeur suggests, images within digital formats “sometimes lend undue credibility to otherwise weak arguments” yet, in the case of the 2014 Mayoral race, the digital images must overcome the media circus hype and not only garner credibility for the candidates, but also restore respectability to the position. This presentation will analyze the rhetorical impact of the images used for the November 2014 Toronto mayoral campaign websites of contenders John Tory, Olivia Chow, Karen Stintz and David Soknacki in terms of the pathos, logos and ethos required for the restoration work.
La Grandeur, Kevin. ‘Digital Images and Classical Persuasion’. In Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle Kendrick, 118-136. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
About the presenterTracey Bowen
Dr. Tracey Bowen is a lecturer in the Institute of Communications, Culture and Information Technology at the University of Toronto. Her research primarily explores visual literacies in relation to visualizing research processes through drawing, mapping and marking. She also writes about the visual-ness of everyday life, with a particular focus on graffiti as an unsanctioned text in the physical world and as the subject of 21st century digital archiving. Her published works include “Reading gestures and reading codes: The visual literacy of graffiti as both physical/performative act and digital information text” In Monika Raesch (Ed.), Mapping Minds, Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press; Cultural Production in Virtual and Imagined Worlds, co-edited with M. L. Nemanic, Cambridge Scholars Press; “Drawing within the Chiasm” in Tracey: Contemporary Drawing Research, Loughborough University. She is also co-editor of Multimodal literacies and emerging genres, published by University of Pittsburgh press, 2013.