Visual Communication: Opportunities and Challenges
Noor Shamsarini Md Isa
Introduction
Visual communication plays an important role in communicating information, data and creates experiences through various visual mediums such as film, animation, photography, graphic images, infographic and so on. Scholars discover that from other ways of communication, visual communication stands out as a different form of communication because it doesn’t have to be thought or learnt due to the facts that human naturally understand images as a source of communication. It is from the historical evidence on the cave drawing during the prehistoric age, for instance. One uniqueness of visual communication is that it aids the non-literacy group across the world to understand information, ideology and narratives without depending on complicated text or languages. Visual communication breaks down barriers of challenging languages across race and ethnicity by transforming it into understood visual medium such as posters, infographics and many others. Dependency of the public on the visual medium especially screen-based media such as television and new media especially social media makes it becomes the most important method of communication in this era compared to traditional text medium such as newspapers and books.
This area deals much with both arts and communication because the elements of art were used as a form of communication through the uses of elements of arts such as color, shape, form, texture, balance and so on. These elements have in depth connection with experiences and emotions of the audiences. This helps convey the “feels” of certain visual messages. The dominance of visuals in our everyday life especially through screen-based media or printed media impacted how society and culture were shaped or inspired by this medium. Storytelling is the main component in visual communication industry since powerful visual communication can provoke, educate, challenge and change behavior by the meanings it’s brought. Graduates from visual communication usually work as creative directors, art directors, animators, filmmakers, photographers and designers.
Visual communication plays important parts in various spheres of culture, social media, politics and economics. It is an integral part of economics activities when we use it for advertising; it can become social voice if we use it for journalism, can creates awareness and becomes voice for non-governmental association when it is uses as Public Services Announcement (PSA) and as a propaganda in politics spheres.
Visual communication believes that images can be studied the same as languages, thus they adopted linguistic theory in understanding images. Among prominent theorist in visual communication includes Ferdinant Saussure, Roland Barthes, Max Wertheimer, Charles Sanders Pierce, to name few. In cultural perspectives for instances, we study visual mediums to understand the symbols it has within society across the world. These perspectives were called “semiotic study” which deal much with meanings and symbols. The use of roses as symbols of love, for example, is an inherited tradition in western society but the symbols of love might be different if we see it from other society perspectives. Symbols in cultures include gestures, logos, color, emoticons, facial expression and so on. Ethical perspectives, on the other hand will concern with the uses of images to deceit publics such as fraud advertisement claims, issues related to racial and religious harmony in media and racism in media, for instance. The wide spectrum of this area makes it applicable to many perspectives that use visual medium for specific purposes
Issues and Challenges
The issues in this area include visual literacy, which concerns the ability to understand and process visual medium. This comes into discussion since the impact media has on society at large. The association of visual content with the meanings it conveys brings worldwide concern on impacts it has. Obviously, the content of the media and its capacity in reaching literate and unliterate audiences across the world serves as a powerful tool for any means be it political, economic, or cultural changes across the continent. The images coming from Gaza’s war for example, circulate across the globe and initiate social movement across the country. Biased Western media reporting is exposed by images circulated in the social media by the Gaza’s inhabitant itself. Though some media platforms blocked the images, there are many other media platforms that continue to air the images. Visual serves as a proof of an event, thus accelerating trust and strengthening our perceptions on biased narratives. Again, visual created will always serve an ideology and beliefs of certain group and (usually) undermine another group. The “representation” of symbols in the media is another important issue because of subliminal messages it holds especially in the entertainment industry. The ideology representation in the media especially the issues of Islamophobia, LGBTQ+, terrorism and racism I argues, is crucial aspects the public is facing now. Other than that, the issue of cultural imperialism is also an important aspect since the global media brings alien culture through the universal global consumption of screen-based media especially on the OTT platform such as Netflix.
