The Impact of What We See and What We Don't See - Week 4

    

    Because of how much content we are able to consume on a daily basis, I personally find it easy to forget about how much thought goes into how those things look and what those visuals may be swaying you to do. There are many different ways that visuals influence what information you trust, as well as what you do with that information. Visual influences can range all the way from an actual image, to the layout of the text you are reading. In many ways, what we trust is largely dependent on what is familiar to us. It's when we see something out of the ordinary that we stop and question the credibility. We consider the reason why something is out of place. This is the balance that designers of digital layouts must consider. They try to make their design interesting enough that people are willing to give it a chance, while also keeping it familiar enough to be widely trusted information. 

    In a book titled "Writing Spaces", the authors go into detail about "rhetorical moves" in writing. Essentially a rhetorical move is some aspect of the text that is carrying out a specific function within the genre of writing that it is supposed to be in. An example of a rhetorical move would be including a "Dear Professor" at the beginning of an email to your professor. Including this is an expected normalcy when writing an email, and without it, one might question the credibility of your email. You may be seen as unprofessional, rude or just lazy. The best way to identify a rhetorical move in a text is to analyze a number of texts from the genre you are analyzing. Some examples of genres are emails, yelp reviews, lab reports and essays. These are just some specifics, but really any instance where you are writing to accomplish a goal could be considered its own genre. This is a useful concept to understand because it is very likely that in the future, you will be asked to participate in a genre of writing that you are not totally comfortable in, and being able to recognize the specific things in the text that accomplish whatever goal you're going after can save you a lot of time and a lot of worrying. 

    There is a similar idea regarding visuals in the digital space, called visual digital rhetoric. This describes how design contributes to function in digital writing environments, according to Mary E. Hocks, an associate professor at Georgia State University. She describes different areas of digital rhetoric that contribute to how visuals affect our experience and our thoughts about digital resources. One of these areas is called "transparency" and is used to describe how similar the design is to already established patterns in similar genres of digital design. An example of a transparent aspect of a website would be the placement of the shopping cart icon for an online store in the top right corner. If you were to visit a new online store, and found that their shopping cart was in the bottom left corner, and not the top right, you would immediately be skeptical of the website because it does not conform to the expectations you have for the genre of website. While the level of transparency does not necessarily correspond a high level of transparency with being good, or a low transparency with being bad, it does play a part in establishing trust between the designer and the viewer. This is the balancing act that I mentioned earlier, that many designers struggle with. On one hand, you want to catch the eye of the viewer and make them want to look at your website, but on the other, you don't want to vary so much from what is considered acceptable that the viewer doesn't consider it worthwhile or trustworthy. In this way, we must remember that at the end of the day, the viewer is the decider of meaning regarding whatever the designer puts on the page. That being said, one way to incorporate innovative ideas while appealing to conventional expectations could be to put new information in areas where people already have established trust. For example, you might use a comic book-style word bubble to signify that whatever is inside the bubble is coming from another source or author. I think the key here is integration and creativity, where you use things that people are familiar with to draw them into new ideas. 

    Looking at last weeks content, this is similar to the way that often readers online are considered "co-authors". Last week the focus was on how readers have so many options for participating in online spaces, like commenting, tagging and other ways of interacting with authors. This week, however, I feel that the focus is less on what the reader is contributing to the text in terms of actual action, and more on how they are interpreting the information they read. In Carter's "Argument in Hypertexts", she emphasizes how important design and layout is in digital situations, given that there is no sequential structure that readers have to follow. A sequential structure is something like a book, where it is common practice to start on the first page and continue page by page until you reach the end. In contrast, the navigation through a website is completely up to the discretion of the reader. Thus, the goal of the designer, in order to combat the loss of a sequential structure where information can be presented exactly how the author intends, is to design the page in a way that there is a clear "suggested" path of navigation. This could look like arrows pointing to different ideas, leading people to believe that you should start in one place before going on to a different place. However, just because there is a suggested course of action, it does not mean that the reader is going to abide by that suggestion. This means that authors must take into consideration that any page on their website can be accessed without any other context, and that takes a lot more planning than you'd think.

    I think one of the most interesting overarching ideas I got from this week was how influential familiarity is on us, and that if I want to design something to convey an argument or information, I need to make sure that I balance what is expected of the design with what I intend the reader to grasp from the design. I find it interesting how much more likely we are to trust that something is good and credible, just because it looks like other things we've seen before that are good and credible. This can even be a little scary to think about, given that some of the criteria we use to determine credibility can be very easily copied by people who do not have good intentions. While I know that we rely on familiarity to help limit our margin of risk against being scammed, information wise or otherwise, I also think it is important to think about why a designer or writer may stray from what is expected in their work. The first example that came to mind was an author named Sally Rooney, who is author of the first book I read, titled "Normal People", which did not use a single quotation mark in her book to indicate dialogue. In this situation, using quotation marks to indicate dialogue is a rhetorical move that could be considered obligatory for some people when writing a novel. However, in an interview in 2018 with Stet Magazine, Rooney said, "I don’t see any need for them, and I don’t understand the function they perform in a novel". By this she suggests that if the book is written in first person, then it would mean that technically the whole thing should be in quotations, given that it is all some kind of dialogue, internal or external. This is a wonderful example of how straying from the expected turns the reader into the real decider of meaning, because of how mixed the public was in opinion on this decision. Some people love that it's different and that she stuck to what she really believed was realistic to the novel, including myself, while others were appalled by her lack of punctuation. I personally liked it because of how ordinary it made the story seem to me. That might sound counterintuitive, because you may assume that you always want a book to be out of the ordinary, but by removing the direct indication of dialogue, it helped culminate the feeling that you really were experiencing everything right alongside the character telling the story, right through their eyes. 

    That was just one of many examples I can think of where some kind of debate was started over the intentional decision to stray from an expectation. I find it so interesting that that kind of decision can lead to the disapproval of so many, but also lead to Rooney's books being some of my favorite reads! Are there any examples of things you love that you can think of that maybe aren't so ordinary? If there are, consider the rhetorical moves the creator made that make you love it so much, and let me know, too!

Resources: 

“A Conversation with Sally Rooney.” STET, 26 May 2020, stetmag.com/interviews/sally-rooney-interview-conversations-with-friends. 

Driscoll, D., Vetter, M., Stewart, M., & Heise, M. (Eds.). (2022). Writing spaces: Readings on writing. Parlor Press. 

Hocks, M. E. (2003). Understanding visual rhetoric in digital writing environments. College Composition and Communication, 54(4), 629. https://doi.org/10.2307/3594188 

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