Visual Persuasion or Community Organizing

Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising

Author: Paul Messaris

"Paul Messaris is an extremely thoughtful commentator on the world of visuals. He has studied advertising visuals for many years and his insights are always stimulating and sometimes, even controversial. This book makes an important contribution to the literature in two fields: visual communication and advertising. I recommend it for faculty and students as well as professionals in the advertising field."

--Sandra Moriarty, Professor University of Colorado

"With an informal writing style and examples both thoughtful and illustrative, Paul Messaris in his Visual Persuasion leads the reader through the often complex field of visual literacy related to advertising images with high style and intellect. When so much information is conveyed through quickly edited and carefully controlled mass media images, Visual Persuasion is a vital book toward understanding the impact on individuals, cultures, and society of persuasive visual messages."

--Paul Martin Lester, Ph.D, Author of Visual Communication with Messages

"A smartly reasoned and elegantly written treatment of visual argumentation authored by one of America's most respected authorities on visual communication. "

--James Lull

The pictures in TV commercials, magazine ads, and other forms of advertising often convey meanings that cannot be expressed as well, or at all, through words or music. Visual Persuasion is an exploration of these unique aspects of advertising. By virtue of their ability to simulate the appearance of the physical world, pictures can become surrogate objects of desire or other emotions which ads subsequently associate with products. By exploitingviewers' assumptions of a direct, automatic connection between photography and reality, images can serve as proof of advertising claims. Because of the implicit nature of visual argumentation and the relative lack of social accountability that images enjoy in comparison with words, pictures can be used to make advertising claims that would be unacceptable if they were spelled out verbally. Using these characteristics of visual persuasion as a starting point, this important book analyzes a variety of commercial, political, and social-issue advertisements. A separate chapter examines the role of pictures in cross-cultural advertising. Visual Persuasion is recommended for upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in communication and media studies. It also contains insights that will be valuable to students in courses in cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and advertising.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: A Theory of Images in Advertising
Pt. 1	Image as Simulated Reality
1	Pictures and Reality	3
2	Visual Form and Style	53
3	Can Pictures Bridge Cultures?	90
Pt. 2	Image as Evidence
4	Visual Truth, Visual Lies	129
Pt. 3	Image as Implied Selling Proposition
5	Editing and Montage	163
6	Showing The Unspoken	219
	Epilogue: Ethics of Visual Persuasion	265
	References	275
	Index	289
	About the Author	297

Look this: The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea or Yoga for Children

Community Organizing: Building Social Capital as a Development Strategy

Author: Ross J Gittell

Community Organizing provides new insight into an important national challenge how to stimulate the formation of genuinely community-based organizations and effective citizen action in neighborhoods that have not spawned these efforts spontaneously. Since Robert Putnam's identification of the role of social capital in regional governance and economic development, there has been a virtual industry of interest and action created around the implications of his findings for the development of low-income communities. Yet, there remains a paucity of detailed empirical effort testing and refining his ideas. This book attempts to fill this gap.

Community Organizing distills lessons from a national demonstration program that employed a novel approach to community organizing consensus organizing. Consensus organizing enhances social capital, building both stronger internal ties and capacity in low-income communities and fostering new relations (bridges) between residents of low-income communities and larger metropolitan area support communities.

Using evaluation research and detailed comparative study of community development activity in three diverse demonstration sites, Ross Gittell and Avis Vidal identify key elements of building social capital, which strongly affect community development: comprehension of community development, credibility of effort and participants, confidence, competence, and constructive critiques of efforts. Other elements are more relevant to program management and implementation and include communication among participants, congruence of program effort, management of inherent contradiction, and adjusting implementation to reflectlocal context.

This book describes the limits and promise of building social capital and will be of interest to community development students and professionals.

Booknews

In this evaluation dedicated to community development corporation volunteers, Gittel (strategic management and public policy, U. of New Hampshire) and Vidal (Metropolitan Housing and Communities Center, Urban Institute; Washington, DC) feature a recent national demonstration CDC program in three sites: the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. In the context of this nationwide movement for inner city social capital-building, they summarize the lessons learned from every organizational and implementation phase of LISC's innovative consensus organizing approach. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.