• Datum: 21. November 2013 – 23. November 2013
• Location: Universität Bremen

The annual conference of the DGPuK research group “Visual Communication” (November 21-23, 2013)

Content and aims

Our everyday life and our everyday experience are inextricably linked to media content and media technologies. Media images play a central role in this media penetration of everyday life.

The increasing quantity of images in traditional media is one aspect of this visual mediatization. However, the quantity of images is also increasing in everyday communication, which is often mediated by media, such as in social networks, which is why people often speak of a “flood of images” or the “visual age”. Changes can also be seen in the qualities of images: for example, new types of images are emerging (e.g. transition from analog to digital images, machine-made images, scientific images, three-dimensional cinema and television, computer-generated images) with new, specific characteristics.

At the same time, new types of images are moving into the focus of visual communication research: images that do not originate from the typically considered communication and media science contexts, as they are often summarized under the keyword “public communication”, but also images that can be assigned to the field of “everyday”, increasingly mediatized communication. Finally, the way in which we deal with images and communicate with or about them is also changing. While photographs in the “analog age” were mainly used to capture special events for commemorative purposes, today they are integrated into everyday communication processes as a matter of course. More and more personal time is being spent on the use of now much simplified and cheaper technical devices for image production and reception and for communicating with images.

In summary, the increasing visualization of media and social environments represents an integral aspect of the mediatization process. Visual communication practices are important everyday practices in mediatized societies. Nevertheless, visual communication research has so far mainly dealt with the selection of mass media images and/or their content and potential meanings. The focus has therefore primarily been on the “results of professional image action” manifesting themselves in the form of media images (such as journalistic images or advertising images) and their effects. In contrast, the active processes associated with image action – understood here in the broadest sense as practices of image production, communication by means of images, image reception and image appropriation – were largely ignored.

In recent years, however, there has been an incipient research trend towards examining the processes and meanings of visual action. In particular, the focus has shifted to the visual practices of young people in the context of social networks (see currently Autenrieth/Neumann-Braun 2011; Neumann-Braun/Autenrieth 2011; Richard et al. 2010; Meier 2009; Reissmann 2012). In the English-language literature, there is an increasing number of articles that deal with practices of “photo-sharing”, the images of “consumer photography” or “personal photography”. However, analyzing the most diverse forms of image action remains a challenge for visual communication research. This also includes research into the connection between (manifest) media images and the mental images associated with them (such as mental images, role models, visual ideas and concepts).

Against this backdrop, this year’s conference of the Visual Communication Section deals with the topic of visualization and mediatization and offers a forum for the presentation and discussion of current research on image-related communication and on professional and everyday image-related activities. Last but not least, the theoretical, methodological and empirical challenges that exist here will be explored.

Contact persons:

Dr. Katharina Lobinger
(deputy speaker of the FG Visual Communication, conference organization)
University of Bremen, ZeMKI
katharina.lobinger[at]uni-bremen.de

Dr. Stephanie Geise
(Spokesperson of the FG Visual Communication)
University of Erfurt
stephanie.geise[at]uni-erfurt.de