Talk:Visual sociology

Interesting as Jerry Krase's input is, I'm not sure if the use of the first person is fitting for a wikipedia article. It would perhaps benefit from a more brief mention (maybe in the third person?) and a link to a new article on the project being described, either internally or externally, to do both the project justice and keep the visual sociology article streamlined and salient.

It could be that I am simply bound up in outmoded discourses of what constitutes an encyclopedic article, with its normative prizing of the objective, authoritative third person mode. That said, there has to be some line drawn between wikipedia articles and, for example, blogs.

I propose an edit and a link to a new article on the project mentioned. Any thoughts?

Bricolab 00:42, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I took a stab at making the article more encyclopedic

It read like a cultural studies essay, at least to me. I removed the following text (and I hope I'm chronicling these changes in the proper, Wikipedia accepted way):

Setting aside for the moment issues about what it is that a camera records, visual sociology suggests a whole range of methods for collecting data.

I suppose the author's concern is with the idea that cameras don't record "reality" objectively, as many people tend to assume. True enough, but this observation wasn't really integrated into the article, and I wasn't sure how to do it.

Every culture is composed of jillions of non-verbal images, a fact apparently more easily grasped by anthropologists and cultural studies researchers who are comfortable with studying blanket designs, pottery shapes, totems, fetishes, and graven images; or deconstructing films, advertisements, or television. People in the first world live in the most decidedly visual environment yet produced. Each one of us consumes tens of thousands, maybe millions, of images each day. Even if we don't want to see we cannot avoid it. Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist, described the image world as a simulacrum, a media world of copies of copies of copies where there is not and has never been an original. Everything in the symbol world refers to other symbols - a world of allusion and trope, maps referring not to territories but only to other maps, news referring to other news, photographs referring to paintings and so on in an endless a game of mirrors.

This looks to me like original research, that is, less like a description of the subfield of visual sociology and more like the author's critical approach to sociology. Even if it raises good points (although in my opinion this argument that "underdeveloped" societies are less visual than industrialized ones is problematic). Can future editors demonstrate exactly who employs these notions in visual sociology and how?

Whether from its enlightenment roots in Auguste Comte's arguments against metaphysics and concomitant proposals for the application of a positivist social science to the betterment of mankind; or from the Marxist insistence on Praxis as the guarantor of truth; or from the influence of Heisenberg's uncertainly principle that one cannot describe without changing; or the insights brought by feminists, race-scholars and the postmodernists that social scientists can only be members of society with race, class, and gender; or even from the sort of atheoretical social welfare approach of action sociology; the social sciences have always emphasized practice. Yet consider the arcane and professionalized language used by social scientists or educators. Visual sociology might begin here and signal new ways of communicating not only with each other, but with the vast world of non-sociologists.

We live in a world of multimedia communication in which the assumption that text is words is being eclipsed by notions that everything is text (but text is not everything). Pictures and bullets and scents and music and fashion and the body are texts. Discourse is in color, 3D, stereo, surround sound -- it is virtual. Sociology is a form of imagination, education and discourse and it to should be in living color, surround sound -- like everything else an imitation of life. Visual sociologists begin by wondering what sociology has to say; to whom we want to communicate, and how sociology might communicate better. Visual sociology in this sense means straight forward things like selecting photos and other images for school texts, and ways to assess what these images may mean to viewers. Using visual material to present sociology also includes employing films and videos in teaching, e.g, documentaries, drama, experimental video, etc. It may also mean learning how to take the tools of documentary away from communicators without theories or methods, and applying them from a sociological perspective.

I think that this could be reintegrated into the article, if someone knows how to attribute these ideas to practicing visual sociologists.

I hope that these edits don't step on anyone's toes or egos, but I think they make for a more accessible and encyclopedic article.

Birdmessenger 14:44, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

OK, but...

I can see the case for the amendments made by Birdmessenger. But now the "three approaches" section is now rather lopsided, with one of them much bigger than the other two. Since the 'theory and method' section listing the three approaches was kinda cut-and-pasted in originally, from another article, maybe either (a) remove it all, or (b) someone can write short summaries of the "three approaches" in a more Wikipedia style, with a note that there may be more approaches too . . . ?

Davidgauntlett 23:12, 12 December 2005 (UTC)