“This anxiety, this need to defend “our speech” against “the visual” is, I want to suggest, a sure sign that a pictorial turn is taking place.”

WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 12

Within recent years, social media has created a major shift in media creation, particularly for students in the Millennial and Generation Z grouping. While the focus of these platforms has primarily been on connecting people, the fact remains that social media has changed the way our students think about audience and writing. In addition, social media has replaced text with emojis and GIFs, is cause for alarm amongst most academics, and, I would argue, has created a division with the academia regarding the defense of “our speech” which “the visual” has replaced.

Students may use more emojis than words in their daily interactions with friends, family, and the world through social media. On an iPhone, there are 2,823 emojis*. Regardless of emoji “haters,” this language carries with it the same depth of meaning that speech and text do—and it successfully goes beyond words to carry the emotion to the viewer. GIFs function in a similar way, offering a moving picture to convey emotion and meaning, and relies on the rhetorical situation surrounding the GIF, which is often a popular culture reference.

For example, the White Man Blinking GIF has been popular since it was released in 2017. This GIF is used to express bewilderment or surprise. It’s supposed to convey the writer’s facial expression as being similar: a silent eyebrow-raising surprise. But the history behind the GIF situates it in a live video-game feed run by a popular gaming website on “Unprofessional Fridays.” A subtle joke was made that carried double meaning, and White Man Blinking was born.

I propose that we, as composition instructors, create a pictoral turn within our own classrooms and allow for students to use and study visual symbols like emojis and GIFs as composition—so long as we make them aware of the writing process and rhetorical situation. I see this as being an incredible way of bringing students into rhetoric with something they are already familiar with. Or, a little research might bring them as surprise as they discover the hidden meanings behind the emojis and GIFs they do use.

(as of Oct 7, 2018 update)