What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values

Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as freedom. Over the past decade, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. Drawing on an epistemology of social constructionism, we ask which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Instagram. We studied 20 widely used value hashtags, sampling the top 100 posts for each (N = 2,000). A combined qualitative–quantitative content analysis revealed that 19 of the 20 hashtags possess distinct visual footprints, typically reflecting an orientation toward the self and an emphasis on consumption. We conclude by discussing three implications of our findings: the role of images in the social construction of the meaning of values, the distinction between internalized and externalized value depictions, and aestheticized consumption as an organizing principle of Instagram’s mainstream.

Lord’s Space in Seventeenth-Century Britain

This chapter discusses the ‘Lord’s space’, which refers to the space (or notional space) round a feudal lord, especially a sovereign prince—or, indeed, space symbolically associated with the Lord God. It focuses on literary examples, particularly plays and masques, which were undoubtedly designed in part to assert through their display the prince’s greatness, even if they contained specific contents of an advisory or controversial nature. France and Britain in the seventeenth century are apparently to be regarded as ‘theatre states’. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the dominant symbol of nature had become the theatre. In the midst of all the significant theatricality, a prince’s location, both in the cosmic or intellectual and in the material theatre, must be a matter of moment. The prince required to be the cynosure of all the looking, so that theatres must be constructed accordingly. That was possible, because in the early seventeenth century court theatres were hardly ever permanent buildings, but rather temporary facilities, usually erected for a single performance, perhaps in a hall of Whitehall Palace that also served many other functions. The chapter then considers the hierarchic ordering of objects and people that had long governed the visual imagination of medieval people.

Visual imagination and cognitive mapping of a virtual building

We investigated the contribution of visual imagination to the cognitive mapping of a building when initial exploration was simulated either visually by using a passive video walk-through, or mentally by using verbal guidance. Building layout had repeating elements with either rotational or mirror symmetry. Cognitive mapping of the virtual building, determined using questionnaires and map drawings, was present following verbal guidance but inferior to that following video guidance. Mapping was not affected by the building's structural symmetry. However, notably, it correlated with small-scale mental rotation scores for both video and verbal guidance conditions. There was no difference between males and females. A common factor that may have influenced cognitive mapping was the availability of visual information about the relationships of the building elements, either directly perceived (during the video walk-through) or imagined (during the verbal walk-through and/or during recall). Differences in visual imagination, particularly mental rotation, may thus account for some of the individual variance in cognitive mapping of complex built environments, which is relevant to how designers provide navigation-relevant information.

Winged women on book covers for contemporary African fiction: Shubnum Khan’s creation for Mohale Mashigo’s Intruders (2018)

In her collection of short stories, Intruders, Mohale Mashigo (2018) draws on popular culture as well as local cultural memories as invested in South African folktales, to conjure up a fantastical world in which spirituality is often invoked. In this article, I consider the way in which the visual image of a woman with angelic wings designed for the book cover by artist Shubnum Khan, serves the purpose of marketing the commodity by means of connotations presumed to be familiar to potential readers, but also still suggestive enough to stimulate, rather than prescribe, the visual imagination ignited in the process of reading. I link book cover designer Peter Mendelsund’s argument that the reading imagination, although fuelled by memory, remains “loosely associative” and “not overtly coherent”, with Ingvild Gilhus’s cultural-historical appraisal of the angel’s appeal as such a malleable symbol of (increasingly, specifically) female superhuman capabilities. I argue that the cover image ‘works’ because of its ability to kindle memories of precolonial African spirituality, associations with Christianity, as well as images circulating in mass media.

Kenneth Boulding’s Visual Imagination

The merits of visual images in conveying truths about the social world is widely recognized in social science, but some commentators have suggested the possible inadequacies of postwar economics on that score. Unimpressed by the omnipresence of diagrams in economics, they note that these are not images in the sense that maps are. The story of Boulding, an admirer of maps and strong believer in visual reasoning, who moved away from economics to become a general social scientist in the late 1940s, seems to confirm the above assessment. Yet, the difference between economists and other social scientists does not so much reside in the absence of images in economics—some diagrams in economics are maps—as in their declining role in postwar economic modeling. In that respect, the story of Boulding, his lack of influence on economics and his increased recognition among other social sciences testify to the gradual backsliding of visual imagination in postwar economics. If many today recognize the usefulness of diagrams for the dissemination of economic knowledge, only a few are aware that preceding the attempts to make these diagrams intelligible to their users, a real effort of visual imagination was required for their creators to ensure their explanatory power.

Autopoetic sculpting of Stevan Raičković: Poetic self-consciousness in the poem cycle 'Razgovor sa ilovačom' and the poem 'Iz mraka te, pesmo, zovem, iz ničega'

In this paper, we have analyzed the manifestations of poetic self-consciousness in the poetry of Stevan Raičković in the poem cycle Razgovor sa ilovačom and in the poem from the poetry collection Verses, Iz mraka te, pesmo, zovem, iz ničega. By semantically shaping the motif of the loam, the poetic complementarity between the poem and the cycle was established-the ideal of the poem as sculpture and the meta-lyrical reflection of the poet, evoked by observing the transformation of his own character into a bust. The poem Iz mraka te, pesmo, zovem, iz ničega evokes a symbolic attempt to sculpt the poem, based on visual imagination. Explicit autopoiesis is manifested in this poem-the poetic self-consciousness tries to view the poetic text as a matter that can be manually shaped, and in the end reaches a conclusion about the incompatibility of the means of expression and the assumed result. In the cycle Razgovor sa ilovačom, the means by which the poem is supposed to be materialized also appears to be incompatible with poetic contents, and lyrical subject expresses doubts about the constitutive power of language. The discrepancy between the stativity of the sculpture and the dynamism of the inner life, however, causes a return to words. Self-referentiality in the cycle Razgovor sa ilovačom indicates the implicit autopoiesis manifested in the treatment of the relationship between life and art and the problematization of equivalence between nature and poetry: because the poet tries to fix phenomena from life in the poem, just like the sculptor, he moves away from the dynamism of life. Interpreting the way in which the motif of the loam is shaped in relation to the theme of poetry, demonstrates the development of poetic self-awareness and doubts about the possibility of writing an authentic poem.