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The Aristotelian definition of rhetoric is the art of persuasion.
Since we know semiotics to be a visual type of rhetoric—
What exactly is this commercial trying to persuade you of?
Hello, ladies,
look at your man,
now back to me,
now back at your man,
now back to me.
Sadly, he isn't me,
but if he stopped using ladies scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell
like he's me.
Look down,
back up,
where are you?
You're on a boat with the man your man could smell like.
What's in your hand,
back at me.
I have it,
it's an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love.
Look again, the tickets are now diamonds.
Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. I'm on a horse.
Do you feel that they are doing so in a fair way?
Answer this question in any way that feels right to you.
*You can pause the video at anytime.*
Through the intentioned use of about every logical fallacy in the book— misdirection,
ad homonym attacks, clever non-sequiturs, appeals to emotion
We, as the viewers, arrive at a somewhat positive view of Old Spice.
The ad, in an albeit exaggerated manner, how the use of visual signs and symbols can sloppily--yet
with great effectiveness--persuade you to accept a proposition.
But let's take the contemporary rhetorical criticisim a step farther:
If Plato believed that true rhetoric's aim always was truth by HONEST means can this
even by thought of as such?
In the age of an almost limitless digital enhancement, it seems that we cannot say that
this type of media's end goal is truth.
As such, it might be more fitting to adopt a term Plato and Aristotle used for 'false'
rhetoricians:
"Sophistry"
If images are, "focal points of meaning," are the uses of images that couldn't possible
exist without Photoshop simply a form of sophistry in the digital age.
One of the important differences between the rhetoric of
image and the rhetoric of the word is that images are relatively more flexible at allowing
a differing
even conflicting
attribution of meaning to the same text.
And we can expect these discrepancies to grow larger as we move further into the digital
age.