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A Visual Text Analysis

734 Words3 Pages

College is a monumental time in the life of the students attending it. It has for many been viewed for a long time as a right of passage from childhood into adulthood. Thus, the idea of what college is and the public discourse surrounding college has invariably been apart of the way our society views the university as a whole. These modes of communication vary from written works or visual works to some combination between them as is typical of a website. Each of these mediums of communications add a unique perspective to the public discourse of higher education. All mediums come with positive and negatives; however, all mediums are clearly not created equal. Due to the need for visual texts and websites to rely on eye-catching and entertaining …show more content…

This promotional poster shows a gigantic red solo cup in the center with five students cheerfully smiling sitting in it like it’s a hot tub. There are also three other students surrounding the red solo cup. On the cup below the show title Greek, is the message “college. it’s a rush.” This message clearly is contributing to the public discourse of higher education in a very specific way. More specifically, this message is unquestionably insinuating that college is one enjoyable, continuous four year party. This text portrays this message through the use of the red solo cup. In American culture, the red solo cup is synonymous with a party and drinking an alcoholic beverage. Naturally, students shown relaxing in the red solo cup are shown having a fantastic time while smiling with their hands raised in the air in a celebratory fashion. This implies multiple things about stereotypical college life. First, this suggests students are at the university first and foremost to party while academics are not the main focus of these students attention. Second, this suggests that greek life is in some way required to fit in or be a an alleged normal college student. This persona of college, while applicable to some is far from the truth for the majority of university students. The overall problem with this text and visual texts in general is that they support the enjoyable and entertaining portions of university life while simultaneously ignoring the aspects of higher education which are less glamorous. The issue with this is that this contributes to a public discourse in which the discourse is not representative of the facts of the situation. This, in turn, leads to unrealistic expectations of college for a majority of students entering the university system. Naturally, the Internet has extended the nature of visual images to the combination of

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