Introduction
Ghostbusters (1984) (Transcript)
Dr. Egon Spengler (played by Harold Ramis) is right. Print is dead. Print media—books, newspapers, journals, etc.—were once composed of living material and aside from any worms, moths, or bacteria feasting upon decomposing pages remains dead media. If Spengler is understood in a less literal and more hyperbolic manner in which he means print media technologies are not necessarily as important as they once were, then he's also right. For many, reading practices have shifted so that reading occurs nearly completely on screen. Reading web pages, blogs, vlogs, and Facebook pages along with using digital media reading technologies—smart phones, Kindles, iPads, nooks, etc., have replaced reading traditional print media reading technologies like books, newspapers, and magazines. In fact, e-books are outselling print books at Amazon.com (Miller & Bosman, 2011).
If Dr. Spengler means, however, that ideologies about communication using print media are changing, then Dr. Spengler is dead wrong. Ideologies about print media are not exactly dead. They are alive and often perpetuated on web pages in the ways verbal text and visual imagery are presented together in digital media. This does not mean that Bolter is incorrect in his claim that "the World Wide Web and other digital media challenge not only the form of the book, but also the representational power of the printed word" (Bolter, 2003, p. 21). In fact, digital media dispute the "dominance of the printed word, by claiming to provide a new kind of interaction between the user/viewer and the digital application" (Bolter, 2003, p. 20). The new types of interaction created by digtial media or digitality, as Wysocki (2004) argues, "has widened the range of choices of material for anyone working with a computer" and so "ought to encourage us to consider not only the potentialities of material choices for digital texts but for any text we make, and that we ought to use the range of choices digital technologies seem to give us to consider the range of choices that printing-press technologies (apparently) haven't" (p. 10). Like Dr. Spengler and like print media, however, digital media often "collect[s] spores, molds, and fungus"; digital texts are often designed to act like print media. Digital media designers often overlook the "range of choices" digitality allows for in favor of the "range of choices" print media affords. Print media affordances become the default "range of choices" through which design decisions are made. Though “I ain’t fraid of no ghost,” I’m fraid of the continued resurrection of print poltergeists—the ways in which the possibilities digital technologies are being remediated rather than explored and used to their full potential.
The particular resurrection I am concerned with is the resurrection being made by many web page designers who persist in presenting verbal text and visual imagery as if a web page were print media. The visual imagery displayed is often static or fixed. It doesn’t change when a user visits a web page, though it easily could. When a web page uses static imagery, the page is resurrecting and participating in a print media ideology about visual imagery—that visual imagery cannot change and must be singular rather than multiple. The use of static visual imagery and the ideological position that a visual image should be presented statically induces audiences and designers to forget about the representational and rhetorical possibilities digital media affords. It induces audiences to forget how verbal and visual imagery can work together to communicate and create meaning in new ways. The use of static imagery on the web can be considered a technical form of remediation—of the "formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms" (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 273). In the case of static imagery, the remediation occurring is the assumption of unchanging (static) imagery. It's the idea that one visual image is enough or is the only means available for picturing, for representing.
Digital media offers another possibility for picturing that disputes the static assumptions of print. Dynamic imagery (i.e. rotating slide shows or image rotators) challenges the idea that one image is enough and is the only possiblity for picturing and representing. My juxtaposition of static and dynamic imagery offers a way for designers and audiences to develop a new media perspective about visual imagery. New media is, as Wysocki defines it, a perspecitve and media practice that doesn't necessarily have to be digital media:
[Texts] that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality: such composers design texts that help readers/consumers/viewers stay alert to how any text—like its composers and readers—doesn’t function independently of how it is made and in what contexts. Such composers design texts that make as overtly as possible the values they embody.” (2004, p. 15)
By exorcising and exposing one poltergeist of print (static imagery), I offer ways to understand the consequences of digital remediation. I offer avenues for designers and audiences to "newmediate"—to "stay alert" to the possibilities and potentialities of static and dynamic imagery. By juxtaposing static and dynamic imagery, I intend to show how designers and audiences can become newmediators or "overtly" aware of how technological choices are material and ideological. These technological choices should not be invisible or taken for granted like ghosts haunting and influencing designs and limiting perspectives.
Print, Static Imagery, and Visual Imagery (return to menu)
"Print," as Richard Lanham (2007) observes, "has striven for purely through vision" (p. 116). Print, as my ghost metaphor attempts to illustrate, attempts to be transparent or invisible. It attempts to be the "style that is never noticed" (Lanham, 2007, p. 116). It's as if what one reads is pure content or in Lanham's terminology pure "stuff," pure denotation. Print's emphasis on linear text and the assumptions that come with it helps us forget that it didn't have to develop this way. After all, "the technologies of the printing press were never static, and could have gone in other directions than those that made the reproduction of photographs, illustrations, charts and graphs or of non-rectangular text shapes more technically difficult or expensive than the reproduction of linear type" (Wysocki, 2004, p. 13). Additionally, as Lanham (1994) describes, print paradigms function to discourage selection and possibility because of how it conceals its rhetorical functioning and its historical contingencies. He notes that like all texts
Print, after all, is a trickery too, not a historical inevitability. Print represents a decision of severe abstraction and subtraction. All non-linear signals are filtered out; color is banned for serious texts; typographical constants are rigorously enforced; sound is proscribed; even the tactility of visual elaboration is outlawed. Print is an act of perceptual self-denial…”. (1994, p. 73-74)
Though static pictures may possess non-linear signals like color and tactility, there is still a trickery and self-denial involved. There is an assumption, which I'll discuss in more detail later, that visual texts need verbal text to make meaning. Verbal text is serious and meaningful text. Visual text is additional and not necessary. Lanham’s descriptions regarding what print hides, furthermore, are based on stable notions of print’s concealment (i.e. color, typography, sound, and touch). Print can and does possess these elements, but an audience rarely considers them. For instance, white pages on black text are default, sound is italicized and capitalized, and pages in magazines often feel different from pages in books (smooth versus textured). Print’s ubiquity and the ethos it projects might be said to be couched in individualism—“it is authoritative and unchangeable, transparent and unselfconscious, read in silence and, if possible in private” (Lanham, 1994, p. 8). Print hides its history and how print, itself, is a technology rhetorically and socially defined and constructed. Print encourages privacy and the notion that one learns through abstraction rather than experience. Print, it might even be said, associates with being "intellectual" as Janine (played by Annie Potts) points out in the Ghostbusters's clip: "I read a lot myself. Some people think I'm too intellectual but I think it's a fabulous way to spend your spare time."
Reading technologies, as Lanham observes often adopt print's limitations. Most e-books, for instance, have chosen to mimic printed books as closely as possible. They transport to the screen all the expressive limitations of printed books: no color, no motion, no sound" (2007, p. 131). To be fair, e-books and e-readers have and are changing as well as the forms they are presenting. E-readers like the Kindle and nook are becoming more like iPads, smartphones, or multimedia devices rather than displays used mainly for print or verbal text. For me, the "new" book is an app like the multimodal remediation of A Charlie Brown Christmas where print, voice narration, visual image (still and moving), music, and the ability to play music are combined to create a "new" book form and experience. Of coures, Lanham would note this isn't a "serious" text and is a children's book; however, I think this app represents a hopeful future for more expressive book forms to come. While web pages and websites are often more like the app I've described and not like Lanham's conception of e-books in their expressiveness, they do behave as "traditional" books in their presentations of visual imagery. It is as if there is a technical assumption that there is only one possibility for presenting a visual image and that it must be stable. 
One reason for the assumption of stability is that print occupies meatspace. In print, it is only possible to succeed statically—without adapting or adopting ideas quickly. When a text is printed, it might as well be set in (tomb)stone since expressions of ideas are slow to change or develop as they would with dynamic text or dynamic pictures. A book, for instance, instructs audiences to forget that an author’s ideas can change quickly or even immediately after being published; new editions often take years to come out. Static pictures, then, can be considered meatspace pictures rather than cyberspace pictures. Web pages using only static pictures assume the “stability” of print.
When a web page's verbal text (e.g. a title or description) is coupled with a static picture, it creates a similar kind of stability. The verbal text may make a picture less ambiguous and help provide a context for understanding the picture. In other words, verbal text attempts to fix a picture's interpretation. Birdsell and Groarke (2004) describe such fixing as "immediate verbal context." Immediate verbal context are the ways "Words can establish a context of meaning into which images can enter with a high degree of specificity while achieving a meaning different from the words alone" (Birdsell and Groarke, 2004, p. 315). Barthes (1978) makes similar comments on the ways verbal text works to situate pictures. He writes that words "anchor" a picture to a particular understanding of that picture:
The text helps to identify purely and simply the elements of the scene and the scene itself; it is a matter of a denoted description of the image (a description which is often incomplete)...The denomitave function corresponds exactly to an anchorage of all the possible (denoted) meanings of the object by recourse to a nomenclature. (p. 39)
For instance, in the slide show above, if "Ghosts" had been replaced by "Halloween" or "Ghostly Images in Media," an audience's understanding of the pictures would change. Rather than seeing types of ghosts, an audience is directed toward an understanding that the pictures represent holiday imagery or are part of a rhetorical analysis.
At the same time, however, it is important to remember that pictures or visual images also function as anchors. When audiences visit a web page, they are often greeted by ambiguous verbal text. Depending on the web page or website, an audience member can be greeted by verbal text like “you,” “customers,” “parents," and "ghost." Pictures, then, can also be viewed as ways to anchor verbal text and conjure particular understandings of what a designer means by “you,” “customers,” “parents," and "ghosts." If it used to be that verbal text held most of the anchoring responsibilities, today, the roles are more equal and, perhaps, even reversed. After all, now visual imagery is not only searchable through verbal text, visual imagery is searchable through visual imagery beyond OCR programs. TinEye and Google search by images offer what is commonly called a "reverse image search" allowing web searchers a way to "search by image instead of text" (Google) and find visual images like or similar to the images they've searched for. Additionally, Google search by image tries "to generate an accurate 'best guess' text description of your image..." (Google). For me, a "best guess" acknowledges the complicated ways in which visual imaery and verbal text anchor each other. It's becoming more difficult understand anchoring as one-sided though the name for this kind of search ("reverse image search") implies that it is somehow "backward" or "strange" while "forward" or "normal" search is still text-based/biased.
Such anchorings are rhetorical issues for designers and audiences because static visual imagery, like the ghost to my left, can deny the existence of different kinds or types of ghosts in anchoring verbal text. In more words, a particular type of presence is conjured for users visiting this page. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) describe presence as "the very fact of selecting certain elements and presenting them to the audience, their importance and pertinency to the discussion are implied. Indeed, such a choice endows these elements with presence" (p. 116). Presence foregrounds some things (reveals or makes present) and pushes to the background other things (conceals or makes absent). In the ghost to my left, I've foregrounded the friendly or funny Ghostbusters' logotype and made absent more serious or frightening types of ghosts. With only one ghost, a casual reader/browser might assume this piece is about Ghostbusters exclusively or that it isn't serious or academic. In other words, presence is limited.
Digital media technologies like slide shows/image rotators open up represen(ce)tational possibilities. Dynamic visual imagery unlike static visual imagery may work with verbal text so that there are more "ghosts," “yous,” “customers,” or “parents.” This imagery may work to increase the number of audience members identifying with a web page or and generate more than one presence for audiences. There doesn't have to be one type of ghost. For multimedia authors whose goals are inclusivity and diversity in their visual representational practices, the digital technologies for creating dynamic imagery are significant tools.
Designing Digital Media: Critical Hyperreading and Mechanical Learning for Students and Scholars (return to menu)
By exploring ways visual imagery is presented on the web is to give presence to those ubiquitous and overlooked tools of digital design. My analysis not only helps us understand the rhetorical possibilities of digital media technologies, it adds to Nicholas C. Burbules's (1998) analysis on the workings of one of digital media’s most important contributions to reading: the hyperlink. In his discussion of how hyperlinks function tropically (as rhetorical tropes) he asks us to become critical hypereaders and analyze how hyperlinks are rhetorical and shouldn’t be taken at face value. To hyperread critically is to question hyperlinks and consider how they behave metaphorically to reveal certain ideological positions while concealing others. Through the use of hyperlinks the “Web advantages certain voices and perspectives and disadvantages others” (Burbules, 1998, p. 119). The navigation menu on MSN’s website, for instance, offers a category for sports. The drop-down menu reveals a number links to sports (Figure 1).
Figure 1 
Burbules would say that these links act as a synecdoches. The links represent part of sports for the whole of sports and shows a particular ideological position of what sports are worth listing, of what constitutes sports in the United States. Badminton, boxing, skiing, snowboarding, and surfing are concealed to an audience and denied inclusion into the category of sports. Static and dynamic imagery, like hyperlinks, function tropically to reveal some possibilities and conceal others.
Exorcising Print Poltergeists, builds off another of Burbules's observations regarding a cognitive or critical thinking transition that can occur for authors who know about the mechanics of digital texts—how they are made. He posits “the more that one is aware of how this is done, the more one can be aware that it was done and that it could have been done otherwise” (1998, p. 118-119). Though not as explicit about the need for a mechanical understanding of how digital texts are made, Strain and VanHoosier-Carey (2003) implicitly echo this sentiment describing an unfortunate aspect of humanities scholarship: "Unfortunately for the humanities, most of its scholars are not fully aware of the functional, design elements of hypermedia, and the potential that they present to humanities scholarship" (p. 259). Strain and VanHoosier-Carey encourage humanities scholars to consider how interfaces are designed, are rhetorical, contribute to hypermedia arguments, and to become involved in the creation of hypermedia projects or applications (hypermedia is their term for acknowledging how hypertext is not just written text but incorporates other hyperlinked media). They suggest scholars examine how technologies act as affordances—how "they convey the interactive significance of an object, the equivalent of meaning in words or images" (Strain & VanHoosier-Carey, 2003, p. 261). Technologies enabling static or dynamic imagery offer different types of interactions with objects (pictures) for audiences. Understanding the functions of an interface, or the interactivity it affords, is a consideration of the mechanics of an interface—that a web page was made a certain way and it could have been made otherwise.
Like Burbules and Strain and VanHoosier-Carey, Bolter (2003) implores humanist theorists to create hypermedia texts. As I understand Bolter, he recommends humanist theorists imitate how teachers of graphic design and fine arts not only criticize new media artifacts but also produce them. He argues that such a move can help scholars move away from our print or written textual bias. He writes, "To approach new media as a practice is to appreciate the cultural significance of images and sounds as well as written words"(p. 27). He calls for a new critical theory of new media (i.e. what I take him to mean as digital media) and argues this theory "should analyze and even criticize current cultural practices through new media forms...a new theory should turn new media forms themselves into vehicles of critique" (p. 34). Bolter's suggestion necessitates more "functional" or "mechanical" learning by humanist scholars. Bolter, Strain and VanHoosier-Carey, and Burbules are all speaking to the importance of praxis—of generating digital media rather than exclusively theorizing about it. Exorcising Print Poltergeists, therefore, offers pedagogical suggestions to humanists for creating and using static and dynamic imagery in their classrooms and tries to "practice what it preaches" by being a digital media document utilizing static and dynamic imagery to critique static and dynamic imagery.
Exorcising Print Poltergeists furthers our understanding of the mechanics of dynamic imagery and static imagery by considering them as affordances that allow for a particular type of user experience or interaction with hypermedia texts. In the web pages that follow, you will find further analysis of static and dynamic imagery in the Static and Dynamic web pages of this website. In the Pedagogy page audiences will find activities, assignments, and software recommendations for students and scholars to engage with the mechanics of digital texts by creating slide shows. In Conclusion, I summarize my argument and make suggestions for future research. In a synecdoche that summarizes the purpose of the piece, Exorcising Print Poltergeists seeks to prove Dr. Spengler completely right and kill the use of static imagery on web pages.