Visual data and sociology - Essay Example

VISUAL DATA AND SOCIOLOGY Sociology is the study of human societies. At the macro-level, sociology studies societies as a whole and their social institutions such as the family, economy, religion, polity, and education. At the micro-level, sociology is concerned with everyday interactions within small social groups. This is based on the notion that a particular group carries with it specific norms and characteristics, or learned behaviors common to its population. In a more general term, a group represents a particular "culture". Culture and society are different terms though. While cultures are complexes of learned behavior patterns and perceptions, societies are groups of interacting organisms. Thus, not only humans have a particular culture. Anything and everything that interacts-animate or inanimate-- forms a society that has a particular culture. Surveys, experiments, ethnography, case-studies, content-analysis are some of the strategies traditionally employed in conducting sociological researches. Results in the application of these strategies form the data for qualitative or quantitative research methods. Beginning in the 1970s, however, and over the following three decades, the social sciences experienced a significant change in their understanding of social life. This change is often described as the 'cultural turn'. That is, 'culture' became a crucial means by which many social scientists understood social processes, social identities, and social change and conflict. In understanding these complexities, Stuart Hall (1997) stresses: culture is not so much a set of things - novels and paintings or TV programmes or comics - as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings - the 'giving and taking of meaning' - between the members of a society or group Thus culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is around them, and 'making sense' of the world, in broadly similar ways.1 Meanings may be deliberately or accidentally created and transferred. However these meanings are sent, they become a representative of the group or a reflection of its culture as these representations creates an identity for the group (society). This phenomenon may be explained in a number of ways. Recently however, many writers addressing these issues argued that the visual is central to the cultural construction of social life in contemporary Western societies (Rose, 2006: 26).2 Inference is made to the fact that advancement in technology has increased dramatically since man's triumphant passage from the industrial age to the information age. Not a single day will go by that a person will not be affected or affect visual technologies - photography, film, video, digital graphics, television, acrylics, for example - and the images they show us - TV programmes, advertisements, snapshots, public sculpture, movies, surveillance video footage, newspaper pictures, paintings and so on. All these different kinds of technologies and images offer views of the world; they depict the world in visual terms. The process of depicting is not a passive action though. These images do not work as a mirror that reflects the society as it is. Prior to the act of reflecting people responsible for the images' taking place, in a way, create a reality for the beholders to perceive. Hence, what seems is not actually what is seen. Perceivers or the society sees a construction of a re-constructed understanding of what is and results to contradicting reading of what should be. In this paper the use and effect of visual materials on sociological research will be explored. Specifically, this paper will argue that there are significant methodological or ethical problems in the use of visual materials in sociological research. To make the explanation more concrete, a visual image will be analyzed before the end of this paper. Wagner (2008), describes how visual images became part of research methods employed in studies conducted in the social sciences. According to him, since the early 1980's, similar forms of affiliation emerged around research methods involving interviews, life histories, and field observations. In the same way manner that quantitatively or experimentally orientated researchers talked with each other about different kinds of numerical data, social researchers who did field work, interviews, and the like began talking and writing about the kinds of data closely associated to their own approaches - for example words, artifacts, physical traces, or images. In support of these cross-disciplinary examinations of field work, new journals, conferences and networks emerged around issues of qualitative research. In response to these shifts in theory and in the methods of educational research, words and images -- photographs, drawings, cognitive "maps" and video tape -- appeared as increasingly valuable forms of data, a development that had parallels in medicine, business and other applied fields.3 For most writers, the sense of sight is the most fundamental of all our senses. John Berger (1972: 7) opines that this is due to the fact that 'seeing comes before words (Rose, 2006: 27).'4 Perhaps this explains why a child identifies faces of significant others before he could actually say 'mo-mma'. Consequently, what is revealed through the written words is amplified by the visual data that accompanies them. Martin Jay (1998) asserts: All the management of our lives depends on the senses, and since that of sight is the most comprehensive and noblest of these, there is no doubt that the inventions which serve to augment its power are among the most useful that there can be. (21)5 It has also been argued too that the visual is equally central to post-modernity. As technology advanced, these new visualizing technologies have created 'the vision machine' in which we are all caught, making the visual a part of man's social life. To such view, Mitchell, W. J.T. (2002) clarifies that what is perceived will never be at all times what is intended; it may never be transparent: vision is (as we say) a cultural construction, that it is learned and cultivated, not simply given by nature; that therefore it might have a history related in some yet to be determined way to the history of arts, technologies, media, and social practices of display and spectatorship; and (finally) that it is deeply involved with human societies, with the ethics and politics, aesthetics and epistemology of seeing and being seen. (166) 6 They are social constructions, pure and simple. Mitchell further asserts that these visual images may become "instruments or agents of domination, seduction, persuasion, and deception."7 At this point, it is important to note that there is a dispersed but persistent body of work in the social sciences that uses various kinds of images as ways of answering research questions, not by examining images but by creating them. However, when social scientists are making their own images, their concern for the power relations in which those images are embedded takes a specific form: it becomes a discussion of research ethics which reflects on the power dynamics between the researcher, the researched and the images, as stressed by Rose (2006: 6) 8 As a social construct particular 'audience' or 'reader' of an image will bring their own interpretations to bear on its meaning and effect. As Fyfe and Law (1988) confirms: a depiction is never just an illustration ... it is the site for the construction and depiction of social difference'. One of the central aims of 'the cultural turn' in the social sciences was to argue that social categories are not natural but instead are constructed. These constructions can take visual form. "To understand a visualisation is thus to enquire into its provenance and into the social work that it does. It is to note its principles of inclusion and exclusion, to detect the roles that it makes available, to understand the way in which they are distributed, and to decode the hierarchies and differences that it naturalises." (7)9 In effect, images offer very particular visions of social categories, namely: class, gender, race, sexuality, able-bodiedness among others. Furthermore, it makes clear that images of social difference work not simply by what they show but also by the kind of seeing that they invite. And as earlier pointed out, since a person: an image may have its own visual effects (so it is important to look very carefully at images); these effects, through the ways of seeing mobilized by the image, are crucial in the production and reproduction of visions of social difference; but these effects always intersect with the social context of viewing and with the visualities spectators bring to their viewing. Having these ethical concerns and problems that may be caused by the use of visual materials, Rose (2008) suggested three critical approaches in analyzing visual images, as follows: 1) take images seriously for they are not entirely reducible to their own context; 2) think about the social conditions and effects of visual objects; and 3) consider your own way of looking at images.10 The article caps off with three sites at which the meanings of an image are made should be given full attention: 1) the sites of the production of an image (controlled or non-controlled); 2) the site of the image itself (medium through which the image is viewed; 3) and the site(s) where it is seen by various audiences (e.g, through the web, magazines, books, daily paper).11 For certain questions such as, "How much is too much or too little, or too far and too near to get the right angle for the visual image that would carry the particular culture that is intended by the writer or the researcher How representative is that moment, that population and that angle to reflect a particular group Will it not invade the subject's (image) privacy How open or transparent should the subject be for it to be considered a true reflection of the reality" may be constructed and re-constructed differently depending on who is reading the visual at a particular time. Suffice it to say that all these, including the previously presented ideas affirm my argument that there are significant methodological or ethical problems in the use of visual materials in sociological research. Consider the photo taken by Ravelo (2008) of a boy in almost waist-deep water of the Manila Bay collects plastic materials to sell near the polluted coastline of Manila. 13 Such depiction of the coastal area were ships, international as well as domestic vessels dock may raise concerns from different groups. Child abuse may be indicative of this, labor code, safety work environment, effect on tourism, on the child's as well as nearby residents' health, sanitation (garbage collection), global warming, bio-degradable and non-biodegradable materials, life in the coastal area, economic situation of the country and so on. I could go on and on describing the situation or the context of the photograph but the real intent or the sociology behind it may never be clear to its intended reader Who is its intended reader, by the way The caption only names the photographer and a brief description of the photo, which may result in a number of conflicting perceptions, and later level of acceptance of people or residents coming from that area. In the process, the image becomes the reality, when in fact this might have happened weeks or even a day after a typhoon or what ever naturally-caused incident that created the pile of waste in that area. Should images, such as this will be used in a sociological research, the previously mentioned approaches identified be taken in consideration. May our vision not be blurred by the unspoken message of the visual materials. Consider its context, the mode through which it has been transferred and how much of the reality is pictured. Instead, one may use numerical data to described the quantity or the frequency or what ever quantifier that may be used to point to the intended meaning. That is when one will get a clearer picture of reality. References 1. Rose (2006) Researching Visual Materials: Towards A Critical Methodology. Chapter 1. Accessed 15 April 2008 from 2. Ibid, p1. 3. Wagner, Jon. Contrasting Images, Complementary Trajectories: Sociology, Visual Sociology and Visual Research. Published as: Visual Studies 17 (2), pp. 160-171, 2002. [reprinted from Sociological Imagination 38 (1/2) pp7-27, 2001]. Accessed on 15 April 2008 from http://education.ucdavis.edu/wagner/papers/cict.htm 4. Rose, Ibid, p2. 5. Ibid. 6. Mitchell, W. J. T (2002). Showing Seeing: A critique of Visual Culture. Journal of Visual Culture. Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 1(2): 165-181 [1470-4129(200208)1:2;165-181;026800]. Accessed on 15 April 2008 from 7. Ibid, p 175. 8. Rose, Ibid, p6. 9. Ibid, p7. 10. Ibid, p10. 11. Ibid, 13-15. 12. Ravelo, Cheryl (2008). Washingtonpost Company.Washingtonpost.com. Accessed on 15 April 2008 from Read More