The Narrative of the Image

Abstract

This poster paper explores semiotics and rhetoric as narrative in social media visual culture, specifically with issues of identity and social change on social media platforms such as YouTube. Under the umbrella of semiotics, postmodernism, and poststructuralism, the paper builds upon the work of Roland Barthes, Stuart Hall, and Safiya Umoja Noble by expanding the concepts of visual semiotics, visual rhetoric, postcolonialism, critical race theory, and algorithms to examine the narrative of the image.