Shock Value

The other posts mentioned how visuals contribute to an author’s ability to convey a certain message to his/her audience or summarize a particular idea through a visual means. But, if we dig deeper, we can see that there are numerous ways of creating visuals to convey a certain message. One of the most interesting rhetorical roles that visuals can be used for is that of shock value: those gruesome, sexual, eerie, and just plain out gross visuals that we all want to look away from, but are perversely attracted to. This particular type of visuals is often very effective because of this perverse attraction to see something out of the ordinary or even taboo; we look at a shocking image, commercial, advertisement, etc. because human nature drives us to do so. Thus, an effective advertisement is born because the authors/designers have made an advertisement that grabs people’s attention (regardless of the means), which is the first step in selling a product of idea.

I encountered the perfect rhetorical usage of shock value several times during my undergraduate years at Penn State. Every fall a radical pro-life group came to campus with numerous over-sized pictures of aborted fetuses and signs reading “Pictures of Genocide Ahead.” The signs grabbed people’s attention because it’s not every day that one gets to see pictures of genocide happening in the world today. The pictures conveyed the group’s message through blood and gore, which inevitably made the whole idea of abortion more real. Regardless of one’s standpoint on the issue of abortion, those images made an impact merely because of their shock value, and, therefore, the group’s means of conveying their ideas was effective because it reached a very broad audience having several different standpoints on the matter.