Digital Delights

No image is “neutral” – this too is partly why they are used – and there are often foreseeable tensions when any singular image is used as a proxy for a complicated social concept. Given the increasing diversity of audience members in education, a greater degree of awareness of some of these foreseeable tensions and greater cultural sensitivity may be needed where humour is involved, especially where there are historical inequalities of power at play. In practice, not every utterance requires visual translation or elaboration – and often the audience’s own imagination can be leveraged for a more individual and powerful source of humour (or horror) through allusion. It may be time to take another look and reconsider some of the visual representations in our presentations.