Geolocating Obama Hope:

Virtual Geosemiotics and Context Dependent Meaning

Conclusion: Recuperating Geosemiotic Meaning

This geosemiotic analysis has committed what appears to be a cardinal sin identified by Scollon and Scollon. We have attempted our analysis without the ethnographic experience that is necessary to observe social interaction orders in the spaces we have identified. Additionally, the types of sensory space that Edward T. Hall (The Silent Language; The Hidden Dimension) conceives of are not a part of our analysis: haptic, olfactory, and aural spaces are left unaccounted for. We have privileged the visual and reproduced an ocular-centricity in semiotics. As a method guided by geosemiotics, virtual geosemiotics does not take in the full ambit of the sensorium.

And yet, we have reached some preliminary conclusions regarding the context dependent nature of meaning for the Obama Hope image in Larose and Orgosolo. Virtual methods may only offer a window on context dependent meaning, but when data is easier to come by than physical mobility and research time, this window has some utility. Our virtual method, for instance, allowed us to uncover localized context dependent meanings of the Obama Hope image that we would not have otherwise garnered from a decontextualized semiotic reading. The virtual tools of Google Street View and geotagged photography from local news media, the loosely moderated CNN iReport and Instagram provided a visual assembly that represents an emplaced ecology of signs. Google Street View in particular allowed us to see the distance between signs, the significance afforded by proximity, directionality, and in general the dialogic intersemiotic aggregative effect. Google Street View offers a simulation of movement around a place, that coupled with the imagination of the researcher can provide a sensation of entering and exiting a distinct locale.

Geosemiotics enables us to see not only how a sign is interpreted in a given place, but how characters in ongoing stories gain different reputations in different locales. For the oil and shrimp workers of Larose, a distance was felt between them and the President in the aftermath of the Deep Water Horizon catastrophe. The word “Hope” was replaced with the phrase What Now? in an open questioning of the iconicity of the Obama Hope image.

In Orgosolo, metropolitan politics are viewed with suspicion and a threat to local agrarian ways of life, therefore, news of Obama’s election is equated with the scandals of Silvio Berlusconi. The judicial process of Silvio Berlusconi’s legal battles and the progress of Obama’s success, were both treated with equal derision. In Orgosolo, local agrarian life is celebrated as a virtue in and of itself and the activities of would-be invaders are rarely praised, with the notable exception of the Italian Left wherein Antonio Gramsci receives commemoration. The opposition to the metropolitan center is coded left, in contrast to Larose where we see the iconography of the political right celebrated.

Both of our murals appear to be unorthodox remixes of the Obama Hope image, but in their emplaced contexts both murals are situated, they do not stand out as anomalous features in their landscapes. The murals’ situated qualities share a peripheral status within their own nation states, and both have a contentious past and present with the wider world. Orgosolo possesses a deep ambivalence regarding its membership of the Italian state, and Larose finds itself at the end of a road that ends in a Gulf of Mexico tarnished by multi-national oil exploration. In such discourses, Obama Hope is a warning of hopes to be dashed and power to be corrupted.

The claim that place matters in the meaning of signs is a realization that is not new in visual communication methodologies or rhetorical studies, but virtual geosemiotics provides a systematic attempt to access those context dependent meanings. We would encourage further studies of circulating images that take on different salience depending on their location in the world. Our choices of the Obama What Now [?] mural and the Obama Berlusconi mural were intentionally driven by a desire for variance in emplaced meaning and a desire to understand how Obama Hope was infused into murals as acts of resistance. Truth be told, we were still surprised by the weight of critical valence that was indexed in the image relative to the ecology of signs in both Orgosolo and Larose.

The value of our foray into geosemiotics is not contained solely within the case level findings we have garnered but in the potential future applications of virtual methods. The applications of virtual geosemiotics depend on the affordances of available technologies and as we proceed into the next decade we might assume that drone technology will be sufficiently advanced to provide real-time images even in hostile climates. Google Street View has its limitations as it provides a composite image and experience of a place in different times, even different years, but virtual geosemiotics may only realize the extent of its applications as geo-imaging technologies multiply and extend their capabilities. In the future, applications of virtual geosemiotics may extend to health communication, environmental communication, and most clearly, emergency and risk communication. For the moment, our critical-cultural project in visual communication has provided a germinal case study for using virtual geosemiotics.

The applications of virtual geosemiotics can be much wider than the use of Google Street View by researchers. For example, access to images obtained by drone or satellite may be used to analyze semiotic ecologies in places that are inaccessible for a variety of reasons. For instance, the hurricane season of 2017 rendered certain islands in the Caribbean Sea inaccessible and in some cases unreachable by traditional communication technologies. Other areas in recent times that have been difficult to access have included Fukushima in Japan following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant accident; Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea suffered Ebola outbreaks in 2014; and myriad places that have suffered debilitating military hostilities such as Iraq and Syria in 2017. As the earth becomes hotter in the 21^st century we might reasonably expect that more places will become more difficult to access due to extreme weather events and conflict over resources. Virtual geosemiotics might be put to a variety of applications in these instances. For example, does effective signage exist in emergency situations, are there signs of life after catastrophes, and can we improve our own signifying environments in case of catastrophic events? We leave others to explore these potential future applications as we focus for the moment on developing pathways for virtual geosemiotics.

In sum, we produced an account of how an object can change as it circulates into different localities with their own ecologies of signification. The static assumption that an artifact might contain an essence that is preserved in transit across physical space is challenged here by our exploration of geosemiotic methods. Our findings have suggested that with multiple sources of geographic indexing, virtual geosemiotics, as a method, can provide an account of how an object gains meaning from its geophysical placement, and how we, as mediators of visual communication, can use our critical judgment when engaging with the use of certain images in certain places.

Works Cited