MBP #4

For my fourth Mini Blog post I choose this image because it is recognized by many Americans and we all understand the meaning that it portrays. A visual ideograph uses an abstract concept to advance support for specific political positions. For example, the words freedom, liberty, and justice are the building blocks of ideology. Ideology is a system of ideas which form the basis of economic or political theory and policy. These words inspire collective meaning and feeling in which we all have a similar idea of what it means, but there is no coined definition for these terms. The original image of Uncle Sam’s “I Want You” poster attempts to recruit Americans to join in World War 1. This actually helped a lot and many men dropped everything they were doing and enlisted in the war. Today we see more images like the one I choose which plays with the original meaning and makes it into something completely different. The image I used can be seen around the holiday times and tells people that if they spend a lot of money on gifts their family will love them more. This visual ideograph can be interpreted in two different ways: The first way someone can take the image is that if they spend a lot of money their family will love them. The second way someone can take this image is with a deeper meaning that they don’t need spend a lot of money in order for their family to love them, because they already do regardless. Visual ideographs can be interpreted in many different ways, it all comes down to how you derive meaning from the image. This shows that visual ideographs are culturally bounded and can elicit many different meanings across cultures.