Constructing an Argument in the Age of Social Media:
Explorations of Visual Thinking Within the Writing Process
As part of the culmination of my graduate school experience at North Carolina State University, I completed my graduate thesis, Constructing an Argument in the Age of Social Media: Explorations of Visual Thinking Within the Writing Process. The project included a full-length written component including a speculative design, both of which were informed by a year of research. The abstract below describes the ideas upon which I focused my research during my thesis exploration.
ABSTRACT
Within the modern American cultural environment of ubiquitous social media, the average user has access to a variety of tools to create, remediate, and disseminate information.
One effect of this shift from user consumption to production is the democratization of news media. With the evolution of free channels of broadcast such as blogs, social networking, forums, and participatory news sites, media conglomerates are no longer the only source of daily news. Citizen journalism has grown out of this phenomenon—citizen journalists contribute to the media landscape by writing about, photographing, and videotaping personally meaningful news and events.
Even though citizen journalists have the means to produce and broadcast their work, they don’t always understand how to construct an argument, establish credibility, and compel audiences to view their writing, nor do they always have the educational tools to guide them through the process. This, coupled with the production affordances of the Internet, creates a need for guiding users in generating content with a purpose.
Design has a role to play in this education. My investigation explores how the introduction of visual thinking into the writing process could help citizen journalists construct arguments. In The Uses of Argument, Stephen Toulmin frames the phases of an argument from a procedural rather than formal perspective. My exploration applies Toulmin’s model of argumentation to a series of studies exploring visual thinking through data visualization, mapping, storyboarding, annotation, and the design of conversational spaces.
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