Iconics: Icon Evolution in Digitality

Image manipulation, archiving, and sharing are all critical technological aspects of Western culture and postmodern civilization. Consequently, creation, identification, dissemination, and proliferation of powerful images across media channels today indicate a burgeoning area of information technology. While words alone are capable of conveying adequate information across media channels, the news industry crafts around the dual enterprise of both word and image. Audio-visual supports of these communication devices constituting new media are standard means of rhetorical expressions in acquiring and sharing information in daily life. Overwhelming sensory experiences associated with broadcast media ensure that neither 1) time to study individual factors that render media as iconic, nor 2) interest in interpretation of such dynamics prior to public release. That leads to deeper issues of access, privilege, and motive, yet only through serious scholarly inquiry can we gain understanding of rhetorical roots and expressions of the diverse entities producing media that eventually becomes iconic.