Visual literacy in the age of Covid-19 and conspiracies
Earlier this week, Groote Schuur Hospital and the health sciences faculty at the University of Cape Town posted an infographic reflecting the breakdown of vaccinated and unvaccinated patients in three Covid-19 categories (those who have been hospitalised, those who are in the intensive care unit and those who have been placed on ventilators).
The aim is to release updated figures daily and to provide data from hospitals across the Western Cape.
The visual representation of legitimate, accurate data should be a key mechanism for increasing public awareness of the effectiveness of vaccines in fighting the pandemic. And indeed, the Groote Schuur figures unambiguously made the case for vaccination.
But antivaxxers have never been big on understanding when correlation does or does not mean causation; that ’ s why they can confidently say things like, “I’ve been taking Ivermectin for months now and I haven’t got Covid-19, so obviously it works!”
And they are not, sadly, swayed by numerical evidence — even when this shows that a hospital in SA is following international trends in recording very low (and almost negligible) numbers of severe or lifethreatening Covid-19 cases among vaccinated individuals compared with their unvaccinated counterparts.
In this case, the similarity to other countries backfired because the graphic maker used the same template, with the same colouring, as a healthcare group in the US trying to make the same point.
The odd thing about antivaxxers is that they follow the opposite logic to Occam’s razor (the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one), preferring to leap to outlandish conspiracy theories or accuse verified authorities of “fake news” rather than face the contradictions in their world view.
These visually similar charts were thus, for the rabid antivaxxers of SA Twitter and
Facebook, grounds for dismissing the local data. There is a deep irony in this newfound aesthetic critical capacity on the part of antivaxxers. It is, I have to say, a case of the pot and the kettle. Because almost without fail, one of the telltale signs of the disinformation for which the conspiratorially minded fall is that it comes packaged in an amateurish, badly designed and visually clumsy form.
I used to think that you have to be a special kind of gullible to fall for the ugly stuff that does the rounds on social media: Trumpism, hardliner evangelical hatred, anti-Semitism, racism and all of these intersecting in one way or another with antivaxx conspiracies. Or that, at least, you have to be predisposed by your own bigotry and neurosis to fall for such fear-invoking messages.
Increasingly, however, I’ve come to realise that there is an additional component to consider: visual literacy.
This is not to be confused with other forms of literacy. You can be highly educated and intelligent, and capable in many spheres, but remain inept in terms of visual literacy — in particular when it comes to digital images. Many baby boomers, for instance, having first encountered electronic media relatively late in life remain as susceptible as preteens who can be won over by a bar graph.
Visual literacy is not, however, age-correlated. Nor does it align with race, gender, income group or vocation. You will find plenty of visually illiterate lawyers, accountants, CEOs, engineers and programmers. To be fair, there
are probably also plenty of practising artists whose views on Covid-19 suggest that they, too, have been duped by
second-rate content — meaning that they do not apply the same rigour to the images they receive via WhatsApp as they do to a canvas or sculpture.
The good news is that, no matter who you are or what your background is, it is never too late to learn.
And yes, you can be trained in visual literacy. It is a subcategory of the general critical literacy that we teach students in the arts and social sciences: how to “read” images, to conduct a rigorous visual analysis almost as a matter of instinct. It does not guarantee immunity against misinformation, of course, but it provides a pretty strong inoculation.
And, given that a humanities degree is not accessible to most, there is an urgent need to place greater emphasis on these skills at primary and secondary school levels. Arts in education as a public health intervention? You’d better believe it.