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Visual Communication, Vol. 5, No. 3, 287-306 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1470357206068459

Clipart images as commonsense categories

George L. Dillon

University of Washington, USA

Clipart is the visual representation of commonsense categories and stereotypes of social representations, as defined by Moscovici. Indexed and displayed online for downloading on Microsoft's Design Gallery and Art Today's clipart.com, the clips exhibit strong threads of continuity with earlier popular illustration and rhetorical manuals of gesture. At the same time, they also register differences in the social representations of different eras, as well as divisions and complexities in the representation of controversial categories such as sexual harassment. Though it is questionable how and in what way the theories popular at a particular time can be critiqued by citing the clipart of the era, these large archives provide powerful new tools for seeing, displaying, and investigating social representations - more powerful and useful than directly accessing Google's hundreds of millions of online `images'.

Key Words: clich • gesture • rhetoric • social representations • stereotypes


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