Toward an Effective Graphical Argument

I'd like to make a brief comparison between a successful and a missed opportunity for creating an effective visual argument regarding the "news" this week. Rio de Janeiro's Olympics bid video presents its main argument - that the games have never been held in South America - by showing a world map with blue dots popping up at every city that had hosted the Olympics. The visual absence of any dots in such a vast piece of land (all of S. America) suggested a sense of absence and unfairness that even the touching verbal speech of President Lula could never match. It is also worth noting City of God-director Fernando Meirelles - who directed the video - edited out all shantytowns that also dot the Rio landscape, properly sanitizing the city into consideration.

The same day the Olympics video was shown and Rio's victory announced, The New York Times ran a front-page article on the financial costs of being a gay couple over a lifetime. It turns out that after careful statistics and hypotheses (algorithms? mathesis?), the newspaper argued it may cost a same-sex couple almost 500,000 dollars more to simply exist than a heterosexual couple. Although the digits could never convey the emotional or ethical implications of marriage inequality, it may serve as a graphical supplement that could either sway public opinion or claim a kind of queer plight representability. Yet the NY Times presented its data very traditionally utilizing charts. The static, overtly familiar visual representation never matched the greatness of the number (almost half a million dollars). Which brings about the question of a possible blindness - akin to a child who becomes "no-deaf" - to certain forms of representation that the digital may bring,or exacerbate.