Peter LUDES

　　Peter LUDES

　　Professor of Mass Communication, Integrated Social Sciences, Jacobs University Bremen

　　Research Interests：Global visual communication, multiple civilizing and globalizing processes

　　Main Publications：Key Visuals (with a CD-ROM), Wiesbaden, 2001, DVD-ROM ‘Medien und Symbole: ?uropäische MedienBILDung’, Siegen 2002, Visual Hegemonies: An Outline, Munster, 2005

　　Olympic Key Visuals in 2004

　　Peter LUDES

　　Key Visuals are functional equivalents to keywords: In television and on the WWW, they condense more encompassing narratives. Trailers of movies and TV programs or video bits at the beginning or the end of information programs are prominent examples.

　　Specific canons of selection and presentation have been established, e.g., by reviews at the end of the year or decade. This process of memorization also applies to the Olympic Games. Looking back to 2004, two analyses show the flow of images before and after the games themselves. Using image retrievals via Google etc. in spring 2004, from websites in Brazil, China, Germany, Greece, and the United States, the quantitative distribution of 301 visuals analyzed in detail shows buildings, material objects, posters, commercials and winners first; teams, politicians, and losers last. The annual TV reviews of Rede Globo (Brazil), CCTV (China), ARD (Germany), and ABC of 2004 present a similar narrative of losers lost in the collective visual memories. We can distinguish culture-specific from transcultural and global Key Visuals, which can become parts of the everyday environments, e.g., on vases, plates, posters on the walls, or as mascots. They are often used for selling products; yet one might even say that certain products like Coca Cola pass on their specific reputation on Olympic visuals: Key players in the worlds of symbols compete with each other and join forces. Male participants in the Olympic Games still dominate--yet we can observe a decreasing gender gap. Torch and flame as well as winners are the most obvious examples for highly prominent visuals on the web which offer keys to a more general presentation pattern: spectators were presented as a marginal phenomenon, visual presentations of the military, police, and politicians will probably increase.