Cross-Cultural Communication in a Crisis: The Universality of Visual Narrative in the COVID-19 Pandemic

A primary goal of twenty-first century legal works is to communicate the law effectively to diverse audiences. Many of the most needful and most vulnerable audiences for legal information have members who lack basic literacy skills and suffer linguistic and cultural confusion from verbal textual media—namely, the printed word. Yet for centuries, legal rules and government restrictions have been communicated nearly exclusively through the printed word. Recent scholarship in visual legal rhetoric, visual literacy studies, and visual cultural studies is informed by cognitive psychology and neuroscience that all points to a solution: visual communication of the law. Visual communication is a nearly universal form of communication that transcends cultural and language barriers. Visual communication can be used in the law to reach the widest possible audience for critical legal information. The Covid-19 Crisis of 2020-2021 has provided a natural experiment in communication of critical information regarding government-backed and government-mandated restrictions and recommendations to broad and diverse audiences through highly visual and pictorial media. Lawyers, judges, and law students can draw immediate lessons from the correlation of visual content and the nearly universal use of multimodal content employing both words and highly pictorial images