Words and pictures

I've been thinking the past few months about the place of images in composition classes. Like the shift from black-and-white to color television in my childhood, our textbooks have turned technicolor as the dawning recognition of the importance of visual rhetoric sweeps the comp/rhet field like those waves of colored cards across a football stadium. I understand its attraction, the carnival-like appeal of all those quirky advertisements to analyze. And learning to look, of course, is a vital skill for the writer. But is making visual rhetoric the cornerstone of comp classes a service to our students, helping them make judgments in a culture saturated with images, or is it a surrender to a public discourse in which people take positions on stem cell research via youtube clips and on political candidates via 30-second Swift boat ads?