Analysis of Visual Rhetoric

This image was on the website, Social Times, which has articles about games, apps, social media and other advertising and marketing topics. The purpose of the graphic was for informational and functional purposes. Since the two teams playing in this NBA playoffs were both in the southern part of the United States, it was obvious that the most tweets would be coming from people in nearby states. Since the two infographics are very similar, it would have been helpful if the article gave more of a description discussing the differences in the maps. Also the title of the article was "26.7 Million Tweets Sent During NBA Finals, 150,000 Tweets Per Minute Game 7 Peak" which could not be gathered from these tweet maps. The legend for the maps stated that the different colors represented the number of tweets per million population, so if the audience is not familiar with the population of each states, then it would be impossible to infer how many tweets actually were coming from those states. Since there was no caption for the two maps and they looked relatively similar, this was an ineffective way to compare tweets about the two teams unless the purpose was to show that there was no significant difference between the numbers of tweets about each team.