Critical Perspectives on Social Media

The notion of ‘participatory culture’ is used to refer to the participation of consumers, audiences, users, and fans, to the formation of culture and the creation of content.  Participatory culture may be contrasted and opposed to the archetypical way of producing information where only one sender shares information with many receivers. Examples of participatory culture […]

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From Viral Media to Spreadable Media

Rushkoff (1994) introduces the concepts of ‘media virus’ and ‘viral media’. According to him, anything that catches our attention on the web may be considered as a media virus: media events, inventions, systems of thoughts, musical riffs, visual images, scientific theories, sex scandals, clothing styles, etc. (1994, p.10). He holds that those memes spread through […]

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Persuasion and Rhetoric in Advertising

Simons defines persuasion as “communication designed to influence the autonomous judgments and actions of others” (p.  20, 2001).  The art of persuasion is generally called ‘rhetoric’. Persuasion in a method that seeks to influence the opinions of others, the way they think, or act. However, persuasion is not a coercive method, it is a technique […]

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Television Commercials of the 1950s and 1960s

Concerning the domain of television advertisement, the 19th century has been a crucial period and a decisive turning point in the evolution of advertising (Marchand,1985; Tungate, 2007). During that period, the number of advertisements increasingly multiplied. What is more, the diversity of the goods advertised on television, and the means available for advertising also definitely […]

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Discourse Analysis II: Institutions and Ways of Seeing

As we have seen in the precedent article, according to Rose (2001), Michel Foucault’s work on power and discourse gave birth to two different kinds of discourse analysis methodologies: ‘Discourse Analysis I’ and ‘Discourse Analysis II’. In this article, we will focus on the second type of discourse analysis: discourse analysis II. Firstly, I will […]

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Discourse Analsysis I: Text, Intertextuality, Context

In the same line as we discussed semiotics as a research method in a precedent article, we will now analyze the concept of discourse analysis as a research technique. This article provides a summary of the concept of ‘discourse’ and ‘discourse Analysis I’. We will also examine discourse analysis as a research method in relation […]

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Cultural Branding

Holt (2004) claims that our world is overwhelmed and dominated by ‘cultural icons’. Cultural icons are exemplary emblems that people accept and associate with significant sets of ideas. A cultural icon may be a fictional character as well as a real person. Cultural icons may also be companies (e.g Disney), non-governmental organizations (O.N.U), universities (Harvard […]

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Semiotics: Signs, Icons, Symbols

Visual communication is so usual and familiar to us that we hardly ever question its rules. Indeed, our conception of visual language is hardly ever established on deep theoretical or concrete reflection. While we have usually been guided through the analysis of the structure and meaning of language, the significances of visual images seems so […]

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