Month: April 2017

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Assignment 3. Discourse Analysis 1

The term discourse was created by Foucault and has concrete meaning. First of all, this term played a crucial role in Foucault’s theoretical arguments and in his methodology. Definition of discourse, according to Rose in her book Virtual Methodologies (2001), is “a particular knowledge about the world which shapes how the world is understood and how things are done in it” (2001, p. 136). There are many types of discourses as medical discourse, political discourse. Even art could be considered as a discourse.

 Also, there are number of terms which could help to understand discourse better. Firstly, the intertextuality  refers to the way that the meanings of any one discursive image or text depend not only on that one text or image, but also on the meanings carried by other images and texts. It works as a link between different sources as images and texts.

 

Another crucial term is a term of power.  Foucault was quite clear that discourse was a form of discipline, and this leads us to his concern with power. Power is everywhere, since discourse too is everywhere. Power relationships could be studied on different levels and with different examples. Also, concept of power relates to knowledge. Since discourse is a particular knowledge it could be concluded that knowledge gives power or knowledge is power. 

Nevertheless, discourse analysis I has particular points of interest. They are various kinds  of  visual  images  and  verbal  texts. On this point the intertextuality is necessary because it is one of the main methods to study images and texts. 

There are several strategies how to do this kind of analysis. For example, some of them are about:

  1. looking at your sources with fresh eyes.
  2. immersing yourself in your sources.
  3. identifying key themes in your sources.
  4. examining their effects of truth.
  5. paying attention to their complexity and contradictions.
  6. looking for the invisible as well as the visible.
  7. paying attention to details

Elliot in Consuming caffeine: The discourse of Starbucks and coffee” In: Consumption (2001) uses the methods of discourse analysis to study Starbucks. According to Elliot, coffee is a popular product, especially in USA, so the study of it helps to go deeper in the analyzing of global culture.

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Advertisement, Brands and WALL-E

Questions about advertisement which were raised in No Logo (1999) by Naomi Klein are very popular.  One of the best example is how humans are pictured in the animated film WALL-E (2008).

By the way, this film is about many topics as emotions, love, humaneness, care of the environment, dangers of technologies and few others.  However, the picture about future of humanity is very bright here and many points are the same which Klein mentioned in her books.

(My favourite example is alphabet for children: “A is for Axiom. This is your home. B is for Buy n Large. This is your very best friend”). And just to show the final step in relations between corporation and the world in this fictional universe. Yes, that’s the logo of BnL on the flag!

 

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Flags, signs and popularity

There is a video from TED Talk about city flags. Flags are the symbolic signs according to semiotics approach but this speech not exactly about it. It is about how flags are designed and what should be made with flag to make it popular. These suggestions are not just about flags. They could be about logotypes for brands, for example.

Nevertheless, I decide that it is rather interesting video which is fun and informative.

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Assignment 2. Cultural branding

Development of advertisement and branding goes for many decades but in 21st century it plays a crucial role in the selling production. According to Naomi Klein, this process actively started in the second half of XX century with new inventions which were needed to spread all over the countries and especially in USA (Klein, 1999, p. 27). In her book No Logo (1999) Klein shows the older example about selling the new types of lamps which were electrical and after some time completely changed the oil lamps. For such big changes there were a need in a good advertising and new ways of creating interest.

D. Holt in his book How Brands become Icons. The Principles of Cultural Branding (2004) tells about few ways which were tried by companies. Holt mentions three important but not very useful and independent ways which are mind-share branding, emotional branding and viral branding.

Mind-share branding is about to be known by consumers and have popularity. This type of branding is about mass-communications, provocative images or advertising and other ways to have people’s attention. Holt uses example of Corona Beer to show that mind-branding could be the way to be known but it is not the way to become a cultural icon. Holt is sure that Corona’s iconic value “resided in the particulars of its distinctive myths, not in the abstractions that mind-share advocates emphasize” (Holt, 2004, p. 20). Mind-share branding is too general and abstract to have the possibility to construct a cultural icon. 

Next way is emotional branding. Main point of this type of branding is in emotional connection with consumers. Holt shows the example of Coca-Cola advertising where they followed the tendencies of each decade and found the problems which people were passionate about. Coca-Cola focused their attention on the multicultural and racial division. It worked because of its time and perception but Holt is sure that “emotional attachment is the consequence of a great myth” but not just emotional link (2004, p. 34). His view also could be supported with examples of two contemporary advertising. One is a failed video about protest which was made by Pepsi. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73P9STckPLw

One one hand, it is almost the same what was done by Coca-Cola. It is about unity and peaceful solutions but there is a lot of critics because of it. Coca-Cola did not have such feedback. Maybe, it was less controversial but maybe Pepsi doesn’t have such myth which made the possibility for such advertising.

Much more popular video is from Nike advertising company in Russia. Nike has long story of telling ideas about strengh and will in their promotion videos, they sell such way of life. The second reason of popularity of this advertisement is also an emotional link to shown seen but without first reason this video also could fail.

Final brand strategy which is also not very useful for Holt is viral branding. Viral branding focuses on the paths of public influence and ways how non company actors influence customers to value the brand. This strategy is about consumers and not firms.

Nevertheless, Holt points that most useful way is cultural branding. Main principle is in constructing a cultural icon. Cultural icon is a person or thing which is seen as symbol of something in culture. This could be made with making an identity myth.

This type of branding had few important features. They are:

  1. Addressing acute contradictions in society
  2. Performing identity myths that address people’s desires and anxieties
  3. Performing as activists and leading culture
  4. Relying on breakthrough performances, rather than consistent communications
  5. Enjoying a cultural halo effect (“cultural halo effect: the positive impact of high levels of identity value on conventional brand metrics,such as perceived quality and association with key category benefits” (Holt, 2004, p. 11) )

Cultural icon is the way to become famous and to make emotional bonds at one time. However, this development of brands could be seen as negative effect on culture and society. Klein in her book talks about too much advertisements, logotypes and brands all around us (1999, p. 31).  Brands, according to Klein, affects culture and could be more important for people than real manufacturing. These consequences Klein sees as dangerous one. It it not just about less pretty view in the city because of billboards and other kinds of advertising. It is about influence on our minds, choice in buying products and culture in a whole.

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Assignment 1. Semiotics and signs

There are number of approaches and discourses which give an opportunity to study contemporary world and events in it. One of them is semiotics. Semiotics began to develop in the end of XIX and at the beginning of XX centuries. Two main authors who established it were Ferdinande de Saussure (1857 – 1913) who was linguistic professor of University of Geneva and Charles S. Pierce (1839-1914), philosopher at Harvard University. 

Semiotics as discipline could be defined as studying of signs, their meaning, significance and development. Berger in his book The objects of affection: semiotics and consumer culture (2010) quotes another author who claimed that semiotics “studies the life of signs” (Berger, 2010, p. 4).  Branston and Stafford in their book The media student’s book (2003) concentrate on more theoretical and scholar definition and emphasize that our perception of reality is itself constructed and shaped by the words and signs we use, in various social contexts. With this point there could be seen an actual importance of semiotics.

Nevertheless, the term of semiotics could not be understood without definition of sign. Sign is a main object of semiotics studies. According to Berger, sign is “something that stands for something else” (2010, p. 3). Sign could be a spoken or written word, image or object which is unified in the mind with a particular cultural concept.  Signs are around us every day. There are three kinds of signs. There are icon, index and symbol. 

Icon is a sign which signify by resemblance. Photographs, drawn pictures which look very similar to the real objects are the icons. Also, icon is a sign only of material object. Icon could not be a sign of idea or concept. The signs on an image below are iconic because there is no difficulty to see a bike, train, airplane or baby images.

Index is a sign which is also close to the object which it signs but index signifies by causal connections. In his book Berger uses the example of smoke of fire as indexical sign and Branston and Stafford have the example of runny nose as indexical sign for a cold (2003, p. 14).  Index points towards the object but not show the full image of it. 

The last type of sign is symbol and it signifies by convention. Symbol is an accepted sign for any type of object or concept. It is important that symbols could be signs for ideas, concepts and other non-material things. There are symbols of justice, religions, genders and others. 

Picture below clearly shows the differences between types of signs. At first, in the images on the top it is easy to recognise male and female. Secondly, different shoes work as the clues and the causal connection to different sexes. Finally, the images below are the accepted signs of male and female and they are symbols because there is no other evidence of their meaning except cultural traditions.

Nevertheless, it should be remembered that different images and signs could be seen as not one type but several. It depends on a point of view.  Few examples of it were mentioned in the books. As an example which was not in any written chapters a pirate flag with a skull and bones on it could serve. First of all, the skull on a flag could be an icon if it is seen as image of skull without any other context. From this point of view, it is the same as image of men and women on the most of toilets. Also, there is symbolic meaning because skull is a symbol of death and accepted symbol of pirates.

Finally, there are several reasons why semiotics could be a research method. First of all, signs are used in all the areas of everyday life and they could provide the information about such themes as gender roles, impression about contemporary politicians and development and popularity of different brands (Berger, 2010, p. 31). Language is also full of signs and metaphors and semiotics is a suitable method to study it. Branston and Stafford claims that signs are closely related with their social nature (2003, p. 24), so social sphere is also needed to be studied from the point of view of signs.

All in all, semiotics is a wide discipline which studies all the types of signs, their development and meaning in the culture. So because of the great amount of signs in our everyday life semiotics is an important and useful method to study culture and society.

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Introduction

Nowadays it is difficult to imagine a world without brands, advertising billboards all over the roads and I strongly believe that brands as well as their production play a huge role in a 21-century world. On the Internet there is always an advertising on the websites and every discussion of brand, even the negative one, could be a good thing for a large companies because it keeps the high level of interest.

Most people know the images of popular brands and there is no surprise in seeing pictures with a brand alphabet (see it below). Moreover, we know most of the brands on this picture. However, the first step is to accept the truth and then to study the processes in contemporary societies carefully. My name is Inna and I accept that sometimes I trust some famous brands more than others. Nevertheless, I believe that Media Studies will help with understanding it better.

P.S. This post is also not an advertising, by the way =)