Author: noemie

Persuasion and Rhetoric in Advertising

What is Persuasion? Persuasion is a communication practice that dates back to Ancient Greek philosophy. Plato was already investigating whether rhetoric as an art of persuasion is ethically justifiable or not. He identified that hiding bad thoughts within good arguments was the threat of persuasion and claimed that it did not include any real knowledge. …

Critical Perspectives on Social Media

What is Participatory Culture? Participatory culture is a term that refers to the culture in which individuals not only act as consumers, but also as contributors or producers. The audience or users are therefore prosumers, and are more or less actively involved in the design of culture and content (see Fuchs, 2014, p.52). Examples are the creation of published …

Discourse Analysis II: Institutions and Ways of Seeing

What is Discourse Analysis II ? Based on Foucault’s work different kinds of discourse analsysis have been developed. While discourse analysis I focuses on content and communication, discourse analysis II is drawn to analyse institutions and spaces. The method also realises that institutions are crucially influencing human perception, experience, behaviour, and normative assessment. Although the …

From Viral Media to Spreadable Media

We live in a world without physical boundaries to share media content with anyone in the world. Our networked society allows us to send music files, videos, images or documents to our friends, family or colleagues that live on the other side of the world within seconds. Power is now based on the accessibility to …

TV commercials in the 50s and 60s

The Origins of Advertising Advertising has been around since there have been goods to sell and ways to promote them. Its real break through, however, was only possible with the industrial revolution and the creation of the first newspapers and magazines in the 17th century.  By the mid-19th century most companies were advertising their products with the help of the printing …

An Introduction to Discourse Analysis I

  Discourse analysis is a method combining linguistics – the study of language – with social and cultural studies. It has been used in a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social studies including anthropology, education and psychology. Discourse analysis differs from the semiotic approach, as Semiotics explore meaning construction related to signs and their codes, while …

IKEA – From Brand to Cultural Icon

The Story of IKEA IKEA is a very successful global brand due to its unique cultural branding strategies that merge valued fashionable design with affordable prices for the middle-class user. The company stands for “affordable contemporary design household goods” (see website), which implies that their products are addressed to a wide range of different consumers. …

An Introduction to Semiotics

What is Semiotics? Semiotics is the study of signs, or the role signs play in society. Branston and Stafford define it as the “qualitative approach seeking to relate texts to their surrounding social orders” (2003, p.12). The basic unit of semiotics are signs, which can be words, images, or objects that stand for a particular cultural …