Assignment 8 – Critical Perspectives on Social Media

Whereas Assignment 7 was centered on the positive aspects of social media and user generated content, this assignment focuses more on the critical perspective on social media. In this discussion, the concept of participatory culture is instrumental to understand. Participatory culture is characterized by “low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement” (Fuchs, 2014, p.

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Assignment 7 – From Viral Media to Spreadable Media

The concepts of viral and spreadable media are deeply intertwined with the current media landscape. Douglas Rushkoff wrote about the phenomenon of viral media in his book Media virus! Hidden agendas in popular culture back in 1994. According to him the mediasphere is the only frontier in modern culture left to expand (Rushkoff, 1994, p.

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Assignment 6 – Persuasion and Rhetoric in Advertising

In his article, Simons (2001) defines persuasion as “human communication designed to influence the autonomous judgements and actions of others [and] as a form of attempted influence […] it aims to alter the way others think, feel or act” (Simons, 2001, p. 7). He further elaborates on this definition by stating that persuasion always predisposes

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Assignment 5 – Television Commercials in the 1950s and 1960s

Methodology – Semiotics Machin (2007) describes a method that can be used to analyze the way in which social actors are represented in imagery – such as advertisements – in Chapter 6 of his Introduction to Multimodal Analysis. Based on this semiotic approach, I have used a similar method to analyze a historic TV commercial from the 1950s

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Assignment 4 – Discourse Analysis II

Methodology Discourse analysis II is a method that concerns itself with the production of human subjects through institutional discourses (Rose, p. 164). A central piece of literature for Discourse Analysis II is Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison as it examines the prison as an institution with a certain discourse and therefore power to produce

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