In the chapter three “Social Media as Participatory Culture”, of the book Social Media: A Critical Introduction, Fuchs (2014) refutes Jenkins’ arguments on participatory culture. This one is defined by Jenkins as a culture in which fans and other consumers are invited to actively patriciate in the creation and circulation of new content” (Jenkins…Continue reading Critical Perspectives on Social Media: Do They Create A Participatory Culture Or A Labour One?

  Nowadays, the amount of people using the Internet and sharing information has never been as prominent and does not stop growing. It permits videos, pictures, information, and every other kind of data to be shared instantly by millions of people around the world. In 1994, Rushkoff comes with the idea that a media can…Continue reading Do Media Follow A Virus Model Or A Manipulable Spreadable One?

From politics, to advertising, to teaching, to casual conversations, persuasion is all around us. Simons (2001) defines it as the “human communication designed to influence the autonomous judgements and actions of others” (p.7). It is an attempt to influence people in the way that it seeks to alter the way others think, feel, or act.…Continue reading The Art of Persuasion

In his book “Advertising the American Dream. Making Way for Modernity, 1920 –1940.”, Marchand (1985) expresses the idea that ads allow us to reconstruct past ideas, images, stereotypes, and can serve as a testimony of the past. Indeed, ads aim at reflecting and shaping social values and popular attitudes. However, one can question whether the content…Continue reading Analyzing a television commercial from the 1960s

Discourse Analysis I, as we saw in my previous post, was concerned with the social positions of difference and authority that are articulated through images and texts, but also on the production and the rhetorical organization of visual and textual materials. The Discourse Analysis II that I will present here, even though it works with…Continue reading DISCOURSE ANALYSIS II

To most people, discourse simply means discussion. For academics however, it is far more than that. Discourse covers all forms of communications. It can be argued that communication shapes the world we live in. To communicate, we draw from assumptions and generally accepted knowledges, to make statements that will make sense to others. By doing…Continue reading Introduction to Discourse Analysis

In the book “How Brands become Icons” (2004), Holt develops a new branding model, the cultural branding one. Brands that he associates as cultural ones are those who stands out because they have “spun such compelling myths that they have become cultural icons” (Holt, 2004, p. 5). He defines a cultural icon as “a person…Continue reading CULTURAL BRANDING: What? What for? And How?