Advertising: raw, cooked, incorporated

Here is a very brief description of one of the projects I'm working on. It considers what available stock of meanings are brought to bear by advertising as a form of historically situated communication. Advertising is a kind of double-communication since it sends messages per se and it supports other messages publication. One key assumption is that the separation between content & audience in mass communication research is false or at least misleading; a tight structural relationship exists between the two.

The nature of advertising: raw, cooked, incorporated

A growing consensus suggests that a global ecological crisis impacts every facet of human society. The recent oil rig explosion and consequent spill in the Gulf of Mexico sent crude oil gushing into the waters, killing 12 oil rig workers as well as marine wildlife, putting fishermen out of work, devastating the tourism industry and other negative occurrences. Although the disaster was watched with horror, the US remained divided over the wisdom of further drilling and indeed whether there is an ecological crisis or not.

Mass media, as has been richly established, contributes to the formation of public opinion through its agenda setting, and other functions. But most commonly advertising’s ability to persuade or set an agenda has been relegated to its primary intention, i.e. to promote products and services.

This research assumes that advertising has an educational function related to the formation of public opinion that exists separately from its promotional function. It explores how advertising educates one section of the population, women between their teen years to over 40, about the role of nature in their social and cultural milieu. The research focuses on magazine advertising, treating ads as sections in a textbook, the textbook being the magazine which performs a highly complex set of educational practices and the ads which both compliment the editorial content and add to it.

Please return to the blog for updates on this project.

Wither Structuralism?

Structuralism is a theoretical project that analyzes, not hidden meanings, but the systematic rules which govern the social formation & are encoded into social artifacts. As a structuralist, for example, Roland Barthes analyzed a wide variety of texts in Mythologies: the world of wrestling, the face of Garbo, neither-nor criticism, and so forth. [I have tried to emulate Barthes in the previous entry.] As Barthes explains, "[m]ythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication....myth in fact belongs to the province of general science, coextensive with linguistics, which is semiology." Semiology: the science of signs.

To be more specific myth refers to an unacknowledged series of concepts through which a culture comes to understand itself. It helps naturalize all aspects of culture: political, economic, social, etc.

However, have structuralism and semiotics/myth as concepts been written out of critical theory? In New Keywords: a revised vocabulary of culture and society structuralism, semiotics and myth don't appear.

Has the power of structuralism as a theoretical perspective withered, or have intellectuals in their desire to be up-to-date, dug it up only to discard it in favor of post-structuralism and/or postmodernism? I think the answer to this question is "yes," and I would argue that it's a loss for understanding the relationships between the exercise of power and the dominant ideology of a given social formation.

For a bibliographic essay on structuralism with many links to relevant online sources click here. And for another great web resource see this semiotics site which I found cited on Sobhan Rezaee's Culture and Communication blog.