Kim Christian Schrøder

The language of advertising

Whenever we pick up a newspaper or magazine, turn on the television or look at the heardings on roadsides, we are confronted with advertisements. These do more than simply sell a product - they work in subtle ways to persuade us to accept the way of life and pattern of our needs that they depict. This book is a revealing study of the strategies of persuasion advertisers use and of the crucial underlying assupmtions advertising makes. Focusing on magazien and newspaper advertising, the authors illustrate the reange of linguistic and visual techniques advertisers use to achieve emphasis and special effects. They consider how advertisements single out specific audiences for their address, and reveal the ways in which the advertiser preys on beliefs about sex roles and prejudices about social groups. The Language of Advertising is not a book which simply presents the results of an analysis of modern advertising. It seeks throughout to equip the reader with the techniques for his or her own examination of advertising ideology and of the social functions of advertising today.

The Relative Importance of Social Media for Accessing, Finding, and Engaging with News

The growing use of social media like Facebook and Twitter is in the process of changing how news is produced, disseminated, and discussed. But so far, we have only a preliminary understanding of (1) how important social media are as sources of news relative to other media, (2) the extent to which people use them to find news, (3) how many use them to engage in more participatory forms of news use, and (4) whether these developments are similar within countries with otherwise comparable levels of technological development. Based on data from a cross-country online survey of news media use, we present a comparative analysis of the relative importance of social media for news in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, covering eight developed democracies with different media systems. We show that television remains both the most widely used and most important source of news in all these countries, and that even print newspapers are still more widely used and seen as more important sources of news than social media. We identify a set of similarities in terms of the growing importance of social media as part of people’s cross-media news habits, but also important country-to-country differences, in particular in terms of how widespread the more active and participatory forms of media use are. Surprisingly, these differences do not correspond to differences in levels of internet use, suggesting that more than mere availability shapes the role of social media as parts of people’s news habits.

Making sense of audience discourses : Towards a multidimensional model of mass media reception

This article discusses the empirical and theoretical challenges facing reception researchers in their encounter with qualitative audience data. It does so by criticizing the one-dimensional theoretical framework set up by Stuart Hall in his famous encoding/decoding article. This framework has resulted in an exclusive focus in reception studies on ideology, as study after study has asked whether audience readings accept, negotiate or oppose the hegemonic thrust supposedly inscribed in the media text. Over the years empirical audience research has demonstrated that actual readings are more complex than that, but these studies have not taken the step of developing a multidimensional model of audience discourse. The article attempts to set up an empirically based general model of media reception with six dimensions: Motivation, Comprehension, Discrimination, Position, Evaluation and Implementation. This model may help open our eyes to the complexity of actualized readings while still enabling a politically committed audience research concerned with the role of the media in processes of social reproduction and, not least, social change.

Complexifying media power: a study of the interplay between media and audience discourses on politics

The article reports from a research project about how the media function as a democratic resource for citizens in Denmark. It brings together discourse- and audienceanalysis perspectives into one research design, questioning the often simplified notions of media power found in media/politics research. Our three-tiered study explores the media/citizen nexus, in a social context where politics spans the continuum from traditional parliamentary politics, through grassroots organizations (‘subpolitics’) and everyday politics (‘life-politics’). First, we explore the citizens’ daily life with the media in the perspective of democratic citizenship, as people report this to us in group conversations. Second, we analyse the media’s discursive constructions of ‘politics’, focusing on the political issues around traffic and transport policy, but including all political coverage of a variety of media during one selected week. Third, we explore the citizens’ construction of ‘politics’ through focus group discussions. We see these studies as interrelated, but abstain from making causal generalizations about agenda setting and definitional power, preferring to map them as three interrelated discursive territories of contemporary politics, and to discuss possible linkages between media discourses and citizens’ discourses. We thus end up by ‘complexifying’ the media/citizen connection beyond simplistic notions of media power.

Learning across Contexts in the Knowledge Society

Developments within the “knowledge society,” especially those resulting from technological innovation, have intensified an interest in the relationship between different contexts and multiple sites of learning across what is often termed as formal, non-formal and informal learning environments. The aim of this book is to trace learning and experience across multiple sites and contexts as a means to generate new knowledge about the borders and edges of different practices and the boundary crossings these entail in the learning lives of young people in times of dynamic societal, environmental, economic, and technological change. The empirical research discussed in this book has grown out of a Nordic network of researchers. The research initiatives in the Nordic countries tend to avoid the more spectacular debates over the future of the educational institutions that tend to dominate and obscure discussions on education in the knowledge society, and which look to models of informal learning, whether in the “learning communities” of workplaces and families or in the new socio-technical spaces of the Internet, as a source of alternative educational strategies. Rather, Nordic researchers more modestly ask whether it is possible to envisage new models of teaching and learning which take seriously both the responsibility to social justice and social wellbeing, which, at least rhetorically, underpinned a commitment to mass education of the 20th century, as well as to the radical challenges to traditional educational models offered by the new socio-technical spaces and practices of the 21st century.

Tracing Learning Experiences Within and Across Contexts

Developments within the “knowledge society,” especially those resulting from technological innovation, have intensified an interest in the relationship between different contexts and multiple sites of learning across what is often termed as formal, non-formal and informal learning environments.

Towards the “Audiencization” of Mediatization Research? Audience Dynamics as Co-Constitutive of Mediatization Processes

Looking over the landscape of recent debates about mediatization, this chapter opens up a discussion of the theoretical and methodological challenges arising from the need to systematically explore audience dynamics as an integral part of mediatization processes. The chapter directs its argument towards institutionalist mediatization theory as well as constructivist mediatization theory. The theoretical argument is supported by empirical examples taken from the areas of audiences’ news platform selection and repertoire-building; online audience mobilization; and media and audience discourses about politics. It is finally suggested that Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model can be used as a heuristic framework for conceptualizing the ‘audiencization’ of mediatization processes.

From Dogmatism to Open-Mindedness? Historical Reflections on Methods in Audience Reception Research

The article traces, from the perspective of audience reception research, the gradual methodological rapprochement of once hostile methodological paradigms: the quantitatively oriented uses-and-gratifications research and the qualitatively anchored reception research. While recognizing that the methodological differences stem ultimately from different epistemological perspectives, the article describes how these differences have been played out on the terrain of empirical methodologies for conducting fieldwork on audience practices and meanings. The article considers four stages of this rapprochement: (1) antagonistic self-sufficiency; (2) separate camps; (3) self-critical coexistence; and (4) complementarity and collaboration.

Book reviews : Norman Fairclough, Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. 214 pp. ISBN 0-340-63222-4 (hbk); ISBN 0-340-58889-6 (pbk

has not yet reached her own position. But what’s keeping her back? In the last essay, ’Disciplinary Desires. The Outside of Queer Feminist Cultural Studies’, Probyn herself offers the key to this delay. The essay contains a programme to turn her sociological optic of the surface into an interdisciplinary approach in which insights from queer theory, feminist and cultural studies are combined. Through the notion of ’the outside’ she outlines the only (Foucauldian) position from which her optic can be effectively deployed: not just from within a particular disciplinary discourse, but primarily on its ’outside’. To be ’insiderist’ thus means one