scholarly journals The PowerPoint Nation: Branding an Imagined Commodity

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Göran Bolin ◽  
Per Ståhlberg
Keyword(s):  
Nation Branding ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
Personal Media ◽  
Modern Nation State

In the formation of the modern nation state and the social imaginary of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the media and representational practices have, among most scholars, been ascribed a prominent position. The question is, however, how have changes in media technologies, from mass media to digital and interactive personal media, impacted on the national imaginaries over the past few decades? This article discusses what happens with the social imaginaries when national(ist) symbols are reproduced through the medium of PowerPoint, as one of the main tools for constructing images of the nation in nation-branding campaigns, i.e. promotional campaigns initiated by governments in conjunction with corporate actors with the aim of producing an attractive image of a country for foreign investors and tourists. It is concluded that the representational technology of PowerPoint produces a nation as an imagined commodity rather than an imagined community.

Nation branding and the social imaginary of participation: An exploratory study of the Swedish Number campaign

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 561-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Pamment ◽  
Cecilia Cassinger
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Participatory Culture ◽  
Nation Branding ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nation Brands

The Swedish Number is a 2016 marketing campaign by an independent tourist association that relies heavily on a developing heritage of Swedish nation branding initiatives. It uses media technologies to encourage citizen participation in promoting Swedish values, partly for the purpose of showing the country’s authentic side and partly for generating publicity. This article conducts a case study of the campaign in order to explore the ways in which media technologies were used to circulate tropes originating in the official nation brand in the service of a commercial interest. We argue that Brand Sweden has established a set of national identity resources that may be leveraged through public participation, vast publicity drives via media technologies and through mimicry of the national interest. Such a study supports a closer analysis of the ways in which nation brands influence identity politics via media technologies. This article will be of much interest to scholars of nation brands, cultural studies, participatory culture, national identity and transmedia engagement. This article forms part of the ‘Theorizing Media in Nation Branding’ Special Issue.

De betekenis van het verleden in het hedendaagse debat over jongensbesnijdenis: ‘Social imaginaries’ en het geval van Paulus

2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 308-321
Author(s):  
Karin Neutel
Keyword(s):  
Male Circumcision ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Apostle Paul ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Newspaper Articles

This article explores perceptions of the past, and in particular of the apostle Paul, in recent newspaper articles that discuss male circumcision, using Charles Taylor’s category of the ‘social imaginary’. Applying Taylor’s category of the ‘imaginary’ to this contemporary debate shows that the past is constructed in several ways, sometimes in understanding history as progress, but also as a warning or a deciding factor in contemporary oppositions. Views of the past that mention Paul locate his relevance for contemporary attitudes in his presumed rejection of physical circumcision and emphasis on inner attitudes, but can draw very different conclusions from this for contemporary attitudes towards circumcision.

Disruptive Fixation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christo Sims
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
New Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Middle Schoolers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
Conventional Type

In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. This book documents the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. It is the account of how this “school for digital kids,” heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged. The book shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes. It traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. It offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle. The book offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.

Media Genealogy of the Contagion: Syphilis — AIDS — COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-112
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Control Society ◽  
Object Based ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form ◽  
Society Of Control

The article is devoted to a genealogy of the attitude toward viruses in social and political practice in light of the new coronavirus pandemic. The disciplinary society and the society of control have taken on a completely new configuration since the HIV crisis in the 1980s. AIDS and now COVID-19 as phenomena of social crisis have had a great impact on (sexual) relationships and have also caused a significant change in the social and political order. Epidemics and pandemics mobilize political structures and constitute power relations, thus changing the way bodies are controlled, establishing new differentiations and redefining what disease is. The authors trace the development of discourses about syphilis, AIDS and COVID-19 to describe how knowledge about the disease is being generated today; it has origins in myth and would be unthinkable without aesthetic visualization and mass media technologies. Syphilis was an exact fit for the paradigm of the disciplinary society, which stigmatized bodily pleasure and abstracted pathology by activating projection mechanisms as a sign of the Other. However, AIDS already differed significantly from that paradigm because other medical technologies are used to define HIV, and that has affected the epistemology of the disease and epidemic. The article considers HIV/AIDS as a transitional model that forms a bridge between the epidemics of the past (leprosy, plague, smallpox, syphilis) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all there is a change in the biopolitical regime so that bodies are no longer controlled and regulated through sexuality. COVID-19 is a new form of sociality which is not based on the exclusion of “pathological” forms of sexuality or on “deviant” or “perverted” bodies, but involves the object-based, microlevel of relations between viruses, the immune system, and the human genome, which are then mapped with distortions and substitutions onto social relationships and practices. The authors use the term “delegated control” in a new context and introduce the original term “omniopticum” to describe the new regime of biopolitics and the “control society” in the post-COVID era.

scholarly journals Social imaginaries and the theory of the normative utterance

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (10) ◽  
pp. 1045-1071
Author(s):  
Meili Steele
Keyword(s):  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Propositional Form

From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political theories in developing their basic normative concepts and principles, providing an alternative to the oscillation between the constructivism and the realism. Theorists of the imaginary have enabled us to think about normatively charged collective imaginaries as logically prior to the construction of normative principles. What theorists of the imaginary have not done is make specific connections between the ontological background of social imaginaries and the normative utterance. This lacuna has left them vulnerable to the charges of ‘normative deficit’ and vagueness that Habermas and others famously make against philosophies of ‘world disclosure’. This article develops a conception of the normative utterance that enables us to reason through social imaginaries. In such reasoning, claims are not expressed in the propositional form of the Rawlsian or Habermasian justification, but through a complex engagement with the worldhood that informs normative judgements.

scholarly journals Typology of Business-Related Fake News Online: A Literature Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-76
Author(s):  
Marko Selaković ◽  
Anna Tarabasz ◽  
Monica Gallant
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Marketing Research ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Crisis Communications ◽  
Web 3.0 ◽  
The Past ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
Smart Technologies

Internet and social media, as highly interactive platforms, enable two way-communication and content generation which was unprecedented in history. In the past, the media were decisive about content that should be presented, and what public impact it might have (Giessen, 2015). User-generated content provided an opportunity for single Internet users to reach large audiences in the same way as content originating from the traditional mass-media. Web 3.0 and Meta Web introduced a new myriad of available solutions and opportunities (Tarabasz, 2013). Smart technologies and integration networks of Web 4.0, with an ability to detect intentions and goals of the users and offer solutions based on users` preferences and habits (Benhaddi, 2017) are opening an entirely new dimension of the social media: digital identity becomes part of the identity of the Internet users. Keywords: Fake News; Crisis Communications; Online Communications; Management Research; Marketing Research

scholarly journals O mito contemporâneo da heroína esportiva: da guerra ao pódio

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 317-324
Author(s):  
Rafael Da Silva Mattos ◽  
Juliana Brandão Pinto de Castro ◽  
César Sabino ◽  
Wecisley Ribeiro do Espírito Santo ◽  
Jéssica Oliveira Florentino ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Women Athletes ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Order Analysis ◽  
Descriptive Research ◽  
Documentary Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
Methodological Strategy

Objetivo: identificar o imaginário social transmitido pela mídia sobre atletas consideradas heroínas esportivas e identificar os discursos sobre as diferenças de gênero transmitidas pela mídia nos Jogos Olímpicos Rio 2016. Métodos: trata-se de uma pesquisa descritiva de análise documental, cuja estratégia metodológica consistiu na busca de matérias sobre heroínas Rio 2016 no site Google. As reportagens foram analisadas utilizando-se a Análise da Ordem do Discurso, de Michel Foucault. Resultados: os princípios da inversão, descontinuidade, especificidade e exterioridade, estabelecidos por Foucault, estavam presentes nos discursos analisados. Nas reportagens, as mulheres consideradas heroínas esportivas tiveram destaque quando conquistaram a primeira medalha olímpica do país de origem, quando realizaram grandes atuações em partidas decisivas e quando superaram abuso sexual. Conclusão: mesmo sendo consideradas heroínas esportivas, a imagem dessas mulheres foi associada à figura masculina. Isso evidencia a necessidade de avanços no quesito igualdades de direito entre homens e mulheres na sociedade.ABSTRACT. The contemporary myth of sports heroin: from war to podium. Objective: to identify the social imaginary transmitted by the media about women athletes considered athletic heroines and to identify the discourses on the gender differences transmitted by the media in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. Methods: this is a descriptive research of documentary analysis, whose methodological strategy consisted in the search of stories about Rio 2016 heroines in the Google site. The reports were analyzed using the Discourse Order Analysis of Michel Foucault. Results: the principles of inversion, discontinuity, specificity and exteriority, as established by Foucault, were present in the discourses analyzed. In the reports, women considered to be sport heroines were highlighted when they won the first Olympic medal in the country of origin, when they performed great plays in decisive games and when they overcame sexual abuse. Conclusion: however, even though they were considered sport heroines, the image of these women was associated with the male figure. This highlights the need for advances in the area of equal rights between men and women in society.

scholarly journals Historicizing media, globalizing media research: infrastructures, publics, and everyday life

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Research ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractVisions of media spanning the globe and connecting cultures have been around at least since the birth of telegraphy, yet they have always fallen short of realities. Nevertheless, with the internet, a global infrastructure has emerged, which, together with mobile and smartphones, has rapidly changed the media landscape. This far-reaching digital connectedness makes it increasingly clear that the main implications of media lie in the extent to which they reach into everyday life. This article puts this reach into historical context, arguing that, in the pre-modern period, geographically extensive media networks only extended to a small elite. With the modern print revolution, media reach became both more extensive and more intensive. Yet it was only in the late nineteenth century that media infrastructures penetrated more widely into everyday life. Apart from a comparative historical perspective, several social science disciplines can be brought to bear in order to understand the ever more globalizing reach of media infrastructures into everyday life, including its limits. To date, the vast bulk of media research is still concentrated on North America and Europe. Recently, however, media research has begun to track broader theoretical debates in the social sciences, and imported debates about globalization from anthropology, sociology, political science, and international relations. These globalizing processes of the media research agenda have been shaped by both political developments and changes in media, including the Cold War, decolonization, the development of the internet and other new media technologies, and the rise of populist leaders.

Mapping the theme of Creativity in Cornelius Castoriadis’s and Paul Ricoeur’s Social Imaginaries

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
George Sarantoulias ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theories Of Action ◽  
Cornelius Castoriadis ◽  
Convergence And Divergence

This paper elucidates the notion that action is creative through the social imaginaries perspective. Hans Joas’s critique of sociological theories on action developed in The Creativity of Action (1996 [1992]) argued that creativity is an essential concept to better understand social action. Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur employ an understanding of action as being inextricably connected to the social imaginary and capable of bringing forth historically novel forms of being and doing. An elucidation of Castoriadis’s dichotomy between the instituted and instituting imaginaries and Ricoeur’s distinction of the ideological and utopian poles of the cultural imagination bring to the surface points of convergence and divergence in their respective understandings of the social imaginary and historical novelty. Inspired by Joas’s critique of sociological theories of action through pragmatism, which is underlined by a critique of the philosophical anthropological assumptions held by structuralism, this essay argues that Castoriadis’s and Ricoeur’s distinct insights on the creative dimension of social action and the way in which social reality emerges can elucidate further an anti-structuralist philosophical anthropology that can help inform sociological theories of action.

Crisis, liminality and the decolonization of the social imaginary

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelos Varvarousis
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Greek Crisis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global North ◽  
Second World

The decolonization of the social imaginary has been proposed as an important dimension of the transition towards a degrowth society. However, although omnipresent in the degrowth literature, the terms “social imaginary” and “social imaginary significations” have not been adequately explained. This creates a level of mystification that limits the analytical value of the degrowth framework. In addition, there is very little theoretical work on how actual social imaginaries can be decolonized and transformed. This paper first tries to clarify those concepts. Subsequently, it develops a theoretical framework for explaining such transitions of the imaginary. In developing this framework, the paper focuses on moments of crisis, since crises have been historically associated with change and transition. It argues that crises are important because they destabilize social imaginaries and open up a stage of suspension—a liminal stage—in which the rise of new social practices can facilitate the emergence of new social imaginary significations and institutions that can contribute to the alteration of the social imaginary at large. The paper draws on case studies related to the Greek crisis, the biggest ever faced by a country of the Global North after the Second World War.

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