Showing papers in "Journal of Communication Inquiry in 2004"

Commodified Identities: The Myth of Italian Food in the United States

Abstract: This study approaches the phenomenon of ethnic food—in particular, Italian food—from a semiotic perspective, keeping in mind the notion of food as communication. The restaurant chain Fazoli’s is used to exemplify some of the communicative strategies employed to promote the association of a company and its products with Italy. These communicative strategies serve the ultimate goal of commodifying the Italian ethnic identity and promoting its symbolic consumption. Through a semiotic analysis, the article identifies a core group of seven themes that constitute the basic structure of the myth of Italian food in the United States. The analysis highlights an unobtrusive use of stereotypes, a mass phenomenon of identity construction, and the depletion of a cultural capital. At the same time, it is recognized that the myth has some positive aspects—namely, the celebration of personal relations (romance and family) and the enjoyment of a more expressive and slow-paced lifestyle.

Constructing Consumables and Consent: A Critical Analysis of Factory Farm Industry Discourse

Abstract: With the relatively recent advent of the factory farming industry (or corporations that confine, breed, fatten, and slaughter nonhuman animals using modern industrial methods), an assortment of corporate strategies have ensued that construct an image of a benevolently beneficial industry. Far from benign, however, factory farms are responsible for a tremendous amount of environmental damage, and although the concerns are significant, the controversy surrounding factory farms and activists’ strategies have rendered little, if any, change. Part of the reason for this ineffectiveness is the immense power of the discursive strategies constructed to support the industry. This article focuses on two codependent corporate strategies: (1) the widespread use of “doublespeak” to describe particular processes internal to the industry, and (2) the creation of “speaking” animals in advertisements to sell the products of those industrial processes. The author argues that these discourses help construct how US Americans...

9/11 in the Service of Corporate Rhetoric: Southwest Airlines 2001 Letter to Shareholders

Abstract: This article highlights the capacity for ideograph-like signs that are deeply embedded in cultural consciousness to be appropriated for the purpose of sustaining the rhetorical agendas of corporations. Focus is applied to the events of September 11, 2001, and to the use of the term 9/11 in the text of a letter to share-holders, signed by the corporate leaders of Southwest Airlines and published in that company’s annual report for 2001. We illustrate how corporate leaders appropriate symbolic representations of national life.

Chimera Veil of “Iranian Woman” and Processes of U.S. Textual Commodification: How U.S. Print Media Represent Iran

Abstract: This research explores how U.S. print media construct a specific commodified version and vision of Iran by using consistent and iconic images of Iranian women. The text for analysis comprises print media reports from 1995 to 1998, including a range of stories from serious news to fashion and other entertainment. The method, critical textual analysis, uses verbal and visual evidence to interrogate the social, ideological practices involved. Findings suggest that almost without exception, stories, whatever their actual content, are anchored by the graphic illustrations of Iranian women, veiled in the apparently impenetrable black chador. These visuals help fund a new ideological perspective, one that has been recovered and refurbished from the rich past of Orientalist discourse. But this version is a finely polished pastiche that relies on visually ambiguous veiled women seemingly indistinguishable from the familiar and yet unmistakably new: Iran itself is gendered female. That veil, prolific of meaning, pa...

The New Imagined Community: Identifying and Exploring a Bidirectional Continuum Integrating Virtual and Physical Communities through the Community Embodiment Model (CEM)

Abstract: The Internet has enabled global growth in the use of virtual communities. Virtual communities provide Internet researchers with an excellent opportunity to study human communication across differen...

Crack Mothers in the News: A Narrative of Paternalistic Racism:

Abstract: This study examines the story the news tells about “crack mothers” through a narrative analysis of a newspaper series, exploring the major themes and character types from a perspective informed by critical cultural studies and feminist theory. It argues that news studies cannot adequately explore race within representation without also addressing gender and class. The focus of the series analyzed here was the battle to save the children of crack mothers. This narrative of redemption, viewed through the lens of gender, race, and class, is one of a white, professional middle-class working to rescue women and children of the black underclass. The underlying paternalistic racism reflects the intersectionality of gender, race, and class while reinforcing negative stereotypes about African American women.

“Nothing Like a Brisk Walk and a Spot of Demon Slaughter to Make a Girl’s Night”: The Construction of the Female Hero in the Buffy Video Game

Abstract: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a television cult series about a California “valley girl” who slays vampires and other demons, has attracted substantial scholarly attention. Less is known about a video game based on the series, released in summer 2002. This article analyzes the construction of Buffy as a hero who fights in the video game, contrasting it with her somewhat different portrayal in the television show. Unlike the television series, the video game provides a onedimensional construction of female heroism, based on the Warrior archetype and omitting the Caregiver/Martyr archetype often present in descriptions of heroes, including the television version of Buffy. The series’ collectivist style of problem solving and focus on relationships also is absent from the game, which, like other fighting games, exaggerates the sexual characteristics of its female characters.

Between the Hero and the Shadow: Developmental Differences in Adolescents' Perceptions and Understanding of Mythic Themes in Film

Abstract: This study engages theories of film and myth in culture through an experimental study of high school and college students’ perceptions of a forty-three-minute edited episode of a heroic action film. Participants were tested for their understanding of program themes as well as for their selection of role models. The authors find significant differences in younger and older adolescents’ understanding of heroic themes, mythic archetypes, and other abstract program messages about the duality of human existence (i.e., we have both good and evil qualities). This study provides a developmental perspective to the semiology of myth, thereby contributing to theories of media, culture, and child development.

A Disunited Nation and a Legacy of Contradiction: Queer Nation’s Construction of Identity

Abstract: This essay examines Queer Nation’s “Queers Read This” flyer, combining a textual analysis of the flyer with an exploration of its uptake in print media. The author contends that the flyer rhetorica...

Business, Advertising, and the Social Control of News

Abstract: This study demonstrates how businesses employ their advertising to socially control and thus censor viewpoints they do not like. In 1970-71, when the University of Iowa student newspaper the Daily ...

There is no South Korea in South Korean Cultural Studies: Beyond the Colonial Condition of Knowledge Production

Abstract: This study examines the colonial condition of cultural studies in South Korea that has brought this new stream of thought to both the social sciences and the humanities. This review of South Korean cultural studies provides not only a critique but also reflects on why cultural studies are needed in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, this study will focus on the ways in which South Korean cultural studies has adopted, appropriated, and utilized Western theories of cultural studies since the late 1980s.

On the Possibility of Communicating: Feminism and Social Position

Abstract: This article sorts out some of the theoretical dilemmas related to issues of identity, difference, and location that have arisen on the horizon of critical and cultural communication studies in the past few decades. Tracing the origins of the belief in the epistemological significance of social position to early criticaltheorists, it explores the further development of this concept in feminist scholarship. Using the feminist struggle with standpoint epistemology as an example, this work explores some of the dangers associated with the assumption that membership in a subordinated group affords one privileged knowledge about oppression, and critically examines the practical difficulties of applying a theoretically sophisticated understanding of the role of social position to politically grounded research.

Community Property: Digital Music and the Economic Modalities of Transmission and Ritual Modes of Communication

Abstract: Using the evolution of the peer-to-peer music-sharing phenomenon as a spring-board, this article explores the economic modalities inherent in two different but not mutually exclusive theoretic constructs of communication advanced by James Carey. The transmission mode of communication theorizes that communication is the transmission of information from one point to another. The ritual mode of communication theorizes forms of communication whose primary purpose is to strengthen communal bonds by sharing communication/communal experiences. Religious ceremonies and music are two prime examples of communication experiences whose primary purpose is not to transmit information. This article examines the role digital recording technologies, the Internet, and the World Wide Web play in pointing out the economic conflicts inherent in these two modes of communication. The recent spate of lawsuits initiated by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music swapping and file sharing over the Intern...

Public Sphere and History: Historians’ Response to Habermas on the “Worth” of the Past

Abstract: This article deals with contested links between the public sphere and history. In particular, it presents a challenge faced by cultural, social, and political historians to use history in clarifying the Habermasian notion of the public sphere. According to the early theory of Jurgen Habermas, history is a necessary ingredient of theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere. Recent research into the history of the public sphere questioned some interpretations of facts on which Habermas based his early theory, but emerging historians’perspectives on the nexus between history and theory of the public sphere uncovered other problems. The role of history in building theories of the public sphere is one such issue. In his later work, Habermas evaded this problem. This article also addresses a third aspect of the problem, which is developed within the history of communication. From this perspective, the history of the public sphere appears much more diverse, dynamic, and ambiguous. According to this positi...

Traveling Orthodoxies? Sexuality and Political Correctness in New Zealand

Abstract: In the English-speaking world during the 1990s, the mass media contained much discussion of political correctness. Cultural politics in general, and questions of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in...

“Monotonous Tale”: Legitimacy, Public Relations, and the Shooting of a Public Enemy

Abstract: On April 6, 1939, FBI agents shot and killed America’s “Public Enemy Number One” as he exited a St. Louis hamburger shop. Agents on the scene claimed the man, Ben Dickson, refused to surrender and threatened agents with two guns he carried. FBI documents and witness accounts, however, show that Dickson was shot in the back as he tried to run away from agents. Confronted by critics in the news media who questioned the legitimacy of the shooting, FBI officials in Washington worked with agents on the scene to concoct a version of events more amenable to the heroic media portrayals they preferred. Using FBI files released under the Freedom of Information Act and media accounts, this study explores the bureau’s behind-the-scenes work to legitimize the shooting and its use of the revised version of events as a public relations device demonstrating the bureau’s responsibility and utility.

Critical Essays and Reviews

Abstract: vides tools for many different kinds of cultural critics. In the end, the potential problems do not obscure the significant contributions this book can make to studies of today’s media environment. Clearly, with such a broad scope and so many points to make, critical readers may find many individual issues with which to disagree. That the work as a whole should play a crucial role in the scholarly consideration of our new communication environment, however, is undeniable. The Language of New Media does an admirable job of creating a new conceptual vocabulary, of integrating a diverse set of theories into an interesting whole, and of suggesting numerous directions for future research. I think and hope that it will gain recognition for its landmark status.

Guest Introduction to the Thirtieth Anniversary Issue: Adventures of a Manifesto for Critical Studies

Abstract: The same year that the Journal of Communication Inquiry (JCI) was preparing to launch its 1974, mimeographed inaugural issue, a European philosopher’s book on controversies in metascience reached its final edition for an English-language audience. “The intellectual life cycle of some researchers,” its author wrote, “resembles that of sea-corals: When young they swim in the ocean. Then they become sedentary and calcification sets in. But they live in a fairly secure niche” (Radnitzky 1973, xxiv). The metaphor highlights restricted circulation as fields of study age, promoting the durability of traditions over exploration. Graduate students saw the young sea coral as their unspoken metaphor, a manifesto even today for a journal solely edited by graduate students. At first glance, the “soul” of this manifesto contained, in the first of a two-paragraph preface, a working oeuvre described by “the broad question, ‘What are the possibilities for the conduct of communication inquiry?’ Such a question is reflective,” began the rallying cry, as if from a dried-up sea bed, massaging the idea “inquiry” through the image of scholars ready to articulate “alternative ways” of doing research, ready to swim in oceans with headier if not always healthier waters. There they would examine the “working assumptions” that “permeate” inquiry. They would need a journal featuring “a critical stance” toward “scholarly tradition and training,” one that saw through reproductions of “habit,” now finally to be fair game. “Critical reflection” would transform “the communication researcher” of the era into “a communication philosopher who philosophizes” in this new “forum,” where reexaminations of “the ‘current state of the field’ ” would tackle “assumptions of inquiry” in its literature (Preface 1974, i). The soul of this manifesto, this first paragraph of the journal’s mission statement, underwent minor stylistic changes in its second volume. But it was its second paragraph that served as a commentary on the inception and production of knowledge in the academy. The journal, said the inaugural Preface (1974), developed through “conversations among Ph.D. stu-

Critical Essays and Reviews

Abstract: The ambitious mission of this book, as indicated in its title, is to articulate the hacker ethic—a special set of attitudes toward work, life, and society—and how it constitutes the spirit of our age. The goal is partially achieved through historical comparison, thought experiments, and raising questions on the defining characteristics of today’s society. In so doing, Himanen illustrates a thesis that carries fundamental significance both theoretically and practically, which is reinforced by the participation of Linus Torvalds (the initiator of Linux, the open-source operating system), who writes the preface of the book, and Manuel Castells, whose substantial epilogue deals with informationalism and network society. Hackers, for Himanen, are not computer criminals, the stereotype propagated in mass media and popular-culture representations (Thomas 1998). Nor do they have to be experts in digital technology. Instead, they can be any type of “information professional,” be it artist, manager, or media worker. As long as one genuinely enjoys one’s work, applies creativity to it, and shares the results with others for free, this person is qualified to possess the hacker ethic. The hacker ethic poses “a general social challenge that calls into question the Protestant work ethic that has long governed our lives and still maintains a powerful hold on us” (p. 7). This Protestant work ethic is what Max Weber (1905) suspected to be the spirit of capitalism nearly a century ago. Connecting the hacker ethic with the Protestant ethic therefore grants Himanen unusual power in historicizing the subject matter. The Protestant ethic, according to Weber, sees occupational work as a “duty in a calling” (p. 54), an absolute end in itself that dominates people’s working hours as well as everyday life. It accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie as exemplified by the economic achievements of English Puritans. While it prevails among all religious groups and atheists in “building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order,” the Protestant ethic also transforms into an “iron cage” that restricts our worldview to “the care for external goods” (p. 181) and hence the subsequent predominance of materialism in modern capitalist society. This tendency is fortified in recent decades, Himanen writes, when money becomes the ultimate justification, whereas work is reduced to means, guided by new principles such as optimality and flexibility, which are “consequences of capitalism’s adaptation to make money in a new technological situation” (p. 124). In contrast, the hacker ethic supports a set of values that profoundly differs from the Protestant ethic and, therefore, may point to a route of emancipation that sets us free from the iron cage. These values are (1) passion, “some intrinsically interesting pursuit that energizes the hacker and contains joy in its realization”; (2) freedom, “a