Session 8: Hope in the Media

Session 8: Hope in the Media
Chair: Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli

Representing Hope in Persuasive Communication: An Advertising Discourse Perspective
Vincent Tao-hsun Chang
Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

This paper aims to propose a pragmatic study along with a critical analysis of the indirect expressions of ‘hope’ in the Chinese print advertisements. Data for analysis are chosen on the grounds of the remarkable trends conveyed therein. First, they are presented in storytelling and narratives by questioning the striking sociopolitical and cultural issues or eliciting fictitious scenes with humanistic concern. Secondly, the attractive images are exploited not as central parts, but solely as periphery routes within stories, thus could arouse more attention of the audience, serving a site where the weaker effects of communication of feelings, attitudes and impressions could be more implicated than by patent expressions in strong communication. Thirdly, they are ideologically significant for conveying such appeals and frames as ‘knowledge equipment,’ ‘belief,’ ‘loyalty,’ ‘perseverance’ and ‘old friends’ to cope with those prevalent despair, anxiety, chaos and disappointment. Placing quite little emphasis on the target products, they encourage an imaginative audience to spell out a variety of weak implicatures along these lines, fairly weakly persuading her to recognise the prominent values.
The audience’s comprehension and interpretation in communication is approached within Relevance framework (Sperber & Wilson 1995) by looking into five captions released by Taiwanese local enterprises. The audience searches for the ‘optimal relevance’ in the interpretation process, during which a wide array of weak implicatures, based on her greater share of responsibility, could be inferred and derived from those ‘scenes’ together with the contexts, depending on different degrees of involvement and shared cognitive environment. The sociocultural aspect of language use, on the other hand, is further explored to see the inseparable relationship between language and social meaning. This functional linguistic study reveals that advertising discourse, lending itself as a symbolic arena, could find hope back again for the audience, and that the selling motive would well be melted and/or hidden through storytelling due to its invisibility, implicitness, indirectness, and a feel of distance.

This paper treats media texts in which an affirmative, joyful affectivity emerges as a “hoping against hope.”  Broadly, I will consider what we might call Deleuze’s ethical naturalism: “The multiple as multiple is the object of affirmation, just as the diverse as diverse is the object of joy,” 1990 [1969], 279).  Working from the signal importance which temporality and futurity (the emphasis on“becoming” over “being”) have for Deleuze’s theorizations of the virtual, I’ll consider recent theorizations of virtuality (i.e., Morse 1998), network form (Galloway 2004, Hardt and Negri, 2004), and multitude (Hardt/Negri; Virno 2004).
Specifically, Deleuze (1990 [1969]) writes that it would be “disastrous” if we were to confuse the “virtual” and the “possible.”  My suggestion will be that this confusion is precisely a disaster that has happened. To illuminate the implications, I examine one or more instances of network media works which communicate joy as both affect and event, a “hoping against hope.” Berlusconi’s Mousetrap (Crudden, 2003) is a digital documentary generated as one possible version of the Genoa WTO from an open database of material contributed by a network of hundreds of videographers of varying origins and capabilities. Mousetrap presents a fully engaged self-critique in suggesting that the WTO meeting and protests invited spectacular use of the media, potentially rendering the very politics of protest as “always already” neutralized – and hence making the violent suppression of the protests all the more terrible.  On this level, the project is anti-utopian and barely dares to hope; or perhaps it hopes in a more complex way, hoping against hope.
Throughout, and sometimes by means of the critical negativity of this method, Mousetrap also projects affirmation and joy, emerging in moments of multiplicity and diversity.  In the introduction, a woman’s voiceover delivers rousing denunciation, recorded at the protests, of the dominant economics of globalization and clarifies her view of the moment in terms of oppositional histories of labor, protest, and revolt; and she is joyful.  Or, unexpected events emerge accidentally, only visible after the fact, brought to visibility by multiple cameras in different spatial or sequential placements. These moments allow, paradoxically, a multi-dimensional view of the heightening suppression: affirmative construction of a certain legibility for the chaotic swarms of events.  In this constructed view, virtually constructed after the face, there is, perhaps, a certain joyful affectivity for the media compositors and audiences of the project.
Reading network media for joyful “hope against hope,” and against the disastrous conflation of the virtual and the possible, the larger goal of the project is to situate historically Deleuze’s treatment of virtuality and ethics: in relation to digital media authoring practices; to what I call contemporary “virtual materialism”; and to the violences incurred regularly, repeatedly within contemporary global geopolitics.

When the situation is a conflict or a crisis and the circumstances are threat, distortion of basics, uncertainty, tension, stress, surprise, disputes, and so on, the need for various forms of communication is highly expected. The mass media play an essential role in society that, I argue, perhaps no other institution, authority, or system in society can play a more dangerous one, especially in large-scale stressful situations. Although the mass media contribute, most of the time, to the de-escalation of conflict or crisis situations for the benefit of society, they sometimes participate in their exacerbation. The mass media can either help in reaching a constructive conflict resolution or crisis de-escalation or contribute to a destructive conflict resolution or crisis escalation. The core message of this paper is to provide the reader with critical and analytical overview of the dilemma that stems from opposing perspectives regarding the expected outcome of such a mediator’s activities. The two-sided effect of the dangerous interfering role of mass media creates a debate that is associated with the mass media’s weakness in accurately portraying reality. The power of mass media, which stems from both their influential functions in people’s daily lives and their relationships with political decision-makers, can be better used as an important mediating party in the processes of conflict resolution and crisis management.