Negotiation Persuasion Argument: Theories and Practices

"Marketing and religion, marketing religion, religious marketing, marketing as religion - all of these are topics for discussion on this blog. This includes everything from marketing God to worshipping commercial culture to brand cults (think Mac users) to faith brands (think Joel Osteen or Oprah).* How do religion and marketing interact in the 21st Century? I contest that rather than a culture war, there is a blending of the two spheres. We can see this in a myriad of ways from how we practice our faith to how we connect to consumer products. I wrote Brands of Faith in hopes of coming to an understanding about my own journey through religion and spirituality. Raised in a liberal Jewish home by parents who didn't much care about God but did have vestiges of a Jewish cultural heritage, I found myself floundering in my faith as I got older. I spent years trying one New Age philosophy after another. I meditated. I read. I walked. I hiked. I meditated some more. I tried A Course in Miracles, Kabbalah, and Buddhism (even thought I might qualify as a JuBu - a Jewish Buddhist - for a while) and through it all I was never satisfied. Oh, I was for a while, but then I would get itchy again. Many times I thought it was because I wasn't born a Christian. You see, all of my Christian friends knew they had to go to church on Sunday. For Jews, Saturday synagogue was never mandatory (and figures show this is true for most American Jews). However, as I began to research religion more thoroughly, I found that Christians aren't going to church that much either. While the most widely published statistics put church attendance at 40-45%, others suggest that it is closer to 26%. That felt more right to me as I tended to see an awful lot of people at Starbucks on Sunday mornings, and I couldn't imagine that they were all Jewish. I began to wonder if it had something to do with marketing - that the books and the expos and the meditation retreats weren't about getting

"Marketing and religion, marketing religion, religious marketing, marketing as religion - all of these are topics for discussion on this blog. This includes everything from marketing God to worshipping commercial culture to brand cults (think Mac users) to faith brands (think Joel Osteen or Oprah).* How do religion and marketing interact in the 21st Century? I contest that rather than a culture war, there is a blending of the two spheres. We can see this in a myriad of ways from how we practice our faith to how we connect to consumer products. I wrote Brands of Faith in hopes of coming to an understanding about my own journey through religion and spirituality. Raised in a liberal Jewish home by parents who didn't much care about God but did have vestiges of a Jewish cultural heritage, I found myself floundering in my faith as I got older. I spent years trying one New Age philosophy after another. I meditated. I read. I walked. I hiked. I meditated some more. I tried A Course in Miracles, Kabbalah, and Buddhism (even thought I might qualify as a JuBu - a Jewish Buddhist - for a while) and through it all I was never satisfied. Oh, I was for a while, but then I would get itchy again. Many times I thought it was because I wasn't born a Christian. You see, all of my Christian friends knew they had to go to church on Sunday. For Jews, Saturday synagogue was never mandatory (and figures show this is true for most American Jews). However, as I began to research religion more thoroughly, I found that Christians aren't going to church that much either. While the most widely published statistics put church attendance at 40-45%, others suggest that it is closer to 26%. That felt more right to me as I tended to see an awful lot of people at Starbucks on Sunday mornings, and I couldn't imagine that they were all Jewish. I began to wonder if it had something to do with marketing - that the books and the expos and the meditation retreats weren't about getting

The Paris-based collective castillo/corrales, working as Section 7 books, has organized several forums to discuss publication, in the course of which some theoretical frameworks have been developed. One is the following definition, which I proposed last Fall when Section 7 convened a 3-day colloquium on publishing and distribution (at Montehermoso in Vitoria, Spain). "Publication is not the production of books but the production of a public for whom those books have meaning. There is no pre-existing public. The public is created through deliberate, willful acts: the circulation of texts, discussions and gatherings in physical space, and the maintenance of a related digital commons. These construct a common space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being. This is publication in its fullest sense." (podcast of that session here.)

Discourse & Communication, Vol. 3, No. 2, 195-216 (2009) DOI: 10.1177/1750481309102452 Coherence in political computer-mediated communication: analyzing topic relevance and drift in chat Jennifer Stromer-Galley UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY,SUNY,USA, jstromer@albany.edu Anna M. Martinson INDIANA UNIVERSITY, USA, anna.m.martinson@gmail.com There is a general perception that synchronous, online chat about politics is fragmented, incoherent, and rife with ad hominem attacks because of its channel characteristics. This study aims to better understand the relative impact of channel of communication versus topic of communication by comparing chat about four different topics. Discourse analysis and coding for topic drift were applied to two hours of chat devoted to the topics of politics, auto racing, entertainment, and cancer support. Findings demonstrate that topic may have an effect on the coherence of chat, with discussion in the politics chat room surprisingly being more coherent than in the other rooms. This research suggests that users can sustain relatively coherent interaction on political talk, suggesting chat technology may not be an inherently problematic medium for political discourse. Key Words: CMC * coherence * dynamic topic analysis * online discussion * political chat * topic

Discourse & Communication, Vol. 3, No. 2, 173-194 (2009) DOI: 10.1177/1750481309102451 `A mess' and `rows': evaluation in prime-time TV news discourse and the shaping of public opinion Marianna Patrona HELLENIC MILITARY ACADEMY, ATHENS, GREECE, mpatrona@ath.forthnet.gr This article examines a recent shift in the organization of prime-time news on Greek private television, from the `one-way' dissemination of information to an interactive format, where the news genre meets the talk show. By drawing on Hunston's model of evaluation in written academic discourse, it is argued that this conversational news format serves as a vehicle for evaluation, allowing the anchorpersons and journalist panels more freedom to voice concrete views. More specifically, prime-time news is generally cast in terms of two major sub-genres, namely the debate and the structured panel discussion. These sub-genres particularly lend themselves to the performance of acts of evaluation by TV journalists. Far from merely reporting events, journalists unequivocally show that their main task is to jointly interpret reality (news events and the actions of news makers) on behalf of the viewer audience. They set about this task by explicitly encoding their personal attitudes, while directly challenging government spokespersons and policies. It is argued that, in so doing, media personalities in effect shape audience opinions. The data attest to the increasing empowerment of the Greek media, and illustrate the ways in which conversational processes bring into being the continuously evolving public sphere in contemporary Greece. Key Words: conversation * conversationalization * debate * evaluation * journalistic discourse * prime-time news

Discourse & Communication, Vol. 3, No. 2, 145-172 (2009) DOI: 10.1177/1750481309102450 Punctuating the home page: image as language in an online newspaper John S. Knox MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA, john.knox@mq.edu.au Between February 2002 and April 2006, the Sydney Morning Herald online [www.smh.com.au], an influential Australian newspaper which went online in 1995, showed a remarkable degree of change in the design of its home page. However, over the same time period, the use of images in hard-news stories on its home page was remarkably consistent, both diachronically and synchronically. These hard-news images are small `thumbnails', and are most typically close crops of faces. Their small size, their consistent and limited subject matter, and their positioning in news stories represent a new practice in hard-news reporting, and raise questions about the role they play in the multimodal story-telling practices of the newspaper, and about the discursive practices of online newspapers more generally. This article presents an analysis of these thumbnails using tools from systemic functional semiotics, and an investigation from three socio-historical perspectives (news photography, typography, and punctuation). On this basis, I argue that in the specific discursive context of the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald online during the time period studied, thumbnails function less as images and more as an expression of the expanding system of language in computer-mediated communication. Key Words: emoticons * images * multimodality * news design * news discourse * newsbites

Abstract This investigation examined how exposure to a humorous persuasive message affects antecedents of presence (i.e., the sensation of being "in" a mediated environment) facilitating message recall. Participants in an experimental study viewed either a humorous or non-humorous version of an alcohol public service announcement and then completed measures of positive emotion, perceived credibility, psychological reactance, presence, and message recall. As predicted, positive emotion was related to an increase in perceived credibility and a decrease in reactance. Increased perceived credibility was associated with greater feelings of presence, negatively affecting recognition memory. These findings suggest that presence may sometimes impede persuasive message recall, although not necessarily to the detriment of attitude change. Keywords: Health Communication; Persuasion; Presence

Authors: Paul Skalski - Paul Skalski (PhD, Michigan State University, 2004) is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Cleveland State University.a; Ron Tamborini - Ron Tamborini (PhD, Indiana University, 1983) is a professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University.b; Ed Glazer - Ed Glazer (MA, Michigan State University, 2004) is a graduate student in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University.b; Sandi Smith - Sandi Smith (PhD, University of Southern California, 1986) is a professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University.b Affiliations: a School of Communication, Cleveland State University, b Department of Communication, Michigan State University, DOI: 10.1080/01463370902881619 Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year Published in: journal Communication Quarterly, Volume 57, Issue 2 April 2009 , pages 136 - 153 Abstract This investigation examined how exposure to a humorous persuasive message affects antecedents of presence (i.e., the sensation of being "in" a mediated environment) facilitating message recall. Participants in an experimental study viewed either a humorous or non-humorous version of an alcohol public service announcement and then completed measures of positive emotion, perceived credibility, psychological reactance, presence, and message recall. As predicted, positive emotion was related to an increase in perceived credibility and a decrease in reactance. Increased perceived credibility was associated with greater feelings of presence, negatively affecting recognition memory. These findings suggest that presence may sometimes impede persuasive message recall, although not necessarily to the detriment of attitude change. Keywords: Health Communication; Persuasion; Presence