Political cartoons are a powerful communicative weapon. They can distract, joke but they can also provide social commentaries on key aspects of reality. Although not always acknowledged, cartoons are a key element on political communication. In this paper, we investigate editorial cartoons potential to political communication and take them as communicative artifacts capable of enhancing political comprehension and reconceptualization of events, through specific frames of understanding. By looking into the double standard thesis, by which cartoonists tend to contrast the posturing, destructive, wastage of politics with the purposive, constructive efficiency of business (Morris, 1992: 254), we try to assess if that same tendency to frame politics and business befalls as well in Portuguese political cartoons. Based on a notrepresentative sample, we proceed to a rhetorical analysis of three contemporary Portuguese political cartoons in which business tends to be associated with purpose and efficiency, while politics is portrayed as a wasteful, vain, otiose activity. By representing politics and business in such a dissimilar way, these cartoons tend to validate in Portugal the double standard thesis, and raises the possibility it can actually be applied to trans-national contexts.
What the concept of public means today? We seek to contribute to this debatesearching for a third-way of appraisal: the public is neither a simple audience constitutedby media consumers nor just a rational-critical agency of a Public Sphere. Weargue the concept should also be seen in at the light of a publicness principle, beyond acritic and manipulative publicity.In accordance, the public may be regarded as the result of the social activities madeby individuals sharing symbolic representations and common emotions in publicness.Seen with lower-case, the concept is a set of subjectivities who look publicly for a feelingof belonging. So, in this perspective, the public is still a fundamental notion to sociallife although in a different manner in comparison to 18th century Public Sphere’s Public.He means above all the social textures and configurations where successive layers ofsocial experience are built up. The public is, thus, acknowledged with the casual andspontaneous public communities disseminated through society carrying out processes ofcommunication that use media to obtain a worldwide relevance.
By giving full emphasis to the impossibility of not to communicate, the first axiom of communication stresses how communication is an event not subject to cessation. It is this never-ending characteristic that impels us to the need to ponder on metacommunication as "communication about communication". By taking a philosophically informed and pragmatic stance, this paper deals with the concept of "metacommunication" and tries to incorporate it in the theory of communication. New York: E. P. Dutton, p.56 IntroductionOne of the everlasting questions that Communication Theory answers is: what is "communication"? Despite the theoretical differences and scientific ambitions between them, several authors, from Dewey (1927) to Shannon & Weaver (1949) Metacommunication as Second Order CommunicationMateus, S. 81 of meaning? Does the notion of "communication" contain clearly transmissible content? Can it be envisaged as sheer content and form?In a speech entitled "Signature, Event, Context", Derrida asked: "Is it certain that to the word communication corresponds a concept that is unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a word, communicable? In accordance with a strange figure of discourse, one must, first of all, ask oneself whether or not the word "communication" communicates a determinate content, an identifiable meaning, or a describable value" (Derrida, 1988: 1).Derrida is, of course, playing with common assumptions in order to deconstruct the concept itself and by doing so, it seems he is alluding to the common notion that to communicate is to "get someone to understand your thoughts or feelings or to give information about (something) to someone" (Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online). He is primarily trying to push the boundaries of what one can comprehend by communication 1 . Of course, there is a representational, directive, clearly transmissible content. It is communication's referential duty: to portrait something about the world. Derrida is also interested in theorizing the displacement of writing by reflecting upon the impossibility to fully saturate the context.The reading of Derrida's oeuvre suggests a critical aspect to communication: the endless allocation of meaning, as if meaning entered a perpetual cycle. In other words, he posits an enlarged and general idea of communication. It is as if communication were a symbolic process that is always escaping us, always in self-reconfiguration. A process with no commencement and no dissolution (cf. Dance, 1967), in constant happening. More importantly, we can read Derrida's insights as a total possibility of meaning: one meaning does not impose itself to another.This assumption on the total deference of meaning, it seems to us, is of vital importance to communication studies since we cannot ponder only the referential duty of communication. One should also consider its relationship aspect (Watzlawick et ali., 1967: 50). This means communicators entail a dynamic process where, along with representation, we need to consider expres...
By focusing on the emergence and development of journalistic conventions and professional routines it is possible to understand the prominent role of journalism in the social construction of meaning. In this article, we theoretically examine journalism as a special field of discursive production. The field of journalism presents more than the facts it gathers and reports. The institutionalized retelling of events is a very distinct way to put meaning on them. We suggest journalism is a historically and culturally bounded discourse whose performative nature is at the core of its moral authority and social credibility. In addition, the performative discourse of journalism invites us to extend the concept to include, for example, the conventions of style and form. The historical transformations journalism took may, thus, be looked at as efforts in the battle for performative discourse involved in the process of a mimetic (re)construction of the social world.A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy: or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to
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