week 4 - reflective response to reading

Student no: s13161812 Reflective Response to Reading – Week 4 MED4105

The author in week four’s reading focuses on how promotional activity dominates political

communication shaping the public’s perception. An important concept is power as certain political

campaigns can become more powerful in society from promotional activity. It relates to this week’s

lecture as the development of technology has caused an increase on the use of promotional activity.

Social media provides more promotional material and increases public involvement with political

campaigns. This week’s reading was more difficult to understand because there were so many

concepts involved.

A promotional resource used for the presentation of groups discusses the dependence and power of

media organisations and the PR involvement when obtaining political information. This is cultural

promotion; the reading states we can “identify some groups as ‘resource-poor’ or ‘resource-rich’”

(Albertazzi and Cobley, 2010, p. 125). This could be due to the group’s social class and presentation

within society. Class, social difference and class as a political category are important within the

media.

In this sense, class is…. a powerfully normative concept that allows an analyst not just to explain social structural inequalities, but to explain how such systematic features can be challenged, overcome and transformed. In doing so, this tradition of the use of the class idea is firmly Marxist in orientation…

Back and Bennett et al., 2012, p. 49

This implies class is about power of political groups in society; it relates to Marx’s theory of class. It

links to promotional culture by groups presenting themselves in a certain way influencing their place

in society depending on if they are resource-rich or resource-poor.

A political group is the Canadian adbusters; they are a pressure group consisting of various cultures.

They want to “forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century” (Adbusters.org, 2014).

They link to this concept of class in a political category using cultural promotion as they are a

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political pressure group, who have incorporated developing technology, to self-promote and to

shape the public’s perception of them to be a superior group in society.

A new investigation could be “How does class and status as a political category, within the

relationship between PR and Journalism, impact the developing technologies use of promotional

culture?” A suitable methodology would be semiotics as the promotion used could be studied to

symbolise the group’s status.

In conclusion, the knowledge I gained is that political groups and media organisations can present

themselves to the public in a certain way through promotional resources, gaining power, which in

fact may not be credible.



Bibliography:

Adbusters.org. 2014. About | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters. [online] Available at: https://www.adbusters.org/about/adbusters [Accessed: 22 Feb 2014].

Albertazzi, D. and Cobley, P. 2010. The media. 3rd ed. New York: Pearson Education.

Back, L., Bennett, A., Edles, L. D., Gibson, M., Inglis, D., Jacobs, R. and Woodward, I. 2012. Cultural Sociology: an introduction. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.
