All posts tagged with 'media discourse'
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Michael Ferenchick is in his second year of the New School University’s master’s in Media Studies program. He earned a B.A. in English Literature from Tufts University and has worked as a singer and gardener. Current interests focus on the sociology of media as a methodological approach toward studying work, labor and medicine. He intends to pursue his studies beyond the master’s level.
The Discourse and Media Environment of Direct to Consumer Drug Advertisements
Direct to Consumer Drug Advertisements increasingly saturate popular media landscapes in the United States. Ultimately, the discourse of such texts functions as an instrumental fore shaping our perceptions of health and illness as well as redefining the very parameters such concepts are predicated on. Drawling from a sample of 350 print advertisements, this paper identifies and examines three discursive processes which organize the texts: “synthetic personalization,” “conditionalization,” and solicitation of consumer action. These processes are shown to exist by means of specific grammatical, syntactical and lexical construction. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates how these discursive architectures situate the discussion of health and illness within a political economic context where the orientation of speaker to audience is expressed via a consumption and production dichotomy. The final section of the paper states the importance in making problematic the current trajectory of medical discourse in a market context.