Below I will provide in class sources in pdf form, which use three quotes/sources from the articles I provide. Include3 outside quotes/sources of your desire.Use the outline provided below to organize the paper.Meaning and MaterialityHow does the meaning and materiality of your creative product influence consumers’ interpretations? How do consumers’ interpretations of meaning change based on their social context? How does this compare/contrast to what you learned from the cases in the course readings on this topic?Taste and Social NetworksHow do social networks among consumers influence their taste in your creative product? How do consumers’ taste in your creative product influence their social networks? How does this compare/contrast to what you learned from the cases in the course readings on this topic?Taste and ClassHow does consumers’ social class influence their taste in your creative product? Are consumers univores or omnivores in their taste for your creative product? why? Has this changed over time?How does this compare/contrast to what you learned from the cases in the course readings on this topic?Morality and CensorshipDo consumers see some aspect of your creative product as immoral? Why or why not? How do these perceptions vary based on consumers’ identities?
a. How
does this compare/contrast to what you learned from the cases in the course
readings on this topic?
instructions_for_paper_3.docx
lecture_14___mcdonnell___chapter_5__displacement_and_decay.pdf
lecture_15___lizardo___cultural_preferences_and_personal_networks.pdf
lecture_16___johnston_and_baumann___democracy_vs_distinction__selections_.pdf
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Instructions for Paper 3:
Select the creative industry or subsector/genre of a creative industry that you chose for
Paper 1 (If you decided that you hate your creative industry and want to switch, please email
Robyn and me with your new creative industry).
Find at least three academic or non-academic sources beyond the course reading such as
magazine articles, newspaper articles, or documentaries. It is OK to use all non-academic
sources, if you wish. Make sure that all of your sources are reputable and relevant.
Drawing on the central concepts and themes of the course, compare the findings from these
sources (your independent research) to the central concepts/themes in the course readings
and lectures. Engage deeply with the course readings by comparing the cases in the readings to
your creative industry when analyzing a course concept. You should show knowledge of the
readings beyond the class lecture in your analysis of the course readings. Use relevant
quotes/paraphrasing from the course readings. Be sure to cite internally in addition to listing
citations in the references.
You should focus on three to four key course topics (these are the topics of the lectures) from
various readings across different lectures in the unit, as discussed in the Grading Criteria
document. You should focus your attention on citing and discussing the academic readings from
the course (marked with an asterisk on the syllabus). You should use at least three course
readings.
The Consumption paper may address many of the following questions, and you may use the
questions below to help you outline and organize your paper. However, this is just a sample
outline – you should choose the topics and concepts within each topic best relate to your creative
industry and in which you are most interested.
1. Meaning and Materiality
a. How does the meaning and materiality of your creative product influence
consumers’ interpretations? How do consumers’ interpretations of meaning
change based on their social context?
b. How does this compare/contrast to what you learned from the cases in the course
readings on this topic?
2. Taste and Social Networks
a. How do social networks among consumers influence their taste in your creative
product? How do consumers’ taste in your creative product influence their social
networks?
b. How does this compare/contrast to what you learned from the cases in the course
readings on this topic?
3. Taste and Class
a. How does consumers’ social class influence their taste in your creative product?
Are consumers univores or omnivores in their taste for your creative product?
why? Has this changed over time?
b. How does this compare/contrast to what you learned from the cases in the course
readings on this topic?
4. Morality and Censorship
a. Do consumers see some aspect of your creative product as immoral? Why or why
not? How do these perceptions vary based on consumers’ identities?
b. How does this compare/contrast to what you learned from the cases in the course
readings on this topic?
Some themes will fit certain creative industries better than others. If you are unsure how a topic
relates to your creative industry, you can discuss it with us in office hours. If you are writing on a
broader creative industry, you may focus on narrower genres/subsectors of this industry for
certain topics, if you wish. If you are writing on a narrow genre/subsector and have trouble
finding research for a particular topic, you may talk about the broader industry or about another
genre/subsector within that industry for that topic. You do not have to focus equally on
everything we covered for a given topic, but can focus each topic on what you find most relevant
and interesting (so long as you are relating it to the course material).
The paper should be 3-4 pages, not including the list of references at the end. Given the
relatively short length of the paper, please devote as much of the paper as possible to content,
rather than “padding”. This means that you should include only a brief introduction or
conclusion. Direct quotes from the sources or readings should also be kept short (around three
lines of text or less).
Formatting: The paper should have 1-inch margins on all sides. It should be double spaced, in
12-point, Times New Roman font. Please put only your name in the header (not multiple lines
regarding the course number, etc.) and entitle your paper with a single line (i.e. “Production in
the Music Industry”).
Citations and References: Your paper should have internal citations for both course readings and
sources from your independent research. After quoting an article/book or discussing the findings
without explicit quotations, use in-text/embedded citations. For example:
As Espeland and Sauder (2007) reveal, law school administrations often change their
admissions criteria in order to conform to public ranking systems.
Research reveals that law school administrations often change their admissions criteria in
order to conform to public ranking systems (Espeland and Sauder 2007).
At the end of your paper, include a list of references. The list of references should include both
course materials and sources from your own research that you directly cite in the paper. You may
format these according to any well-recognized referencing system. This is a good style guide to
follow: http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/quick_tips_for_asa_style.pdf
Please reference the Grading Criteria document for information on how we will assess your
papers.
This document is brought to you by the
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(Title 17 U.S.Code)
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Title: Best laid plans : cultural entropy and
the unravel ing of AIDS media campaigns/
Call #: P96.A392 G46
Volume:
Issue:
Month/Year: 2016
Pages: 120-144
Location: Main Library
2016
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Best Laid Plans
Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of
AIDS Media Campaigns
TERENCE
E.
McDONNELL
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Terence E. McDonnell is the Kellogg Assistant Professor of Sociology at the
University of Notre Dame.
Unless noted otherwise, photographs reproduced in this book are by the author.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2016 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16
I 2
3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38201-2 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38215-9 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38229-6 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226382296.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McDonnell, Terence E. (Terence Emmett), author.
Title: Best laid plans : cultural entropy and the unraveling of AIDS media campaigns/
Terence E. McDonnell.
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. I Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015048929 I ISBN 9780226382012 (cloth: alk. paper) I
ISBN 9780226382159 (pbk.: alk. paper) I ISBN 9780226382296 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: AIDS (Disease) in mass media. I Mass media in health education Ghana-Accra. I Communication in public health-Ghana-Accra. I AIDS
(Disease)-Ghana-Prevention.
Classification: LCC P96.A392 G46 2016 I DOC 362.19697 /92009667- dc23 LC record
available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/2015048929
0 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of
Paper).
DISPLACEMENT AND DECAY
5
Displacement and Decay:
Materiality, Space, and Interpretation
AIDS campaign designers work for months to design a campaign that reaches
their target audience with a clear, consistent, and culturally relevant message.
Designers believe that after following best practices, they have mitigated the
possibility that audiences will interpret their campaigns incorrectly after
the launch. Given the gospel of best practices, designers express confidence
that they have made the best possible campaign for their target audience.
Designers have faith that their campaign objects embody their message and
will change behavior as long as the objects reach their target audience. With
the objects "perfected;' the AIDS organization releases its campaign into the
public sphere. By and large, this is where the organization's work ends.
I bring to light the unexpected lives of these campaign objects after their
release into public space. These unexpected lives determine whether messages
reach the target audience and whether those audiences interpret campaign
objects as intended by campaign designers. When people interpret and use
campaign objects in unexpected ways, these alternative interactions often
undermine a campaign's ability to persuade people to change their behavior.
If you can't see a billboard's message, or if you miss the point, that billboard is
unlikely to persuade you to put on a condom. When this happens, the months
and monies of development are squandered.
These disruptions in the communication process happen because of a
tendency toward cultural entropy. From the moment organizations begin
to circulate their AIDS campaign, the objects become increasingly open to
disruption and deterioration. The cause of these unexpected disruptions is
often material in nature, and the disruptions lead to communication failures,
unintended misreadings, and misappropriations. When campaign designers fixate on choosing the right symbol and message, they fail to account for
121
how the material qualities of their campaign objects will interact with the
setting in which they are displayed. In particular, designers do not attend to
such specific dimensions of the setting as the physical environment and the
cultural practices people enact in the vicinity. I argue that the cultural entropy caused by the interactions between an object's materiality, its physical
setting, and local cultural practice is patterned and systematic. In the cases
I present, I identify three ways communication is disrupted: (1) certain settings prevent the intended message from being communicated, (2) campaign
objects may decay or be obscured when exposed to the elements and local
cultural practices, and (3) some campaign objects are more vulnerable to displacement, and moving the object to unintended sites may hinder intended
interpretations.
By failing to adequately attend to how objects, settings, and audiences
interact, practitioners of public-health communication have trouble explaining when and how communication breaks down. By focusing on material dimensions of these interactions, my data reveal three kinds of communication
disruption. First, audiences may never see a campaign object, as when a tree
or building obstructs the message from view. This kind of disruption is fundamentally about whether the campaign object is perceptible. Second, audiences
may not interpret the campaign's message as the producers intended but often
assume they have. On these occasions, the objects are not legible. Third, as in
the case of the female condoms described in the introduction, audiences may
find creative alternative meanings and uses for objects that they prefer over
the intended use.
In Accra, as in any city, the arrangement of place and how citizens engage
the city through their local cultural practices work in tandem to constrain
people's "practices of looking" (Sturken and Cartwright 2001) . Urban scholars
have made similar observations through ethnographic attention to space and
materiality (Jacobs 1961; Zukin 1995). By observing the conditions of interpretative interactions-how the physical and cultural constraints on people meet
the material conditions of objects and the city-this chapter articulates how
the materiality of AIDS campaigns shapes their meaning (Griswold 1987b).
AIDS Media Campaigns and Materiality
Within any setting, the interpretation of AIDS media depends on the interaction between the materiality of the object and the surrounding environmental conditions. Certain combinations of AIDS campaign objects and urban
settings are discordant, rendering campaign objects less perceptible and legible. My specific focus is on material discordance-a mismatch between the
122
CHAPTER FIVE
FIG u RE 1 5. Ghana Social Marketing Foundation's Champion Condoms bus shelter advertisement,
Accra Central neighborhood in downtown Accra
material qualities of an object and the physical setting where it appears. Public
places rarely provide ideal conditions for reception, and more often than not,
these conditions are outside of the control of AIDS media producers.
For instance, figure 15 features a bus shelter advertisement for Champion
condoms in the Accra Central neighborhood of downtown Accra. In Accra,
as in many developing cities, sales are not confined to semipublic settings
such as stores. Rather, hawkers use every inch of public space to sell goods.
This photograph shows how the market has overtaken the advertising space.
In it, a hawker displays clothes for sale using the side of the bus shelter, blocking the poster from view.' This display of clothing reduces the visibility of the
poster. The material qualities of the bus shelter make possible the obstruction of the poster. The bus shelter's height and capacity to bear weight allow
hawkers to hang goods over the advertisement. In this sense, the activities
of the hawkers compete with the qualities of the bus shelter that advertisers
emphasize (i.e., the shelter as surface for advertising) to obscure the image.
In addition to the imposition of the market onto this image, bus shelters
are innately bad sites for media. Because shelters shade passengers from the
sun and protect them from rain-persistent weather conditions in tropical
climates of places such as Ghana-people stand or sit in front of the media. 2
For pedestrians or cars traveling past the advertisement, these people seeking shelter obstruct the message from view. Those Ghanaians who are inside
DISPLACEMENT AND
123
DECAY
the shelter waiting for transportation direct their attention out to the road
rather than inward toward the shelter and its advertisements. The placement
of the shelter's bench ensures that those seated will also face away from the
ad. Placed directly against the advertisements, people must sit with their bodies facing out. This unique combination of clothing sales, advertisement orientation, material qualities of the shelter, and social convention hinders the
producers' attempts to maximize visibility of their campaign.
The billboard at the University of Ghana, Legon (fig. 16) presents a similar
example of a disruptive setting. This billboard depicts a man with his arm
around a woman, with the associated text "Don't Rush into Pre-Marital Sex.
You .. :• But the rest is obscured. At the bottom of the billboard, people have
pasted pictures of political candidates, three announcements for the "Legon
Beach Bash;' six flyers for the Baptist Student Union's "Jehova Praiz 'oi' concert, and more. These various announcements cover the remaining text of the
original billboard: "Risk Getting Infected By HIV/AIDS!" 3 Due to the limited space for advertising events on campus, just like limited market space
for hawkers, students co-opt the built structure around them. In an act of
creativity, local students use this billboard as free advertising space, effectively undermining the intended meaning of the billboard as a message about
AIDS. This creative use is enabled by the eye-level height of the billboard: it
is just short enough to paste a flyer along the bottom that will be readable
by an adult passerby. Had producers built the billboard higher-just out of
ooN·T RUS.H
INTO
PRE- MARITAL SEX.
YOU
FIG
u RE
1 6.
"Don't Rush into Pre-marital Sex" billboard on the University of Ghana, Legon, campus
124
CHAPTER FIVE
reach for potential flyer posters-the billboard would not have afforded this
use, and the perceptibility of the AIDS prevention message would not have
decreased.
Based on interviews with twenty-five students passing by the billboard, it
became clear that the message is less perceptible and legible than on the day it
was erected. Of the twenty-five people I interviewed about this billboard, only
four recognized this advertisement as an HIV/AIDS message. About half the
people said that no one pays the message any attention because of the condition of the billboard. A few of these people used the language of "messy" that its messy condition distracts from the message and makes people not
want to look at it. Most students felt strongly that the billboard should be
taken down or replaced because its condition symbolized a disrespect of the
university. Those students who took the time to look at the message walked
away frustrated by the condition of the billboard, instead of being thoughtful
about the HIV transmission risks of premarital sex.
Throughout Ghana, billboards serve as a central medium of communication about AIDS. As other advertisers do, many AIDS producers like billboards because the medium tends to yield high "impression rates" (Luke,
Esmundo, and Bloom 2000). Billboards offer AIDS campaigns a routinized
means of communication, increasing "effectiveness" through repeated viewing. Billboards also impose their messages on public audiences more than do
television or radio, on which people can flip to another station (Hackbarth,
Silvestri, and Cosper 1995). Because most AIDS campaign designers in Ghana
discuss billboards as a core component of their communications strategy,
and because billboards are often the sole media channel for many campaigns,
most campaign objects I discuss are billboards. With multichannel campaigns
that include radio and TV, one might claim that the low perceptibility of a
single billboard does not preclude audiences from access to another billboard
or a radio advertisement. However, because most residents move through the
city in habitualized travel patterns, low perceptibility of even one billboard
reduces access to knowledge for all the residents who pass it.
Through efforts made by the Ghana AIDS Commission, many mediabarren rural villages have a billboard that marks village boundaries with a
generic message like, "Welcome to [insert village name here]. Prevent AIDS.
Use a Condom:' For these villages, the AIDS prevention billboard is often
the only billboard nearby and therefore a highly visible reminder to protect
oneself against AIDS. In urban Accra ...
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