Pragmatic, Rhetorical, and Cultural Analysis

The three chapters for this assignment dealt with pragmatic, rhetorical, and cultural analysis of media in  the United States.  The three types of analysis focused on different media critique lenses that scholars could use when evaluating media.

Pragmatic Analysis was particularly concerned with practicality especially in terms of government and industry regulation of media.  It discussed ways in which different types of regulations had been successful or not, as well as defined issues within American media regulation such as: monopolies, copyright/intellectual property, national security/interest, diversity, and morality.  It seemed to be an approach that was more involved with how to critique regulations governing media rather than media itself, but it discuss different types of violence in a way that I thought was particularly interesting and could be used to really dissect violence in media.

Rhetorical Analysis focused on theories of "sign" and the recognition of symbols, denotations, and connotations.  It discussed rhetorical structures and helped shed light on how different medias are designed to persuade or illicit specific reactions from the audience.  It also discussed the affect of aesthetics on viewers like color, lighting, editing, etc.

Cultural Analysis was the most interesting chapter for me-- particularly the scenario about the father and his son that were in the car accident.  Despite being a woman, at first it took me a moment to put together than the surgeon was the boy's mother.  It really sent a hard hitting message about the assumptions that are part of American culture that would make me naturally assume at first that the surgeon was male.  This really started generating a lot of hypothetical situations in my head about what else I initially think about people and how I visualize them completely based on assumptions that have really no context in reality.

The chapter dealt with the definition of culture, as well as the forms of culture: physical, social, attitudinal, but also that culture is: collective, rhetorical, historical, and ideological.  It also discussed ideology, which I think was important to put culture into an ideological context.  It also made a specific and I think important point: ideology privleges some interests over others.  It discussed different ideological process such as myth, doxa, and hegemony.

The discussion of the American Dream as an ideology was particularly interesting to me-- I'd always felt this way, it was just interesting to see it articulated this way.  It was also scary to see how easily this ideology is put into media to make it normalized and be considered just "how things are".  This also seemed scary when considering the ways in which minorities are depicted in mass media.

The ending really did lead me to questioning: in what ways can white Americans be interested in other cultures without just being selfish consumers that are entitled to do so because of their privilege?  Is it even possible?