Communication Honours Capstone Projects

For Marx, the necessity of freedom has ontological grounding. When our capacity to labour is alienated from us and applied to abstract ends, we are unfree. For Marcuse, repressive needs prevent the development of what he calls “inner freedom.” This is the capacity to think critically and act autonomously from repressive society, to have different needs and desires than those which are imposed. However, in The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse argues that experiencing art interrupts unreflective involvement in the world, infecting experience with awareness of an inner dimension that is suppressed and distorted by those appearances. In this capacity of art Marcuse sees the potential for the reinvigoration of inner freedom.

Rhetoric, commonly regarded as the art of persuasion, is a subject of study and fascination that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. As many scholars have suggested, rhetoric is a quintessential part of communication itself. Studying rhetoric affords us an understanding of how texts and the messages within them come to encapsulate a society’s values and ideals. This is particularly true of advertisements and, specifically to my purpose, pharmaceutical ads. In this paper I draw on the theories and methods of Glenn Stillar and Kenneth Burke in the analysis of three pharmaceutical drug ads. I analyse a Cialis poster ad, a Toviaz magazine ad and a Mirapex television ad. I use Stillar’s three tiers of analysis (discoursal, rhetorical and social) in combination with Burkean pentad analysis and the associated Burkean theory of the negative and substance. Using these frameworks, I ­explain how the ads present an ideal of health, youth and attractiveness as directional substance. The use of this ideal can be expanded to a discussion of autonomy in terms of attaining and maintaining of health, youth and attractiveness. The drugs offer autonomy by ameliorating the symptoms of the medical conditions that keep us from the ideal of health, youth and attractiveness. However, this capability exists only within and because of a framework of the drug’s constraints. Through rhetorical analysis, we come to understand the simultaneous constraining and enabling effects behind each of the advertisements and recognize that our autonomy exists somewhere between them.  

Communication students at Simon Fraser University were surveyed and interviewed to deduce perceptions and behaviour of news consumption over social and traditional media. Both social media and traditional media are used to consume news with traditional media acting as the primary news source and as more accessible and reliable than social media. News stories considered important or having various perspectives were verified the most, especially world news. Extent of accessibility of sources and education determine the variety of sources used. Awareness of privacy issues in social media is high, but respondents do not alter their news consumption behaviour accordingly. High perceptual connection between being informed of news and being a well-rounded citizen corresponds highly with its impact on respondents’ news consumption.