CDA: From Print Texts to Multimedia Franchises
Critical discourse analysis began with the study of print texts, particularly newspaper articles and editorials that displayed an implicit ideological bias (Fowler, Hodge, Kress, & Trew, 1979). Its purview has long since been extended to more diverse media, such as the formal spoken discourse of parliamentary debates (Wodak & van Dijk, 2000) and the multimedia circus of contemporary television news (Chouliaraki, 2002). The linguistic foundations of CDA have been extended by efforts to define the semiotic resources of visual-graphical representations and video (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). Where in the universe of discourse have we traditionally looked in CDA to find revealing instances of the political ideologies that serve dominant interests? Some classic media genres include:
In addition to these classic media genres, analysis has also focused on other genres of mass media culture, such as films, print fiction and nonfiction, and television programming other than news and advertising.
We know, however, that today our society is witnessing an explosion of new media. Where should we now be looking among these new media for evidence of the changing nature of political ideologies and their modes of expression in society? Any such updated list should certainly include:
My own interest in the first and last of these newer media has led me to the theme of this essay: that many of the dominant ideological discourses of globalizing commercial culture today are widely distributed across multiple media. This is specifically the case for particular thematic formations (Lemke, 1995) which can be protected by copyright as “intellectual property” and then “franchised” or distributed across different media under the logo of a corporate “brand”.
For example, the print fictions known under the brand of “Harry Potter” also distribute their messages about the nature of people and the social order in the media of films, DVDs, videogames, websites, clothing, toys, and even candy (see the amazon.com “Harry Potter Store” for a sampling:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/1084186/002-2245057-1823241 ). The Harry Potter franchise is a new kind of cross-media or meta-media object. The complete experience of its “discourse” involves participation with all these media: not just reading the books, but also seeing the films (which differ significantly from the books) and the DVDs (which include material not in the commercially-distributed theatrical-release films), playing the videogames, wearing the clothing, buying the toys, visiting the websites which are linked to the books, films, and videogames, and even perhaps eating the candy. The websites often include vast networks of online discussions among “fans” about the commercial works, with speculations about future products, and even the production by fans of imitative fictions that further elaborate the alternative reality of the Harry Potter universe (e.g. http://scifi.about.com/od/fanfichp/ or http://www.harrypotterfanfiction.com/ ).
Much the same can be said of the “Lord of the Rings” (LOTR) or the extended “Tolkien” franchises and those associated with the brands of The Matrix, Star Wars, Star Trek, and many others. Some of these franchised worlds began as print fictions, some as films, some as television programs, and some as videogames. There are today a number of powerful franchises, particularly for children, which originated in the manga and anime genres and media of Japanese culture. Or in product lines of toys, which spawned animated television series, movies, videogames, websites and online community cultures. From the viewpoint of many fans or consumers of the products of these franchises, it does not matter what the medium or genre of origin may have been. From the viewpoint of those controlling the commercial interests of such “intellectual property”, maximizing profits compels a strategy of crossing over across as many of these media as possible.
It is not just children who are the consumer targets of these powerful franchises. The Matrix and the Lord of the Rings franchises mainly target adult consumers, and many franchises from the manga-anime culture target high-school and college-age students, and may well maintain an influence well on into today’s prolonged “commercial adolescence”, a market deliberately extended to consumers well into their 30s.
Videogames as a medium are now more commercially successful worldwide than films. They primarily target the extended adolescent market, but in fact the average age of consumers in many sectors of this market is now over 30. Every successful film or videogame is the potential progenitor of a vast cross-media franchise. Successful videogames and films have spawned books, film projects now begin videogame co-production early in their development, all major commercial releases of films and videogames for this market have associated commercial websites, and the successful franchises rapidly spawn fan-based websites and online communities, which may be supported by the franchise owners or become independent. There is now a national cable-TV channel in the U.S., operating 24-hours a day, whose content is primarily devoted to commercial videogames (recently merged with one oriented to consumer electronics, http://www.g4techtv.com/ ).
A special characteristic of these fan franchise worlds is that consumers take on a strong sense of ownership and identification with them and their points of view, even if their sense of control over them or within them is part of the illusion of the medium. News broadcasts or print media present us with a point of view and try to portray the social world as if “as it is” in objective fact, but they still “address us” from outside. In the case of immersive worlds, having chosen to enter them, we learn to address each other in their terms. The potential ideological and political effects of immersive virtual worlds are still largely unknown and un-researched.
Commercial opportunism in global corporate culture today is supporting not just immersive worlds in media such as videogames, but these larger world-franchises that extend their parallel social realities into many other media that pervade ordinary social life. In bookstores you see not just their books, but the large graphical displays advertising them. You see these also in the video store for their movies on DVD, which some people, particularly children, are in the habit of playing at home over and over again. You go online and are directed by placement of advertising links, or by your own inclination, to both their commercial sites and fan community sites (usually cross-linked to each other), where you can encounter information and opportunities for identification not available in the other media. You can share your interest in the franchise world with real-life friends and friends met online. You can write “fan fiction” and read and critique others’ fan fiction. You may, and more people increasingly will, actually cooperate online in the creation of “mods” or modifications of the games to reflect your group’s particular interests(e.g. http://www.planethalflife.com/community/hosted/mods.shtm or
http://www.planethalflife.com/espacemod/ . I believe that these are relatively new and unprecedented identification phenomena: vast online fan communities that discuss these worlds in depth and at length; the creation of large numbers of texts by readers/players/viewers within the conventions of the alternate world; the convergence of identification with characters and themes from the original media with identification through the medium of the online community of real people. Such experiences renew engagement with these alternate worldviews across spatial sites and extended timescales that far exceed our encounters with unfranchised print and broadcast media.
The potential power of this new inter-medium has not been lost on major political interests, in particular the U.S. military, whose creation of the “America’s Army” franchise (http://www.americasarmy.com/ ), beginning with an online computer game but rapidly developing a large parallel online player community provides ample opportunity to explore the utility of the medium not just for recruitment, but for conveying ideological messages of many kinds about the nature and function of military organizations, idealized military culture, natural enemies, desirable weapons systems, justified rules of engagement, etc., etc. This franchise is already so large that it would be considered a major success by commercial standards, even though it is not distributed for profit. Timeo milites et dona ferentes … not Greeks perhaps, but nonetheless, soldiers bearing dangerous gifts.
My aim here is first to identify the phenomenon of the distributed franchise as a new kind of inter-medium with significant ideological potential. Second, to argue that some of its features, such as immersive alternative worlds and identification through online fan or player communities, as well as its ability to continue to re-present itself to us in many guises, in many sites, and across extended periods of time, may make it a more powerful medium for shaping people’s views of what is natural in the social world than prior media. And finally, to ask what extensions of CDA, conceptually and in terms of research practices, will be needed to enable us to assess the affordances, effects, and dangers of this new inter-medium and its messages.