Discourse, Power, Ideology in Advertisement Video

俞延延 王怡安

1. The concepts of discourse, power and ideology and their relationship

Critical discourse analysis is a subdivision of discourse analysis, which emphasizes how and why certain discourse is produced rather than focuses on describing discourse (Teo, 2000). It means that critical discourse studies aims at finding the implied ideology contained in the texts through analyzing the linguistic features of discourse and social factors surrounding discourse and further reveals the power relationship hidden such ideology. Van Dijk (2001) gives a more specific definition to critical discourse analysis that it mainly studies how social inequality and dominance are legislated, reproduced and strived against by spoken and written texts in social context. From the two definitions, discourse, power and ideology are three important terms in critical discourse analysis and they are closely related to each other. So, it is necessary to explain the concepts of these three terms firstly.

Language is of great important in our social life. Discourse is seen as language use in texts or talks (Fairclough and Wodak, 2004). It can represent the world from different perspectives and affect how people see the world. And discourse is also regarded as a form of social practice or an action, which is not only a transparent medium for recording information or reflecting real world, but is ideological as everyone produces discourse from a specific ideological stance (Fairclough, 1989). Since it has important influence on society, it resulted in the concerns of power used in discourse.

Power is another concept that attracts attention. Power, especially social power of groups, means control. The more powerful groups can control the behavior and though of the less powerful groups through various ways. It can be achieved through coercive way by employing the police or the army, which is physical force. However, in most cases, the power of ruling groups is achieved through manufacturing consent or toleration by being integrating in laws, rules, norms and habits (van Dijk, 2001). It is noted that power is not used in an abusive way obviously by dominant group. By contrast, it exists in our everyday “natural” action and though, especially if it is exercised through consent. Ideology is the primary way to achieve consent (Fairclough, 2001).

Ideology is a system of ideas and beliefs shared by a group or a community, which is organized from a certain aspect (Hodge & Kress, 1993). It guides people’s action and thinking model in an unconscious and natural way because people have already taken those ideas granted and believed it without doubt. However, it is not so natural. Ideology embodies the norms and values of the ruling groups, who use ideology to protect their own interests, control less powerful groups and maintain the asymmetrical power relation. In critical discourse analysis, scholars try to uncover the ideology contained in speech and writing to increase people’s awareness of certain social problems.

Discourse, power and ideology have closely linked with each other. Critical discourse analysis concerns how dominant groups control discourse and what the social influence of such control is in different social domains. In following part, an advertisement video is used here as an example to show how those three elements are expressed in the advertisement field in the modern society.

2. A case study

In recent years, there have been some advertisement videos promoting feminism, such as the health care brand Always “Like a Girl”, or Dover’s “Real Beauty” and “Choose Beautiful” series of advertising. Those advertisement videos get hot and are praised by women since they do not blame women about their imperfect figure and require them to pursue “the ideal appearance” such as slim figure, white and beautiful flawless skin, and big eyes without crow’s feet as most advertisements do when they try to promote the sale of product. By contrast, they seem give women autonomy to choose beautiful and to define beautiful by themselves, which resist traditional patriarchy that women’s appearance is evaluated by men and women competes with each other through good appearance. However, in those advertisements that promoting feminism, businesses do not give up emphasizing the importance of beauty. One of the advertisements selected to analyze is real beauty sketches, which is the most popular videos and has been viewed more than seven million times on YouTube channel. In this essay, the video will be analyzed from three perspectives, which based on Fairclough’s (2001) tripartite model. The model is adjusted a little to suit for multimodal critical discourse analysis and the analysis presents from multimodal discourse analysis, discourse practice analysis and social practice analysis.

(1) Text and image analysis

In the first part, it will focus on the linguistic features used in the video. The advertisement video has almost six minutes and can be separated into five parts. In the first part, it introduces that several women with different ages and different races were interviewed and were asked them to describe their facial features, and then a well-trained sketch artist Gil Zamora draw them based on their description. In this process, they cannot see each other. In the second part, viewers can hear women describing their appearance and the pronoun “I” is used almost in every sentence by women such as “I feel like it protrudes a little bit”. This pronoun shows that those descriptions are subjective and intuitive. However, their description is very critical and careful when the following experts are observed.

They are brown eyebrows, dark brown eyebrows.

I Kind of have a fat, rounded face.

The older I’ve gotten the more freckles I’ve gotten.

I’m forty so I’m starting to get a little bit of the crow’s feet going on.

In those four experts, women noticed their color of eyebrows, their face’s size, their increased freckles and crow’s feet on their face, which are all very tiny changes on the body. They give those body features clear description. Also, it is noticed that they do not use any positive words to describe themselves. Thus, those description shows that women are strict about their body.

In the third part, views can see description of those women from others’ opinions. One of the prominent linguistic features is that more positive words such as “expressive”, “nice” and “cute” used with the pronouns “she” in their speech when they recalled others’ appearance. The most frequent word in their description is “nice”, such as “She had blue eyes, very nice blue eyes.” That appraisement presented in the video shows that people have a more positive and gentle attitudes towards others’ appearance. In the fourth part, the sketch artist asked those women to see two sketches: one painting is based on their own description and another one is based on others’ description. Viewers can see those women are surprised about the difference in two painting and they thought the second one was more beautiful according to the dialogues between artist and sitters from the following excerpts.

I have this whole thing about having dark circles and crow’s feet around my eyes. And that was not part of the sketch at all that the stranger did. The stranger was a little more like, gentle.

She looks closed off and fatter. She just looks kind of shut down, sadder too. The second one it’s more beautiful. She looks more open and friendly and happy.

From the excerpts, it can be seen that those women used many positive adjectives such as “gentle” “happy” to describe their second portraits while negative adjectives such as “fatter” “sadder” are used in their first portraits. Also, the pronoun “she” used in the speech shows distance between the women and the paintings and that those women tried to see themselves in an objective way.

In the ending part, it is a thinking process that women discussed the meaning of this activity. The pronoun “we” appears frequently when those women talked about their feeling such as “It impacts the choices in friends that we make, the jobs we apply for, how we treat our children. It impacts everything.” By using this pronoun, the advertisement gives viewers a misconception that they know each other well and they have similar problem about beauty. It can arose viewers’ echo and identify the values and ideas shown in the video. And from the example, it conveys an opinion that appearance is central for women and they should learn how to appreciate it objectively. Moreover, the sentence structures in this video are very informal and colloquial with a lot of ellipsis, which can be observed in many places, such as “The length of the nose, what is that like” and “I’m gonna ask…” With those sentence structures, the video maker can build more close relationship with viewers and reduce viewers’ defensive attitude toward advertisement.

In the second part, image is given more attention. Kress and van Leeuven (1996) formulate a “visual grammar” based on systematical functional grammar made by Halliday. “Visual grammar” includes three metafunctions, representational function, interactive function and compositional function. The analysis will focus on interactive function because it tries to reveal the relationship between the advertising maker and viewers. Contact, social distance, attitude and modality are four main factors in interactive function. In the video, those women and the artist seldom have eye contact with viewers and aclinic angle is used. It shows that the advertising maker do not demand viewers participating in the advertisement and do not require them consent with the ideas in the video strongly. Viewers can be a bystanders when they watching the video. The aclinic angle also shows an equal and relaxed relationship between viewers and advertising makers.

(2) Discourse practice analysis

After the advertisement is analyzed from text and image perspective, it is necessary to discuss the theme of the video and the strategy used in the video to find the power relation between video maker and viewer.

The video discusses how women define their own beauty. On the face of it, the advertisement conveys the idea that every woman has natural beauty and can own good life. They do not need worried about their appearance and should be more confident about themselves. However, the actual theme is that appearance is important in women’s self-identity, which is a key factor affecting women’s self-worth and life quality. In the video, it shows the huge difference between self-assessment and others’ assessment about women’s appearance and the importance of the assessment both through language and through facial expression with exaggeration. Those women use many positive words to describe the more beautiful portrait, which proves the cause-and-effect relationships between appearance and self-worth. Also, they discussed importance of appearance directly by saying that it affects their choice of job, friends and family.  From the perspective of facial expression, when they saw the two pictures and realized their natural beauty, those women are moved to tears and become serious, which illustrates the importance of appearance. However, women can be assessed by many other factors such as their personality, their income or their job. In addition, good appearance does not mean they will definitely have good life, which is not presented in the advertisement. From all above analysis, it can be seen that advertising maker still stresses the relationship between beauty and self-worth to female customers and persuade them to pursuit beauty in order to sell products. In the original power relation, advertising makers try to sell products to customers, thus they belong to less authoritative side. However, when advertising makers try to convey information about how to define beauty with an activity or experiment, they become informant and have more authority, which makes their speech more credible and shape a good brand image.

(3) Social practice analysis

Social practice analysis focuses on the interactive relationship between semiotic mode and social context and thus reveals the ideology hidden in the advertisement video. As mentioned above, there are dual aspects of discourse, discourse as social practice and discourse as representation of social practice. So, the advertisement video shows the ideologies from two perspectives.

On one hand, the video is influenced by the society. It represents the social ideology that women’s appearance affects their self-worth and their life. As Riji (2006) stated, the appearance of women is strictly judged by the society. Women are materialized as appreciable scenery in the video, which implied women need to care about their appearance than men do. When the advertising maker conveys such ideology in the video, its ultimate aim is to ask women choosing beauty by buying their products of certain brand.

On the other hand, the video with high click rate strength people’s awareness about female appearance. In the video, through others evaluate those women’s appearance, women feel good about themselves. This will make viewers hope to get others praise about their own appearance, rather than their working ability or character. At the same time, it gives others the right to evaluate their appearance. The video will exacerbate the patriarchal control of women and make women pay for such inequality.

3. Conclusion

From the multimodal analysis, this essay shows that unequal relationship between women and men is presented even in the advertisement video that looks like promoting women’s autonomy on their appearance and reveals the social ideology that female beauty is important for women in the society through the video. It also shows how advertising makers and the company behind it use the ideology to promote their products and influence the public’s opinion toward women’s appearance. In fact, everyone has the right to pursuit beauty if only it is their own choice.

References:

[1]Fairclough, N. (1989, 2001). Language and power. London and New York: Longman.

[2]Hodge, R. I. V., & Kress, G. R. (1993). Language as ideology. London: Routledge.

[3]Riji, H. M. (2006). Beauty or Health? A Personal View. Malaysian family physician: the official journal of the Academy of Family Physicians of Malaysia, 1(1), 42.

[4]Teo, P. (2000). Racism in the news: A critical discourse analysis of news reporting in two Australian newspapers. Discourse & Society, 11(1), 7-49.

[5]van Dijk, T. (2001). Multidisciplinary CDA: A plea for diversity. Methods of critical discourse analysis, 1, 95-120.

[6]Wodak, R., & Fairclough, N. (2004). Critical discourse analysis. Qualitative Research Practice: Concise Paperback Edition, 185-202.

【作者簡介】俞延延(1993-)，女，汉族，江西上饶人，嘉兴学院南湖学院，硕士，助教，研究方向：语篇分析；王怡安(1991-)，女，汉族，浙江平湖人，嘉兴学院南湖学院，硕士研究生，助教，研究方向：口译。