[rohrpost] CFP Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft Nr. 9: Werbung / Advertising

[Kathrin Peters]

CALL FOR PAPERS, ZFM NR. 9 (2/2013):

"Werbung"

(scroll down for English version)

"Die Historiker und Archäologen werden eines Tages entdecken, daß die
Werbung unserer Zeit die einfallsreichsten und tiefsten täglichen
Betrachtungen darstellt, die eine Kultur je über ihr ganzes Tun und Lassen
angestellt hat" – behauptete Marshall McLuhan in seiner 1964 erschienen
Studie Understanding Media.
Dass Werbung Aufschlüsse über die eigene Kultur verschafft, ist
spätestens seit den Analysen von Marshall McLuhan bekannt. In einer
ähnlichen Weise argumentiert Roland Barthes in seiner berühmten Analyse
der Panzani-Werbung, wonach Werbung kulturelles Wissen mobilisiere und
damit lesbar mache. Werbung manifestiert und popularisiert Wissen aber
nicht nur, sondern generiert es auch – nicht zuletzt Wissen von und über
Medien. Diesem wissensgenerativen Aspekt von Werbung im Hinblick auf
Medien will das Schwerpunktthema nachgehen. Es will damit nicht nur die
Manifestationen soziokulturellen Wissens in der Werbung und deren normativen
Charakter untersuchen, sondern auch die generativen Prozeduren und
Infrastrukturen der Werbung. Wie produziert Werbung Wissen von und über
Medien?
Dabei ist von besonderem Interesse, dass auch der Medienwissenschaft
Werbung immer wieder als Ausgangspunkt oder Beispiel dient, um Thesen
aufzustellen bzw. zu prüfen. Das wirft die Frage auf, inwiefern das Wissen der
Werbung wissenschaftlich relevant ist. Das medienwissenschaftliche Konzept
der time-space-compression, das soviel heißt wie Zeit-Raum-Verdichtung und
den medial bedingten Bedeutungsverlust geographischer Distanzen meint,
weist hier eine Richtung. Jörg Döring ist der Entstehungsgeschichte des
Konzepts nachgegangen und hat dabei seinen werbetechnischen Ursprung
offen gelegt: Der Begriff wurde von dem britischen Geographen David Harvey
auf der Basis einer Werbung des französischen Unternehmens Alcatel geprägt.
Werbung dient hier als Anlass für die Formulierung wissenschaftlicher
Erkenntnisse mit dem Anspruch auf Allgemeingültigkeit. Ausgehend von
dieser Beobachtung will das Schwerpunktthema der Frage nachgehen, wie
Werbung Teil an der Generierung medienwissenschaftlicher Begriffe und
Erkenntnisse hat.
Insofern möchte das Themenheft weniger der Analyse von Werbung im
Sinne der Werbeforschung als vielmehr den theoretischen Perspektiven einer
solchen Wissensgenerierung und -manifestation nachgehen. Daran schließen
begrifflich-konzeptionelle Fragen an – allen voran die nach den vielfältigen
Erscheinungsformen von Werbung sowie nach der Uneindeutigkeit des
Wissensbegriffs.

Das Heft erscheint im Oktober 2013.
Texteinreichungen (25.000 Zeichen) bis Ende Februar 2013 an christina.bartz at uni-paderborn.de
Redaktion: Christina Bartz, Monique Miggelbrink

http://www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de/

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CALL FOR PAPERS, ZFM No 9 (2/2013):

"Advertising"

"The historians and archeologists will one day discover that the ads of our
times are the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever
made of its entire range of activities" – Marshall McLuhan in Understanding
Media
Since at least Marshall McLuhan it has become commonplace to look at
advertising as a source of information about culture. Roland Barthes makes a
similar argument in his famous analysis of a Panzani advertisement when he
states that advertising mobilises cultural knowledge and makes it readable.
However, advertising does not only reveal and popularize knowledge but also
generates it – not least knowledge of and about media. This special issue sets
out to pursue advertising’s knowledge-generating aspect with regard to
media. In it we want to investigate manifestations of socio-cultural knowledge
in advertising and their normative character as well as the generative
processes and infrastructures in advertising. How does advertising produce
knowledge of and about media?
It is of particular interest here that within media studies, advertising often
serves as a starting point in the formulation and verification of hypotheses,
which raises the question whether the knowledge of advertising is
academically relevant. The concept of space-time-compression which within
media studies denotes the decreasing significance of geographic distances as
a result of new media technology may provide a hint. As Jörg Döring
discovered in his investigation of the concept’s genesis, the term actually has
its origin in advertising since it was coined by the British geographer David
Harvey who based it on an advertisement by the French telecommunications
company Alcatel. It is thus an example of advertising serving as the basis for
the formulation of scientific discoveries that also lay claim to universality.
Based on this observation, this special issue will investigate how advertising
participates in generating terms and findings in media studies.
Thus, this special issue focuses less on an analysis of advertising in terms
of advertising research and more on the theoretical perspectives the
generations and manifestations of knowledge allow. This raises conceptual
questions concerning advertising’s diverse forms of appearance as well as the
ambiguity of the underlying understanding of knowledge. This focus on the
relation between knowledge and advertising needs to take into account that
advertising is in many cases situated on the interface between the new and
the well established. While it serves to promote the novelty and innovation of
products, it does so by referring to the familiar in order to generate new
connections of meanings. However, this also entails a methodological
problem, namely that the process of gaining knowledge inevitably contains a
dichotomy of the rule and its exceptions. As a closer look into the case of
Alcatel mentioned above demonstrates, this is also the case here: Harvey
inductively infers theoretical knowledge about the distance-reducing effects of
media on the basis of the image in the Alcatel advertisement. At the same
time, in media studies advertisements often provide examples and are
deductively used as proof in scientific arguments. Thus, it is imperative to
look not only into the relationship between innovation and tradition so
relevant to advertising, but also into the relationship between the common
and the particular in order to provide a productive basis upon which media
studies can build.
This special issue is an invitation to add to these methodological and
conceptual reflections and to sound out advertising’s potential to generate
knowledge within media studies. Which theories and theoretical concepts
support and are productive in the context of the thesis that advertising
incorporates socio-cultural knowledge? What are the limitations of the concept
of advertising as manifestation of socio-cultural knowledge? This also
broaches the question of media differences and how the structures and modes
of operation of singular media relate to the genre of advertising. For example,
it could be considered whether the thesis that advertising popularises
knowledge also applies to net based forms of marketing which are ‘viral’ in
character rather than based on traditional mass media. To put it in more
general terms the question is how the media-related functional logic of
advertising’s form determinates cultural knowledge. What roles do the images
and texts in advertising play in this context?
The aim of this special issue is thus to look into these questions which
combine advertising, media(techniques), knowledge and science as aspects of
an historical-epistemological perspective as the relationship between these
aspects. Therefore, it calls for close analysis as well as general methodological
and theoretical reflections. It thus aims to develop a media studies and
cultural studies perspective on advertising. Consequently, potential fields of
research are media studies and cultural studies as well as knowledge
research, especially the history of (scientific) knowledge. We particularly
welcome submissions considering the normative character of advertising as
well as the ideological or rather historical contexts of knowledge generation,
as the reason why advertising seems so problematic for the generation of
scientific knowledge appears to lie in its intentional nature.

Please send your text submissions (around 25,000 characters, spaces
included) by the end of February 2013 to: christina.bartz at uni-paderborn.de

Guest editors: Christina Bartz, Monique Miggelbrink
This special issue of ZfM will be published in October 2013.

http://www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de/