Tag Archives: digital

Digital media and communication scenarios

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It’s not food safety, it has more current relevance to Covid-19, but this paper has some important insights for communicating during an outbreak. The Australian lesson from cornavirus seems to be, go fast, hard.

Expert-lay mass media communication (a phrase I always despised) in public health prevention campaigns has been at the forefront in knowledge dissemination before digital communication gained in momentum.

The advent of digital media has radically changed communicative scenarios and strategies used to actively involve population, for example promoting large-scale change in awareness, behaviour, and attitude. However, research still has not fully documented how digital environments orchestrate different multimodal resources, including, among others, language, still and moving images. Other research gaps deal with understanding how users can be actively engaged in websites and how the identity of participants is projected with reference to their distance from the voice of the expert.

The paper combines linguistic and visual analysis in a multimodal perspective to investigate the interplay of identity and distance in the website and integrated social media of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, https://npin.cdc.gov), an operating component of the Department of Health and Human Services (US).

Linguistic and visual analysis of the Vital Signs monthly reports on campaigns for HIV prevention will focus on the revision of the notion of deixis to see how this has been reconfigured in multimodal environments. Findings show that person, time, and place deixis have been reshaped in digital scenarios with the aim of engaging participants and disseminate knowledge to prompt change in behaviour.

The image, left, shows person deixis, place deixis and time deixis in English.

“The time is now”: A multimodal pragmatic analysis of how identity and distance are indexed in HIV risk communication digital campaigns in US

May 2021

Journal of Pragmatics, vol.177 pg. 82-96

Maria Sindoni

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.02.012

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378216621000680

Promote microbiologically safe food? Report makes case for digital connection with consumers

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People said I was crazy at Masters and Johnson … wait, that’s a Woody Allen movie.

But 10 years ago, whenever I asked for verification of something, my students would tell me in a sardonically hipster manner, Dr. professor, there’s this thing …(pregnant pause for effect or sneer) it’s called Google.

Today, people can use smartphones in New York City and Beijing to get animal.house.cucumberdetailed restaurant inspection reports for those that care.

Americans can get lots of information about their food already – sustainable, local, natural, organic, animal friendly, dolphin-free – but nothing about microbial safety.

And some companies are better.

They should brag.

The technology is already available for those who want to push their investment in food safety.

Unfortunately, most of what consumers see is rewards programs, and recall notices.

Tom Karst of The Packer writes that a new report, “Six Degrees of Digital Connection: Growing Grocery Sales in an Omnichannel World” concludes supermarkets may yield higher sales if they invest in digital connections with consumers.

Published by Barrington, Ill.-based Brick Meets Click, looks at the business case for investment in digital connections with shoppers.

Not a stirring endorsement, but in a study of more than 22,000 shoppers from six U.S. retail banners, there was a strong relationship between the number of digital connections and whether a customer is likely to be a primary shopper (who does a majority of grocery spending with that retailer). Digital connections include e-mail, websites, texting, social networks, mobile and online shopping.

I have no idea if the study is valid.

But if supermarkets can electronically connect with so many shoppers, that sounds like an opportunity to market food safety.

A lot of shoppers care about food safety.