The Media and HIV/AIDS Education Campaigns: Corporate Responsibility, Aesthetics and Power

Cheryl Martens

doi:10.22409/ppgmc.v13i1.28253

Abstract

Chandran (2014) argues that the use of media in HIV and AIDS education has been on a scale unprecedented in health education, and social media in particular has played a key role in producing the universal awareness of HIV and AIDS. Theoretical perspectives on the media in HIV/AIDS education vary considerably. Early critical accounts stress that the mass media played a role in the distortion of scientific and medical findings concerning HIV and AIDS, privileging certain types of information over others, such as emphasising AIDS in the early years as a ‘gay plague’, gave precedence to biomedical constructions of HIV/AIDS. Many feminist, queer and AIDS activist accounts move beyond these discussions of media distortion and moral panic of HIV/AIDS by considering the distinctive ways in which discourses actively operate in the construction of gender, sexuality and epidemic. For the most part, however, these analyses maintain a focus on national HIV/AIDS education campaigns and their mediation by public policy.

Highlights

Both traditional and social media have played key roles in producing the universal awareness of HIV and AIDS
Methodological approach HIV/AIDS education campaigns by considering the ways in which they are being reconfigured in relation to global media and how audiences are increasingly implicated through processes of branding in consumer culture
This allows on the one hand for HIV/AIDS education to be distributed to unprecedented audiences

Summary

Introduction

In HIV/AIDS media campaigns today, the consumer is implicated in the message through global processes such as branding and technological developments in digital and social media at a global level. The implication of audiences at various levels, means that looking at issues of representation, while important, is not enough in order to fully explore global media HIV/AIDS campaigns in the digital era. Methodological approach HIV/AIDS education campaigns by considering the ways in which they are being reconfigured in relation to global media and how audiences are increasingly implicated through processes of branding in consumer culture. The production of texts and audiences cannot be analysed as interlinked in the process of producing meaning Following this approach, multiple methods and sources are necessary in order to unpack the processual, dynamic nature of the research topic as a complex cultural ‘site’ (FROW AND MORRIS, 2000). Given the focus of this article on campaign production, here we will consider how audiences are implicated in the production process through a range of digital means, including face to profile communication as part of the branding process

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion