British Websites Research Articles

Emotions and Consumption: Media Representations in the Discourse of Some British and Polish News Websites

The purpose of the study was to test the hypothesis referring to the dominant ways of portraying consumption on some Polish and British websites during a pandemic—either as a social practice with huge chances to consume less or as a significant factor which affects economic growth. On the one hand, the circumstances surrounding the coronavirus could provide an opportunity to “fast-forward” some of the changes required. On the other hand, journalists recommend a quick return to pre-COVID-19 consumption lives, a stimulation of consumption in order to save the national economy.
 The article uses a framing analysis to examine consumption-related texts from two most-read, opinion-forming Polish and British websites—polityka.pl and bbc.com. The framing analysis focuses on the practices involved in the shaping of public discourse; it responds to the need for research into the social significance of consumption.
 It turns out that the two frames of consumption as 1) overconsumption in terms of the need of change in consumer attitudes and behaviour and 2) a factor that affects economic growth are not the dominant ways of portraying this phenomenon during a pandemic. The everyday consumption frame was found to be used more often than the aforementioned frames.

Epistemic vigilance and persuasion: The construction of trust in online marketing

This article explores trust in the discourse of online advertising. Drawing on the relevance-theoretic concept of epistemic vigilance, it asks whether the mechanisms that underlie such a notion can explain which elements in an advert are likely to contribute to the perception of the message as more reliable or credible, thus overcoming readers' inherent skepticism towards advertising. To this end, the online market for tea was taken as a case in point, and an ad hoc corpus of 216 texts from British websites was compiled and analyzed. Findings show that the writers of these texts seek to present their readership with a variety of fine-tuned cultural representations, which may or may not be supported by factual information. This serves to allow the message to pass through the audience's filters of epistemic vigilance, fostering a sense of reliability in the sources of the communication and, by turn, in the product itself.

Is Transcreation Another Way of Translating? Subtitling Estrella Damm’s Advertising Campaigns into English

The current international advertising scenario has led to a new professional profile within advertising translation called transcreator. Transcreation has an explicit call for creativity and semiotic and cultural adaptation. Beer advertising has tried to respond to this call by undergoing significant changes when this product has been internationally marketed in English in global advertising campaigns. For example, Estrella Damm, advertised as “the beer of Barcelona”, has improved its international positioning with its Mediterráneamente campaign, which started in 2009 and has centred on the association of beer with the Mediterranean culture and enjoyment. Since 2019, the campaign has promoted sustainability as “another way of living”. In this article, we examine the English translation strategies used by Estrella Damm’s campaigns between 2009–2021, which are available on the company’s British website and YouTube channel. Specifically, we focus on the following prominent elements: slogans, cultural references, and songs. To do this, we use a descriptive case study methodology, with textual analysis and semi-structured interviews to the creative director and the translators of Estrella Damm commercials. The analysis shows that this campaign uses strategies that are common in advertising translation: internationalisation, envisaged from the start of campaign; dialogue between translators and art directors; some adaptation to the conventions of the target language and culture, and creativity and co-creation. This emphasizes the added value of transcreation in the translation industry.

Corpus-assisted analysis of the collocational profiles of the terms denoting elderly care workers

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the terms used in the Macmillan Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary to identify the people who are paid to provide care to the elderly and check their presence in a corpus – professional home care (PHC) – of three UK-based specialised websites.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on the frameworks and methods of corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis (Baker, 2006). The terms were extracted from a corpus of British websites of companies providing PHC services.FindingsThis study highlights that in the PHC corpus, the words “caregiver” and “carer” are used as synonyms at the level of popular communication, whereas “care assistant” and “care worker” are used for intra-specialistic communication. The analysis also points out the variations in terminology observed in the corpora that are intended for different communication contexts, e.g. how professionals define themselves compared to how external actors identify them.Originality/valueThis paper provides insight into the terminological aspects of caregiving in the professional field through a corpus-based study on specialised terminology integrating lexicographic considerations. This methodological framework can capture the sociolinguistic attitudes of speakers.

Urban media practices: European and Ukrainian experience

The article deals with the world theoretical and practical approaches to the development of urban journalism and examines the practical aspects of the functioning of this field in the media industry. The practical experience of Western colleagues in creation of urban content is identified, examples of successful implementation of local and hyperlocal journalistic projects aimed at producing a quality information product and solving important social problems of local communities are analyzed.The relevance of the topic can be explained by the need to reflect some of the recent changes that have taken place in Ukrainian cities under the influence of different political, historical, social and cultural aspects. The subject field of urban science combines research in the fields of sociology, demography, economics, geography, philosophy, psychology, history and cultural studies. Mass media play an important role in this process, which in the classical sense is the role of mediators between the authorities and the local people.In the process of study general scientific methods of comparison, synthesis, analysis and induction were used. With the help of comparison, it became possible to understand the difference between world urban journalism practice and Ukrainian one, as well as estimate the peculiarities of editorial approaches to development of new journalism formats, and their potential in the context of audience engagement. Synthesis method, which involves combination of the main theses on the basis of common thematic orientation helped to outline the main themes and problems presented in the articles of Ukrainian and British web-sites. With the help of analysis method, the main features and concepts of the editorial policy of the urban projects were investigated and the problematic field of the publications was outlined. The method of induction was used to analyze subjective statements of the blog authors, their single experience that was extended to the general practice of perceiving the image of certain cities by the reader. We also used a descriptive method to depict how Ukrainian cities are presented in the materials of the Ukrainian Week website and the method of content monitoring with the aim to develop the array of journalism articles and find out additional information about the authors.Ukrainian urban resources, as well as European ones, predominantly operate online, due to economic and technological factors. It is noted that modern communication technologies enrich the perception of the urban discourse. City websites serve to “minimize” the official agenda and become “city researchers” and “guides” in various areas of urban life. The thematic spectrum of the “Cities” (The Guardian), “We Love Brussels,” “Skyscraper,” “The Village Ukraine” websites is presented in the work, the strategies of content creation are analyzed. Attention is drawn to the thematic variability of the websites, which reflects the diversity of urban life. The media development of the city was studied on the example of the "Ukrainian Week" magazine. The Private Urban Studies blog mainly contains amateur materials that present the authors’ reflections on life in metropolitan and peripheral cities. Such journalistic projects contribute to the creation of urban discourse and the formation of urban identity.

Mind the Culture Gap: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Tourism Destination Websites in Austria and the United Kingdom

Websites of destination marketing organisations (DMO’s) are important tools to market tourism destinations to prospective visitors. They provide an abundance of information for tourists and help them plan their visit to the destination or find inspiration for an upcoming vacation. In many cases, website visitors come from other countries and cultures. In order to satisfy the needs of international website visitors, website providers would need to consider diverse cultural backgrounds and different languages when designing, implementing and maintaining a website. The main objective of this master thesis is to analyse the depiction of cultural values on DMO websites in Austria and the United Kingdom. It is then sought to compare them to the perceived cultural values of the respective host country by looking at Hofstede’s and Hall’s cultural frameworks. Moreover, it is aimed to provide a framework for tourism professionals and website developers who oversee and implement the creation of websites for tourism destinations. To establish the foundation of this thesis, an extensive literature review in the field of cross- cultural web design is provided with the aim to support the process of further developing a framework for the analysis of cultural values on the World Wide Web. Drawing on Hofstede’s dimensions and Hall’s high/low context theory this framework seeks to broaden the cross-cultural lens adopted by website providers. The content analysis is going to include 18 DMO websites that represent tourism destinations on three levels: Nations, provinces/countries and cities. The analysis is expected to shed light on website design in Austria and the United Kingdom and increase awareness towards the significance of localized cultural values. It should provide recommendations for professionals who are implementing websites for tourism destinations. Additionally, the study on Austrian and British websites can be of excellent value for tourism managers and destination marketers since both countries welcome many tourists each year.

Guest Editorial: Postcolonial past, world present, global futures?

In lieu of an abstract, here is the editorial's first paragraph: A good way to think about postcolonial literary studies today is by looking at how the field is described in job listings addressed to us, or which we feel “interpellated” by (Althusser, 2014/1971: 190−97). In some of its recent posts, the British website Jobs.ac.uk, for example, advertised positions in postcolonial studies, but also in global literatures, global Anglophone literatures, world literature, and in some cases transnational literatures. These different ways of naming the subdiscipline and its objects of study confirm a shift that has been happening over time, which is that the colonial experience is no longer the automatic lens through which we train our critical gaze on the literatures of Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and beyond. Accompanying this development, especially since the early twenty-first century, has been a sense of crisis in the field as its applicability to today’s world continues to be called into question.

A very British tease: Costume, fetishism and materiality in soft-core pornography

Abstract This article will analyse the use of costume in heterosexual soft-core pictorial pornography. It will focus on the British website onlyallsites.com, which will be positioned as offering a materiality to costume that goes beyond the dressing of the female body. Building on this author’s wider work around clothing and pornography, and previous work on the sociocultural meaning of underwear and fetishism, it will situate its case study within the context of a ‘British erotic’ and emphasize the key role that costume plays in the construction of soft-core pornographic representations.

Postfeminist Stylistics, Work Femininities and Coaching: a Multimodal Study of a Website

The aim of this article is to examine representations of work femininities on a British website offering coaching specifically aimed at women. It builds on and contributes to studies of postfeminist representations but with a specific focus on work femininities and coaching webpages. Although studies on postfeminist representation have analysed the way young women's embodied and sexualized femininities are depicted across a wide variety of mainstream media, there has not been a study that focuses on the representation of work femininities on coaching websites. My approach matters because feminist authors critique popular psychology and link it to postfeminism and neoliberalism, but as yet studies have focused on self‐help books and magazines and not on newer media. Furthermore, coaching websites are an important medium for circulating postfeminist work femininities and psychological advice, produced through the digital labour of women entrepreneurs. Through my analysis of one website, influenced by feminist social semiotic multimodality literature, this article contributes to postfeminist theory and organization studies by explaining how ‘postfeminist stylistics’ reproduce postfeminist tropes and depictions of relational and individualized entrepreneurial femininities visually and textually.

Accelerationism and Acceleration

In May 2013, the British website Critical Legal Thinking published a “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” composed by a pair of young British intellectuals named Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Although dotted with expressions and allusions that reflected the authors’ formal training in British doctoral programs, the text was not a scholarly project. Like its more famous model, the manifesto clearly set out to change the world rather than to interpret it. Srnicek and Williams’s MAP, a...

The Meaning of Sport: Sociolinguistic Analysis of Sport and Energy Drink Brands’ Advertising Messages

This article investigates a sign system in promotional campaigns for the 2 sport/energy-drink brands PowerAde and Monster Energy. More specifically, the paper examines advertising materials published on the British Web sites of the 2 drink brands. The media texts are analyzed using semiotics and critical discourse analysis. In so doing, the author attempts to identify the meaning of sport in different contexts and settings and to interpret ideological connotation embedded in the commercial discourse on sport. The PowerAde advertising presents the meaning of sport as controlled and calculated physical activities associated with high-performance sport. This articulation suggests an idealization of productive individuals, and this appears to be the reification of capitalist ideology through sport. Monster Energy advertising tends to endorse alternative sporting subculture emphasizing the aspects of fun and spectacle, but such endorsement is only validated within the boundaries of consumer culture. The author concludes that advertising involves communication practice through which the meaning of sport with some ideological connotations is continually constructed and disseminated to today’s wider society.

A not so strange silence: Why qualitative researchers should respond critically to the qualitative data archive

A driving force behind the establishment of a qualitative data archive in the United Kingdom has been the oral historian, Paul Thompson. He has complained that there is a ‘strange silence’ among qualitative sociologists on re‐analysis, and that many have been reluctant to deposit data. The first part of the paper suggests that the common ethical and practical objections can be overcome in establishing an archive in Australia. However, there is a more serious underlying ideological objection: that archiving promotes and institutionalises a narrow empiricist version of qualitative research. The rest of the paper makes this case by examining teaching materials on a British website, by reviewing Thompson's arguments, and by considering some examples of re‐analysis by sociologists. It is argued that qualitative researchers should respond critically, but that it is possible to address and overcome these problems when developing an Australian archive.

OMNI

OMNI is a British Web site with numerous links to health information, for consumers and professionals. The scope is international.

III. Pro-Eating Disorder Websites: What Should be the Feminist Response?

I inadvertently discovered the world of pro-eating disorder1 websites a few years ago, while surfing the web for research information. Navigating through hundreds of autobiographical narratives of girls and women describing their struggles with anorexia and bulimia, and their current choices to strive for society’s thinness ideal through self-induced starvation and/or purging was distressing to say the least. They shared tips and ‘thinspiration’ with other likeminded readers, posted images of both waif-like models and ‘real-life’ anorexic women, and created huge support groups through mailing lists and chat rooms for anyone wishing to adopt or maintain an eating disorder. When I discussed the sites with others at conferences and in graduate seminars, most were shocked and intrigued by my discovery. Apparently, few knew about this underground movement that was in fact so easily discoverable within a few keystrokes. While it seemed that much of the academic world remained oblivious, it didn’t take long for the media to catch on to the phenomenon. In the past year popular newspapers and magazines have all presented exposes. Media and internet articles include quotations from eating disorder professionals who, equating the disorders with ‘breast cancer’ (NY Times – Morris, 2002) and alcoholism (USA Today – Hellmich, 2001), can’t understand why women would be purposely attempting to cultivate a deadly ‘disease’. Heather Mudgett, writing for the website Suite101.com (2001), writes about her experience reading the sites, ‘Each time I’m dumbfounded, as to why on earth anyone would PROMOTE these horrible disorders.’ Likewise, an article from the British website, femail.com, described the sites as ‘gruesome’, ‘pathetic’ and ‘sinister’.2 Indeed, the articles often demonize the creators of the sites, blaming the ‘anorexics’ infamous defensive talents’ (Time.com, 2001), ‘misguided ideas’ (CWK network – Sodano, 2002) and group ‘delusion’ (Salon.com – Brown, 2001) for the seemingly infectious spread of eating disorders. Furthermore, groups opposing the websites, such as S.C.a.R.E.D (Support, Concern, and Resources for Eating Disorders)3 and S.P.A.P. (Stopping Pro-Anorexia Promotion),4 have developed