27.364, Review: Cog Sci; Discourse; Socioling: Paganoni (2015)

Tue Jan 19 21:16:51 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-364. Tue Jan 19 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.364, Review: Cog Sci; Discourse; Socioling: Paganoni (2015)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry, Sara Couture)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                   25 years of LINGUIST List!
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Sara  Couture <sara at linguistlist.org>
================================================================

Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2016 16:16:14
From: Timothy Jewell [tajewell89 at gmail.com]
Subject: City Branding and New Media

Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36085917

Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-2673.html

AUTHOR: Maria Cristina  Paganoni
TITLE: City Branding and New Media
SUBTITLE: Linguistic Perspectives, Discursive Strategies and Multimodality
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Timothy Jewell, California State University, Fullerton

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

City Branding and New Media: Linguistic Perspectives, Discursive Strategies
and Multimodality by Maria Cristina Paganoni focuses on the relatively
untrodden scholarly path of the linguistic and discursive components of city
branding, an application to the contemporary urban space of the concept of
place branding, which Paganoni defines as “…a process and practice by which
places acquire a new or improved identity by adding measurable economic,
social, and cultural value to their name” (2). 

At the center of Paganoni’s argument is the notion that the contemporary city
encompasses the expression of every form of representation, be it artistic,
professional, political, or corporate; the “urban background” exists to urban
residents and prospective users of city resources not only as a living space
but also a networking space through which cities fashion their identities from
both internal communication (“addressed to citizens, local entrepreneurs, and
students”) and external communication (“addressed to potential residents,
tourists, investors and international talent”) (3). 

Paganoni proposes that cities can now most effectively utilize these
communication strategies through the implementation of “…sophisticated [tools]
of contemporary web governance in the hands of public administration” (4). As
inter-urban competition for city visibility and central networking capacity
gradually steps into the global (rather than local, regional, or even
national) marketplace, cities, which are “increasingly dependent on digital
information exchange” (6), must design their online communication using
linguistic strategies within the “multimodal genre” (8) in order to provide a
discursive space for public interface with urban identity while also
accentuating the discussion of nebulous notions of heritage, cultural
identity, and (often) sustainability using narratives with specific linguistic
intent that often belies a foundation in the semiotics of corporate
communication and marketing.

Paganoni structures her argument within the book into a general introduction
and five thematic parts (each occupying a chapter):

Introduction: City Branding and New Media: Linguistic Discursive and Semiotic
Aspects, a general discussion of city branding in the context of online public
discourse and the linguistic, discursive, and semiotic strategies upon which
such discourse is assembled, especially in relation to conventionalization of
“citizen-centric digital genres” (1):

1)  City Websites as a Multimodal Genre, a discussion and analysis of the
significance of city websites in facilitating public involvement in the
development of a city brand, using the Manchester City Council website as its
central case study and employing tenets from Bateman’s Genre and Multimodality
model (Bateman 2008) to identify “overcoded…repetitive and predictable
[features]” (19) evident in city website layouts and text for the purpose of
facilitating user accessibility on both a rhetorical and navigational level.

2)  E-Governance on the Web: Linguistic and Discursive Strategies, an analysis
of the linguistic evidence from the websites of the nine largest British
cities (excluding London: Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Bradford,
Liverpool, Edinburgh, Manchester, and Bristol, and also including Belfast and
Cardiff for a “balanced representation of the different geopolitical realities
within the same nation” (43)), suggesting that digital communication can
enhance “social cohesion and inclusion” (38) through Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) such as Facebook and Twitter but can also
exclude those who have an “…unequal mastery of ICT skills” (40) as well as
“gloss over the hardships of urban existence” (58).

3)  Branding Heritage, Digital Genres, Transmedia Storytelling, an
investigation into the discourse about “heritage” within the online city
branding genre, closely attending to the heritage-oriented narratives of place
and the “rhetorical strategies used on…heritage websites…[that hybridise]
promotional intents, identity projects and public objectives with the
interaction of…values that clearly [emerge] in the linguistic codification of
heritage” (76), as specific cities and locations within cities are injected
with sometimes artificially encoded cultural meaning

4)  Expos and the Rhetoric of Sustainability, a discussion of the rhetoric and
linguistic strategies used in the online branding and public (digital)
discourse in relation to the Shanghai World Expo 2010 and the Expo Milano 2015
(which, at the time of the book’s publication, had not yet occurred) to call
attention to the perceived progress that each expo represents and the
ostensibly sustainable practices utilized by each expo during the
construction, promotional, and operational processes of each expo, with
attention paid primarily to the “preponderance of marketing over civic,
ecological and humanitarian interests…[and] boundary-crossing appropriation…of
linguistic and discoursal resources by text types endowed with a different
rationale” (134).

EVALUATION

Paganoni’s work is unparalleled in its attention to the linguistic and
discursive details present in the design of content and user experience found
on websites that are, according to Paganoni, singular in their fluid usability
and nuanced employment of linguistic tactics that ostensibly promote citizen
agency in the development of public policy, public health, and other services
relevant to residents (or visitors) of each city whose online presence
Paganoni investigates. Most impressive is her case study of the Manchester
City Council (MCC) website (manchester.gov.uk), which, at the time of this
review’s composition, is yet identical to the screenshot included in
Paganoni’s work (23). 

Furthermore, Paganoni’s trenchant exploration of the repetitive phrasal and
structural linguistic elements present in the MCC website seems broadly
applicable not only to British city websites but also to the emerging online
presence of other cities deeply entrenched within the conversion of the public
sphere from physical to digital environs, such as, for example the website for
the city of Los Angeles, California, which, although not particularly
identical to the MCC website in general artistic design, mirrors the MCC
website’s use of, among many other things, monochromatic iconography, digital
affordances such as rectangular fields containing contents/links with which
the user interacts, and the city name/logo/coat of arms at the top of the page
as well as “short noun phrases…imperative sentences…[and] positive images of
the public realm [including] new facilities, heritage and sunshine” (25).
Paganoni also deftly discusses the presence of “exclusive first-person deixis
(we, us, ourselves, our, ours)”, which, as Paganoni argues, empowers local
administration to make decisions on behalf of the community (27). 

Paganoni also notes the ubiquity of “perceivable tension between public and
expert language…in the adoption of the ample generic repertoire borrowed from
corporate communication” (28), thus not empowering the urban public, as is the
alleged purpose of such language, but rather subtly imbuing the city
government with primary agency in conducting urban policy-making and, in
general, global business without the direct interference of citizens, who are
primed to trust both the physical and digital city government in fleshing out
urban identity in the global city branding process. Paganoni adroitly expands
this notion of visible (but illusory) citizen involvement in the city branding
process by illustrating that, in the case of many city websites with strong
interconnections to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter,
“citizens’ feedback does not go much beyond very basic contact or is made
public insofar as it is positive” and that “public consultations…tend to be
disciplined into rigidly structured online forms…a trivialization of citizens’
voices and the shrinking of a meaningful public sphere” (56). Though her
maintenance of an objective tone lends credibility to her argument, Paganoni
also appears to warn readers of the lack of agency that digital and social
media outlets afford to urban citizens in favor of the E-governance monopoly
bestowed upon city governments who brand their urban environments with digital
content built upon “hybridised public discourse…[in which] ‘certain words
become unspeakable whereas others are repeated endlessly’ (McGuigan, 2010, p.
121)” (58). According to Paganoni, language itself erases the complexity of
public policy and discourse in favor of a corporate vernacular that scrubs a
city’s image clean of negative imagery and of any evidence of a “[deepening]
gulf between the powerful and the powerless” (59), and awareness of these
linguistic/discursive practices will allow greater citizen agency in keeping
city governments accountable, transparent, and collaborative in their city
branding strategies as globalization and digital public interaction become the
norm of the contemporary city’s identity in the twenty-first century. 

Paganoni also thrives in her discussion of the Shanghai and Milan expos,
investigating the weaving of the “journey” metaphor into promotional material
about the expos while commenting on the persistent use of this narrative to
draw public attention away from issues of engineering and urban geography,
noting in a particularly compelling statement that the Milan expo “…adopted a
minimal visual regime that managed to evoke an imaginary but persuasive
politico-emotive geography consisting in an egalitarian utopian anthropic
landscape of the near future that will hopefully regenerate Milan’s periphery”
(121). 

Paganoni’s weaknesses lie, perhaps ironically, in her choice of subject matter
and evidence, as the sources of her greatest argumentative strengths (city
websites,  are ephemeral and might prove to not reflect lasting
linguistic/discursive trends but rather digital trends of the current era that
do not truly illustrate the perceptions of the citizenry involved in such
public discourse. Paganoni refers almost exclusively to language used by
websites and promotional material but rarely cites the input of an actual
citizen involved in public discourse beyond requests for government services,
most notably in a Manchester citizen’s request for small business commercial
property rates (51). Paganoni’s argument rests significantly upon the
linguistic erasure of the public voice, and yet, Paganoni commits this same
fallacy by failing to weave the voices of citizens into her deeply theoretical
argument, which draws most of its strength from linguistic/discursive theories
that are not tested against the public voice whose decreasing relevance
Paganoni supposedly fears. Paganoni’s work would indeed benefit from a
augmented focus in her methodologies on individual/collective citizen voices.
Paganoni could employ a focus group presented with website content modified to
variably use exclusive ingroup (we, us, ours) and outgroup (they, them,
theirs) language to measure individual/group willingness to interface with
city government in relation to the agency and values implicitly presented to
citizens by linguistic strategies present in website/digital text. This
approach is known as social identity framing (Seyranian & Bligh 2008) and
emphasizes the effect of language used by a leader or leadership group on its
constituency’s willingness to embrace change. This approach could lend greater
insight into the relationship between the digital linguistic/discursive
tactics used by city governments and the willingness of citizens in the urban
environment to interact with their governments through language and digital
media, as the choice of using ingroup language as opposed to outgroup language
can have a real influence on public interaction and perception of city
branding efficacy.

Furthermore, a deep analysis of the user experience that can arise from
website layouts based on their formats and affordances is a slippery
methodological practice, as “front-end” (or user-accessible) website design
often changes drastically in its own approaches and methodologies, and
companies that supply such services can also rise and fall rapidly with the
presence (or lack) of the capital necessary to support website development. As
this reviewer searched within the English Heritage website for substantiation
of Paganoni’s claims about its format and language, two notable changes had
occurred, First, English Heritage, the society whose website
(http://www.english-heritage.org.uk) Paganoni mentions as a destination for
many “heritage tourists” (72), has split into two discrete organizations,
indicated by an unavoidable pop-up window that states the following: “English
Heritage has now separated into two organisations. If you are looking for
information on listing, planning, grants or heritage research and advice,
please visit Historic England.” Historic England, whose website
(https://historicengland.org.uk) only vaguely resembles that of English
Heritage, can likely now be analyzed within the framework of Paganoni’s
multimodal approach, but first, an investigation into the changes made within
the English Heritage website would be necessary to account for the
linguistic/discursive practices now extant within both websites. However,
though the linguistic content of the Historic England website may mirror that
of the English heritage website (which itself may not have changed
substantially upon the split into two organizations), the design of the
Historic England website must also be taken into account when analyzing its
discursive practices in relation to its format, and such an undertaking could
likely be repeated ad nauseam for each design and textual element modified
within either website (and which would be necessary for any website/collection
of websites to which Paganoni’s methodologies are applied in order to maintain
the accuracy of any linguistic theories/statements extracted from website
content).

Paganoni’s work is laudable for its scope and rigorous application of numerous
theoretical paradigms to the relatively uncharted regions of online/digital
linguistic analysis, but her claims may only prove fleeting as digital
linguistic practices change over time and the voices of citizens who
participate in online discourse with city websites are augmented by their
inclusion in academic analyses, which, as mentioned above, must include the
input of the public voice as substantiation of otherwise sweeping claims about
the linguistic empowerment of city governance in simultaneity with the erasure
of the citizen as a member of the city branding discourse. Somewhat absurdly,
Paganoni’s work silences the voices of citizens with their exclusion from the
analysis as she argues against their exclusion from agency in the branding of
the contemporary global city. Furthermore, a companion to this work that
focuses exclusively on the role of the citizen and his/her linguistic
practices in relation to the development of heritage and local identity in the
21st-century urban environment would greatly supplement the relevance of this
work to further discussions about the citizen’s place in the global city
branding marketplace.

REFERENCES

City of Los Angeles, California, http://www.lacity.org

McGuigan, Jim (2010). Cultural Analysis. London: Sage Publications.

Seyranian, Viviane & Bligh, Michelle (2008). Presidential Charismatic
Leadership: Exploring 
 the rhetoric of social change. The Leadership Quarterly, 19, 54-76.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Tim Jewell is a Linguistics researcher at California State University,
Fullerton. His current work focuses on Germanic language change and contact
between English and Danish, and he aspires to develop new typological and
sociolinguistic frameworks for understanding the emergence of multiethnic,
multilingual language varieties around the world.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-27-364	
----------------------------------------------------------