Daniel Ciurel

This paper aims to identify the main tactics of deceptive digital advertising. Misleading digital advertising tricks or lures users to take actions or believe things that they did not intend to or benefit from. Digital advertising offers ample opportunities for both serving and abusing consumers. Advertisements that take advantage of consumers’ cognitive biases, anxieties, vulnerabilities, or emotions may be controversial, deceptive, and exploitative. The use of big data for personalization and manipulation through targeted marketing is another instance of dark advertising. There is a vast array of unethical digital tactics, from stealth advertising and deceptive content to platforms and algorithms manipulation that subvert or impair the consumers’ autonomy, decision or choice.

This paper aims to detect the rhetorical moves in climate change debates in digital media environments. Digital media culture is the field of contention concerning climate change discourses of both activists and contrarians. One of the main communication strategies of climate change proponents is apocalyptic rhetoric, using various persuasive appeals, more or less effective (scare tactics, ethotic stances, danger frames, etc.). The opponents of anthropogenic climate change use rhetoric of ignorance, fallacious arguments, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories, fueling controversy and public confusion concerning the issue. Ecomedia literacy equips media users to discern correct information and resist various fraudulent rhetorical tactics.

This paper attempts to pinpoint the importance of visual rhetoric in the city branding of Timisoara as European Capital of Culture in 2023. Visual artifacts related to Timisoara ECoC 2023 can enhance or hinder the urban branding. The image of Timisoara includes a rich cultural, industrial and civic heritage component, with a strong visual dimension. Urban spaces can develop via marketing of destination and place branding, and, in the process, visual rhetoric can prove an essential branding tool in the promotion of the spirit of Timisoara. The European Capital of Culture could have supported the city of Timisoara in rebranding as not only multicultural, open, and inclusive, but also creative, smart, and sustainable. The analysis of visual artifacts related to Timisoara ECoC 2023 reveals an insufficient, mediocre branding performance.

This paper aims to present culture jamming as a rhetorical practice (semantic activism). Culture jamming is an anticonsumerist resistance strategy, a countercultural tactic and a critical practice consisting in manipulation of media and other public discourses by artists and activists, in order to challenge the dominant memes, to subvert the mainstream (cultural, political and commercial) messages, using their own discourses and altering them to create alternative meanings. Culture jamming exploits intertextualty and counterframing, in different ways of deconstructing and re-constructing hegemonic messages, using allusion, irony and parody as polemical devices. Also, perspective by incongruity is used: oddly juxtaposed symbols that influence audiences to adopt new perspectives and create new insights. Cultural jammers are questioning the consumerist and corporate worldviews.

Framing is the process of selecting certain aspects from the perceived reality and placing them prominently within messages, in order to promote a particular definition of the situation , a certain causal interpretation , a certain moral evaluation and a proposal for some remedies. During social movements or protests , especially in an era of post truth, alternative facts and fake news , framing is relevant in different ways of constructing and interpreting messages. Framing is a dynamic process, consisting in collective and ongoing shaping and reshaping of frames by protesters and audiences, in order to mobilize adherents, appeal to authorities and silence opponents. Social media enables social movement activists and participants to organize offline protests and to expand repertoires of action. Online platforms (social networks, etc.) facilitate dissemination of collective action messages and recruiting of supporters. Also, social media influence frame alignment processes of social movements.

This paper aims to identify the rhetorical strategies of the paid covert advertising that matches the aspect and function of the digital media environment in which it appears. With an expanding use of new formats on different platforms and devices, native advertising is a creative alternative to traditional digital ads. The disguised advertisements can effectively avoid both ad blockers and consumer resistance to persuasion, as they are less intrusive forms of commercial content. Native advertising is a hybrid genre, which tends to blur the boundaries between promotional and editorial content, digital news outlets and advertising agencies, publishers and marketers, because of its use of rhetorical camouflage.

Media Literacy (ML) focuses on educating different categories of public (children, young people and adults), in both formal and informal settings, to critically and consciously consume mediated messages. It encompasses various skills, such as critical thinking, problem solving, autonomy, communication and participation. Although ML is far from being a unified field, there are a number of concepts, approaches and competencies that tend to share a common ground. In addition, despite the fact that there is a vigorous development of ML initiatives worldwide, in Romania the critical deconstruction of media messages is only scarcely present, within narrow niches.

Kairos and stasis, two vital concepts employed to account for the rhetorical situation, are still valued and valuable in today communication contexts. As starting points of (corporate) discourse, the two terms prove to be particularly relevant. Both kairos and stasis point to the situatedness of the corporate discourse, since crisis always happens in a specific situation. Stasis and kairos do not perform separately, they function interdependently. Stasis focuses on logos, while kairos concentrates on ethos and pathos. They set rigor and let PR practitioners know at any moment where they are in solving a crisis, what questions to ask and how to act further in managing crisis communication.

This paper analyzes the outcomes of a game-based educational process aiming to strengthen resilience to fake news. An innovative approach that considers linguistic choices as bases for manipulating information is used in an online classroom environment, students in communication being invited to understand, explain and reflect upon framing and information credibility, using as a topic of inquiry the refugee crisis of 2021 in Romania. Cognitive learning outcomes as well as learning dynamics were assessed using pre- and end-of game surveys. The results of the game are discussed in relation with the instructional goal to facilitate the understanding of communicative social actions, learning about disinformation that is deliberately misleading, as well as finding ways to break the disinformation code. The debriefing discussions after each stage of the game encouraged students to reflect upon their newly gained insights and increase their critical thinking capacity, in the effort to ensure a sustainable education in communication studies. The paper has the potential to enrich the educational strategies with innovative methods helping future professionals navigate the complex world of media messages.

This paper aims to show how the consumers shape their identities via advertising rhetoric. The contemporary advertising industry is defining and cultivating customers identity, using tactics such as mental simulation and narrative transportation, based on data-driven social profiling. The consumers are lured in constructing the types of persona which marketers strive to establish, engaging in what I call digital bovarism: an idealized, glamorized and, ultimately, fictional representation of themselves, developed through alienating rhetorical visions. This rhetorical process can be understood using symbolic convergence theory and fantasy-theme analysis, as the individual’s efforts to be unique result in more similarity via mimetic practices of consumption.