The Yes Men Strike Again!

There is a tendency among scholars interested in media and social activism to focus on how social movements make instrumental use of mass media to enhance organization profile, to change public policy, to foster a sense of collective identity, or a combination of some or all of these things. Yet, before today’s media savvy activists were holding [...]

Greening Corporate Reputation

Canada’s agenda-setting newspaper The Globe & Mail yesterday memorialized Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) as one of the world’s 50 greatest reads, praising its role in stimulating greater public understanding about science and helping to shape the modern environmental movement. I’ve been thinking a lot about the book lately, with 2 graduate students working on issues [...]

iWatch: The Power of Surveillance in your Pocket

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

In the discourse about surveillance, the Big Brother trope is king.  Popular culture provides us with recognizable scripts in which to locate our own anxieties and uncertainties about the present, even though the reality of everyday life is often more complex and paradoxical than can be explained [...]

FLICKr and Counter-Surveillance: Resistance or Reification?

Cory Doctorow posts on Boing Boing that two civil society organizations – The Open Rights Group and No2ID – are calling for British citizens to snap pictures of moments or things in their daily lives which capture the expanding nature of the surveillance society. The pics are to then be uploaded to a Flickr site.
Here’s [...]

Purple Pills and Puffery

This post is about promotionalism and the pharmaceutical industry. Some of the ideas come from a paper I wrote a couple of years ago (This Ad May be Bad for Your Health) published as a chapter in my book Communication in Question. I was compelled to revisit some of the ideas that informed the paper [...]

Opt in/Opt out? Consumers Benefit from Surveillance Backlash

In January 2006, the Bush administration came under intense criticism for authorizing the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct electronic (soft) surveillance on citizens’ telephone and Internet correspondence without court approval. The NSA’s ability to monitor the daily communications of U.S. citizens was made possible by the willing participation of some of the largest telecommunications [...]

Thank You for Smoking

In what must be a sign that public health advocates are making big gains in the legal and PR battles against Big Tobacco, news today that the biggest cancer purveyor in the U.S., Philip Morris, has taken the City of San Francisco to court over a new bylaw banning sales of cigarettes in pharmacies.

The company [...]

Disease Surveillance 2.0

In the first meeting of my grad seminar on communication and public health we discussed the contributions of some leading social theorists (Michel Foucault, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens), particularly their theories of governmentality (Foucault), risk (Beck, Giddens) and reflexivity (also Beck, Giddens).
A recent story in Wired magazine illustrates some of these ideas well. The piece [...]

It’s not easy being green

The public health implications of greenwashing, one of the most debated issues in environmental communication these days, is given short shrift in the public and scholarly debate. Greenwashing is a public relations tactic that involves “unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue” by organizations with questionable ecological track records (SourceWatch). Illustrative examples abound, including a Royal Dutch Shell [...]