ABSTRACT
Advertisers and marketers today, like the journalists Scollon studied (1998:156), “are broadcasting and writing into a highly interdiscursive, contested, and social space in many cases and in others they are being pasted up as wallpaper or used to wrap fish.” In the twenty-first century, there are more marketing messages being mediated via more mediational means than ever before. According to Art & Copy, a 2009 documentary film (Pray, 2009) about advertising in the United States, the average consumer “receives” 3,500 marketing messages per day. All of this highlights the difficulty marketers encounter if they want people to pay more attention to their messages than they do to the wallpaper in the room or the wrapping fast food comes in. The point is that no one receives any message at all if they are not paying attention. Gaining and keeping attention has always been at the heart of every social action (Jones, 2005) and it is vital to every information-processing activity (Olshavsky, 1994). Moreover, no matter how we look at communication—“from a mediated discourse perspective or a marketing communications stance—studies acknowledge that attention plays a crucial role in successful communication in the 21st century” (White, 2010:389). Yet, “it’s tougher than ever for new messages to break through our perceptual barriers” (Sacharin, 2001:ix). Sacharin even suggests this is because “the constant noise is leading to an entire society with a form of attention deficit disorder,” (ibid.:ix). The “noise” Sacharin is talking about comes not just from the number of messages being mediated by marketers but also from the plethora of “sites of engagement” (Scollon, 1998) where communication takes place, due to the continuing explosion of communications technologies and their applications. My use of Scollon’s term sites of engagement here should not be confused, though, with the marketing term media. To say there has been an explosion of media due to the rapid rise of new technologies is true, but what is equally true is that, in social interaction terms, new technologies have both multiplied the number of sites of engagement where social actors engage and fundamentally changed the nature of communicative actions (Jones, 2005, 2009). Rather than media, such as TV, radio, billboards or the web, and their texts, merely denoting physical sites of engagement, we can also define them in Scollon’s terms as being “constructed through an interlocking set of social practices which produce a window within which a potential for mediated action becomes instantiated as discourse in real time” (1998:135) and the concept of “sites of engagement is useful to focus our attention on …those moments when texts are actually in use—not just present in the environment” (ibid.:12).
