Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times

"Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times" traces daringly transgressive convergences between cultural politics and global advertising media. On balance the rise of networked global capitalism has paralleled the development of geopolitical strategies organized in the form of global networks. Uniquely interesting to globally networked social movements is the integration of multimodal digital communication processing technologies, into geopolitical strategies. It is precisely because advertising technoscapes are multimodal using both convergent communication networks and mainstream advertising media, that they are able to translate local political concerns into global political spaces. From the concept of 'aesthetics of existence', this book examines advertising as a 'technology of signs' intricately bound up with both the expansion of global networked capitalism, and the forms of cultural political resistances that globalization has precipitated. This book engages with a range of interpolations between cultural politics and advertising technologies including: the governmental rationality of neoliberal vistas, transgressive aesthetics and the cultural politics of representation, the political sign-economy of citizen branding, and techno-political convergences between the social and political and the marking of a new exciting geo-political terrain for cultural politics in global times. Tracing global advertising practices to the cultural politics commonly manifested in the postmodern political caesura of advertising, this book makes use of extensive case studies, whilst drawing on the work of Baudrillard, Giroux, Foucault, Castells and Latour to illustrate the manner in which advertising continues to revolutionise the political sphere. As such, it will be of interest to a range of readers across media studies, cultural studies and sociology.