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Political cartoons as communicative weapons: the hypothesis of the “Double Standard Thesis” in three Portuguese cartoons

Publication . Mateus, Samuel

Political cartoons are a powerful communicative weapon. They can distract, joke but they can also provide social commentaries on key aspects of reality. Although not always acknowledged, cartoons are a key element on political communication. In this paper, we investigate editorial cartoons potential to political communication and take them as communicative artifacts capable of enhancing political comprehension and reconceptualization of events, through specific frames of understanding. By looking into the double standard thesis, by which cartoonists tend to contrast the posturing, destructive, wastage of politics with the purposive, constructive efficiency of business (Morris, 1992: 254), we try to assess if that same tendency to frame politics and business befalls as well in Portuguese political cartoons. Based on a notrepresentative sample, we proceed to a rhetorical analysis of three contemporary Portuguese political cartoons in which business tends to be associated with purpose and efficiency, while politics is portrayed as a wasteful, vain, otiose activity. By representing politics and business in such a dissimilar way, these cartoons tend to validate in Portugal the double standard thesis, and raises the possibility it can actually be applied to trans-national contexts.

2016Journal article

Open access

Visibility as a key concept in communication and media studies

Publication . Mateus, Samuel

The concept of visibility has become a problematic one as hypervisibility gave rise to new forms of opacity that are formed not through secrecy but by its opposite, pan-visibility. Paradoxically, by amplifying visibility, media create new forms of invisibility. An analysis of visibility will provide us with a precise perspective how these processes occur. In this paper, we suggest three lines of empirical and theoretical investigation in the topic of visibility: a sociological (symbolic) axis; a collective (publicness) axis; and a technological (media) axis. Since the social category of visibility is a central aspect of communication and media studies, we will be interrogating it through three distinct ways: visibility as a field whose symbolic determination results in the constitution of different regimes of visibility; visibility as a pivot-concept of publicness since it is this public quality that transforms proto-visibility into a full accomplished visibility; and, third, the transmutations and dangers stemmed from media’s production of visibility. Each one of these principles highlights different concepts: in the field of visibility we need to address inter-visibilities; in public visibilities we need to address proto-visibilities in verge of becoming full-visibilities through the synchrony of collective attention; and in mediated visibility it is imperative to deal with super-visibility as an extreme effect of an intense modulation perpetrated by communication technologies.

2017Journal article

Open access