Targeting Culture

Currently, 1 out of 10 US citizens lays claim to being targeted in a certain way. Do these allegations signal the onset of mass psychosis, a social epidemic of unheard of proportions or a ubiquitous lived reality that affects millions, yet without any obvious and self-explanatory reasons why? Targeting Culture: Making the Invisible Visible offers a comprehensive social theoretic framework for making sense of a largely invisible threat or for how the invisible may be made visible. By adopting as interpretive platform a critical discourse analytic approach, it dimensionalizes the culture of targeting on three levels, micro, meso and macro. At the same time, the analytic highlights salient legal facets, while suggesting that this complex, multi-act, multi-perpetrator crime of multiple composite causality involving interdiscursive chains between lay and institutional discourses may be effectively addressed on the grounds of a multi-dimensional legal model, such as that of indirect perpetration in organized power mechanisms. In order to facilitate the reader's understanding of the subtle nuances of this new cultural phenomenon, a lavish array of concepts is offered to the reader, spanning various perspectives from the humanities and the social sciences, such as psychoanalysis, microsociology, religious studies, social cybernetics, systems theory, multimodal rhetorical studies, philosophy, cultural studies, legal studies. About the authorGeorge Rossolatos (MSc, MBA, PhD) is an academic researcher, marketing practitioner, and the editor of the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics & Discourse Studies. Major publications include Targeting Culture: Making the Invisible Visible (2019), Interdiscursive Readings in Cultural Consumer Research (2018), Handbook of Brand Semiotics (2015; ed. and co-author), Semiotics of Popular Culture (2015), Brand Equity Planning with Structuralist Rhetorical Semiotics (2012, 2014), //rhetor.dixit//: Understanding Ad Texts' Rhetorical Structure for Differential Figurative Advantage (2013), Applying Structuralist Semiotics to Brand Image Research (2012), Interactive Advertising: Dynamic Communication in the Information Age (2002; ed. and co-author), plus numerous articles in academic and trade journals. His research interests focus on cultural consumer research/popular culture, branding/advertising, and digital marketing/new media.