LANGUAGE, THE MASS MEDIA AND THREAT TO SOCIAL EQUILIBRIUM

This paper investigates an advertisement. The objective is to ascertain whether the creators of the advertisement, at the time they created the advertisement, consciously guarded against other meanings than the one they had intended for the advertisement. The procedure used was to show the advertisement to a focus group. Members of the focus group are skilled in Critical Discourse Analysis. The creators of the advertisement said that the meaning found in the advertisement by the focus group was contrary to the meaning the creators had intended for the advertisement. In this light, it was recommended that continuous analysis of texts be encouraged in order to identify potential unintended distortive discursive practices that lurk in texts.