Suchergebnisse

In recent years, Nigeria's image has always been negatively depicted in the global media, as the country's name is associated with some of the world's most sophisticated cybercriminals. The situation with the country's perceived dented reputation, most especially in the Southeast Asia, Western Europe and the United States of America, is ripe for the anti-cybercrime discourse to take root, and subsequently, become a fertile ground for various parties to contribute to the grand discourse from different perspectives. This article highlights the way Nigerian government, through its revenues generating agency, the Federal Inland Revenue Services (FIRS), utilizes a print media warning advertisement (WA) to discursively construct and showcase its efforts in combating cybercrimes. The study utilizes Fairclough's three-layered model for approaching discourse to analyse the FIRS-sponsored WA, which was published in The Guardian newspaper on 2 May 2013. The study incorporates analytical tools from the visual grammar (VG) and the multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) to examine the visual dimensions constituting the frame of the WA. The study revealed how the Nigerian government, through the FIRS sponsored WA, has attempted to discursively draw the attention of the general public to the potential dangers associated with the cybercriminals and their activities as well as suggesting the best ways to escape falling into their traps. The study recommends that governments and other civil societies should explore other means of creating more awareness to the general public, given the speed at which cyber-related crimes upsurge globally at the present time.

In light of revisiting the notion of advertising from the perspectives of the print media, this review article found that advertisements are transgeneric and multidimensional media artefacts capable of operating at several platforms such as the cultural, economic, sociopolitical, religious and ideological spheres. It has also revealed that advertisements constitute an independent social discourse, which is culturally oriented, with remarkable influence on politics, social values, economics, lifestyles and the way people see the world around them. This review has also found that the multimodal nature of the present-day advertisements has accorded the genre some tremendous unseen power, capable of influencing people's choices, when it comes to accepting ideas or goods and services. The review has also discussed how influential a mundane genre, such as newspaper advertisements, could be as it is used as the vehicle for constructing social and political agendas as well as promoting other topical issues in the society.