Corporate Expansion, Textual Expansion: Commodification Model of Communication

Abstract

The authors argue that the contemporary situation of media saturation and hypercommercialism calls for an alternative model of communication that accounts for the current political-economic conditions. This study shows how corporate discursive strategies contribute to the expansion of hegemonic corporate interests and how they redefine public communication. The authors analyze two corporate museums, The World of Coca-Cola and the CNN Studio Tour, as discursive spaces (i.e., text). In support of the authors' concerns, they develop the Commodification Model of Communication. This model moves beyond the traditional “four theories of the press” to theorize how the text has expanded to accommodate corporate expansion by equating earlier concepts of public goods and services with private interests. By using the contradictory textual strategies of authority and choice, corporations work to normalize private, profit-oriented communication and thus solve what they pose as a problem, the cacophony of unlicensed public communication.