Pleasure and pedagogy: the consumption of DVD add-ons among Irish teenagers

This article addresses the issue of young people and media use in the digital age, more specifically the interconnection between new media pleasures and pedagogy as they relate to the consumption of DVD add-ons. Arguing against the view of new media as having predominantly detrimental effects on young people, the authors claim that new media can enable young people to develop media literacy skills and are of the view that media literacy strategies must be based on an understanding and legitimating of young people's use patterns and pleasures. The discussion is based on a pilot research project on the use patterns and pleasures of use with a sample of Irish teenagers. They found that DVDs were used predominantly in the home context, and that, while there was variability in use between the groups, overall they developed critical literacy skills and competences which were interwoven into their social life and projects of identity construction. The authors suggest that these findings could be used to develop DVDs and their add-on features as a learning resource in the more formal educational setting and they go on to outline the potential teaching benefits of their use across a range of pedagogical areas

Social cognition and discourse processing goals in the analysis of `ex-gay' rhetoric

This article reports a critical discourse analysis of a series of newspaper advertisements advocating \u27ex-gay\u27 ministries and \u27reparative therapy\u27 for homosexuality - interventions designed to \u27treat\u27 homosexuality through prayer or psychoanalysis. These ads, part of an effort to make \u27ex-gay\u27 discourse more central to the public communication strategies of conservative, anti-gay political groups, feature both narrative and statistical arguments that gay men and lesbians can be converted to heterosexuality. This study draws on quantitative social psychological research on antigay attitudes and Slater\u27s extension of the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion to establish the cognitive context for this discourse and to link the argumentative features of the advertisements to potential persuasive effects on different audiences. The analysis shows how different rhetorical strategies employed in these ads might differentially influence readers who are either \u27value protective\u27 or \u27value affirmative\u27 in their processing goals. Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications