DOCUMENT D: Dudley MBC’s ‘What’s your culture?’

Critical process

At first impact, I would say the image is colourful, attracting and interesting. In the middle of the image there is a big heading and as a background there are different coloured lines representing the different cultures.

Referring to Lasswell’s model the sender is Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, the message included probably wants us to really know and discover more about our culture and the sender is everyone who might see it. Dudley MBC probably used advertisement as the channel trying to get people attention.

Following the classification of the text, I will now focus on the genre and then consider in detail what in fact we are being offered. First of all, defining the formal structure we can talk about the signifier, which, in this case, is represented by the words and the coloured vertical lines. Besides, we can notice the syntagm in the image with vertical lines, different colours, not perfectly straight. The register is semi-formal English and the vocabulary is direct, explicit and easy-understanding since it tries to trigger a positive reaction in people. The Mode of Address is constituted by a short question and few words, precisely because it is direct to its aim. Furthermore, the message contains also bias and hidden believes: for instance, we can predict that MBC thinks people don’t really know enough about their culture. The main function is making curious and eager of discover, learn and know more about themselves and their past and new traditions and habits. Lastly, the significance of the background is surely connected to the difference of the use of colours, which reminds to the existence of different cultures around the world.

 Besides, it means that everyone has his own ‘background’, which might be mixed with other cultures as well. In fact some colours are in sharp contrast representing the cultures that are completely different and far from being similar; others, referring to the purple one, are slightly shaded to let us intend the existence of cultures that might be similar to others or might have inherited codes from others as well.