The world of Ronald McDonald: on the trademark and the mediatic sociality

• Autor(a) principal: Fontenelle, Isleide Arruda
• Data de Publicação: 2002
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Educação e Pesquisa
• Texto Completo: https://www.revistas.usp.br/ep/article/view/27881
• topic: Propaganda; Publicidade; Socialidade midiática; Advertising; Publicity; Mediatic sociality

The clown Ronald McDonald -- one of the trademarks of the McDonald's Corporation -- is taken as a paradigm to reflect upon the relations between market, media, and entertainment, which have a direct link with what we define as "mediatic sociality". As an ideal metaphor of an advertising that no longer seems to attempt to make sense, the story of the clown allows us to unveil the meanings contained in two of the main practices of modern marketing, the advertisement and the publicity, revealing how, between the nonsense of contemporary advertising and a publicity that has fused illusion and reality, there is a vital relationship between media and publicity, that establishes a new form of communication in which the subject becomes only a means to ends that he/she knows about, but paradoxically acts as if he/she ignored them. Such paradox is revealing of a form of subjectivity profoundly marked by the media as a socializing agent, in the sense that the role of the media as a mediator of contemporary sociality had the effect of altering our perceptive universe, saturating our imaginary in a radically new way. In addition to that, the "mediatic sociality" implies a new form of representation of the subject in the record of the "spectacle", in the sense that "to be in the image is to exist". Needless to stress how much these issues must be included in contemporary studies about the processes of socialization, and how challenging they are to those that work within the universe of education.