Revealing the Equality in Digital Media through Digital Advertising

Abstract: 

Despite the fact that digital advertising is still in its infancy, previous studies have already exposed its importance in representing digital media, especially its ontological properties – rules, structures, features, and biases (RSFB). This preliminary study is to further reveal the relations between these RSFB and the one-way, two-way, and customer-driven business communications that imply the power and freedom and so the possible equality in digital communication. Nowadays, we are heavily dependent on digital media to attain efficient communication but not aware of its power, enforced by businesses and other authorities, over our communications, limiting our freedom in different respects. How can we resist such power? How can we obtain a balance between the power and freedom – the equality in digital communication? In this qualitative study, we first review the representation of digital media in the form of digital advertising with the aid of ten digital advertising campaigns from Australia, Brazil, China, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and the United States, across the Global North and Global South. Then, we discuss the definitions of the three business communications and their relations with the RSFB of digital media in view of the revised discursive interface analysis and network theory of power, alerting readers to the nature of different digital media and their roles in business communications espousing or opposing the equality in digital communication. In the latter part of the paper, we expound how businesses can use digital media to have one-way and two-way communications to achieve business goals and how customers and users can express their opinions and even make businesses change through customer-driven digital communication, pinpointing the possibility of developing a new communication theory depicting the rise of equality in digital communication. We conclude that understanding the underlying properties of digital media assists us in locating the power and freedom in digital communication and therefore allows us to use the right digital media to achieve the equality in it.