Meanings of education in distance learning advertising: from the process paradigm to the product paradigm^*

Abstract

In this article, based on the theoretical-methodological framework of Discourse Analysis, we analyze advertising pieces that put distance learning (DL) on sale in the market. Such advertisements circulate socially – although not exclusively – in the online form. Our objective was to restore, by means of a discursive and materialist interpretative device, (re)interpretation conditions to the process of producing effects of meanings evocable in and through the referred advertising pieces. This restoration was carried out by focusing on how the meanings of education at stake in DL advertising shift the inscription of (distance) learning, moving it away from the process paradigm and leading it toward the product paradigm. This rendering process produces, as an effect, the projection of (distance) learning to the status of merchandise. By means of our analyses, we show that, as merchandise, DL advertising establishes discourses that aggravate the class struggle in neoliberal capitalist society by means of articulation and discursive transversality that (re)direct DL’s discursive reduction to professionalization, to effortlessness, to instantaneousness, to the digital form and to jobs, configuring DL as the “new normal” of/in education. Because of this discursive practice and its impact on society, the discursive devices operating in DL advertising produce a risk to the emancipation of the subject in and through (distance) learning.

Distance learning; Advertising; Neoliberalism; Discourse