engleski

Identities on the Net: Gender and National Stereotypes on Croatian Broad-Reach Portals

This article combines content analysis and semiotic analysis to discuss various ways of perceiving and creating identity of the users of new media products in the transition society of Croatia. The analysis of gender and national stereotypes on the mainstream Croatian Internet portals is meant as a contribution to understanding of what happens when technologies gaining prominence simultaneously with the processes of individualization and reflexive modernization (Beck) meet with a cultural context in which modern and premodern tendencies prevail. The results of our analysis reveal that the owners and editors of the analyzed portals make their business decisions departing from the perception of an 'unproblematic' identity of the users. In spite of a relative scarcity of national stereotypes, the content of the portals is mostly directed at what is perceived as a non- individualized and unfragmented, male-identified audience. Methodologically, the article aims to demonstrate that an essentially old media technique of analysis can be successfully applied to a new media product.

Internet portals; identity; national; gender; stereotypes; content analysis; visual semiotics; implied reader; representation

nije evidentirano