Poster Makers Should Think as Much about Show Business as Science. The Case of Medical Posters in a Diachronic Perspective

As stated by Kay (2005: 1041), the rapid development of society has affected the way in which medical discourse is constructed as e-publishing facilitates and at the same time globalizes the medical publishing market. The notion of globalization lies in the concept of the economic process enhancing capitalism, i.e. the establishment of free-markets all over the world. Initially, the concept of globalisation was regarded quite positively because of the idea behind globalization according to which the more frequently free-markets and competitiveness occur, the stronger the economy will be (Fairclough 2006). In the long term, however, it has acquired negative connotations when related to the financial world - globalisation has begun to be regarded as a synonym for global crisis. As Fairclough states (2006: 2), economic change implies changes of social practices and identities which could not have been possible without a change in discourse. This implies the need to integrate “systematically all background information in the analysis and interpretation” of texts (Wodak 2006:15). The impact of the changing and more business-oriented health care system on medical education seems to be responsible for certain profound changes in academic medicine. For instance, the more and more frequent exploitation of information technology in order to spread medical research projects within the academic community seems on the one hand to be emphasised by competition and profit, on the other by the response to the requirements of low-cost yet qualitative studies so as to cope with the global crisis. As business interests have already gained an important place in medicine, members of the medical community seem to have progressively adopted a business mentality. Doubtlessly, competition, financial constraints and medical worth may raise conflicts within the medical discourse community, which are likely to result in generic tensions. This paper will investigate in what ways the tensions caused by the financial and social context have determined genre variation in medical discourse. The analysis will in particular focus on medical posters, where the marketization processes seem to be more evident, given the consistent presence of promotional traits within such a genre. The research questions at the basis of such investigation will be: a) When and why did the process of marketization of medical discourse begin? b) What are the promotional features that transform poster presentation into a form of marketization of medical discourse c) What direction have these features taken across time? The diachronic investigation will be carried out in the attempt to determine if, when, and to what extent the development from medical virtue to corporate mentality has determined the marketization of medical discourse and the extent to which traits pertaining to promotional language have contaminated contemporary discourse in the medical academic community. In order to carry out such research, I collected fifty medical posters published in major medical journals and downloaded from the Net. I also interviewed some Italian, UK and US consultants within the medical academic sphere in order to have a better contextualization of the social background of medical poster presentation. By integrating genre analysis (Swales 1990, 2004; Bhatia 1993, 2004) with corpus linguistics (Hunston 2002), I will seek to illustrate the societal developments that have determined such variation in the genre of medical poster presentation. Consistent with the methodological approach chosen, the investigation will follow both a quantitative and qualitative analysis. Quantitative analysis will be carried out with Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2007). The resulting data, presented in normalized figures, will be interpreted with a qualitative analysis by means of which I will interpret language use in medical discourse. In addition, given the massive presence of the visual elements in medical discourse, I will also carry out a multimodal analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2004) in order to position the role of iconicity in both generic integrity and generic interdiscursivity. As Swales (2004: 21) states, the conference poster can be seen as a hybrid form falling somewhere between the research paper and the conference visual or handout. In this sense, therefore, the poster may be represented as a multimodal communicative event (see Kress and van Leeuwen 2004), with text, graphics, colour, and (interactive) speech used to convey meaning. “Its content, displayed as a “visual unit” all on a single view plane, distinguishes it from the research paper” (MacIntosh-Murray 2007: 352). In other words, posters are a means to show medical research. Presenting a poster allows authors to more personally interact with the people who are interested in the presented research; yet posters should stand alone with regard to content. As a poster is viewed in context with dozens of others, it has slowly yet consistently become imperative to capture the audience’s attention by means of a title, introduction and graphics. Not only has this meant the exploitation of promotional strategies in medical discourse but also the elaboration of new forms of communication. The future trend seems to point to the video-poster.