Marland, Alex, Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
tephen Harper's government was known above all for one thing - message control.Brand Command, written by Memorial University political communications expert, Alex Marland, helps make sense of this message control and explores the implications of such control for democracy in Canada.It is a well-researched and well-written book, but it is not a comforting read.Marland takes a provocative and highly relevant position visà-vis Canadian politics, power, and communications -i.e., that as interactive, web2.0 media expand democracy itself shrinks.Indeed the dominant metaphor for the Canadian political scene is that of a communications war.Marland argues that while rhetoric and image manipulation are as old as politics itself, there is something new under the political sun -branding.Brand Command's thesis is that centralization of power in the hands of the political elites has to be understood in the context of communication practices and technologies.With what is called the "permanent campaign", governing parties integrate governing with promotion of the image (brand) of the party leader and the larger party.The autonomy of parliamentarians, the media, and civil servants (who serve the people) is compromised as branding erodes essential barriers between partisanship and governance.Moreover, Marland argues that Westminster systems like Canada's -with their tendency toward party unity and centralization of power -are more prone to political branding than presidential systems.The branding of commodities begins in the mid-eighteenth century when consumer goods with little discernible difference (coffee, tea, cocoa, soup) were packaged and marketed around a brand name.Later, advances in consumer research allowed consumer desires and longings to be fed back into and stimulate the overdetermined brand.Marland does not suggest that Harper's Conservatives invented political marketing and branding, but they developed it to an extreme.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".