Out-of-home (OOH) advertising media have expanded worldwide and the shape and format of these media globally, as well as in South Africa, have changed considerably. Until recently, the OOH advertising media landscape consisted primarily of outdoor advertising or billboards reaching vehicular traffic, but now has expanded to include a wide range of OOH advertising media types which aim to reach a mobile audience wherever they live, work, play, drive, shop or commute. Currently there is no coherent contemporary framework to compare and select the most effective media options to reach a selected target market in a specific OOH audience environment. This article draws from academic and practitioner sources to propose a classification framework for OOH advertising media in South Africa comprising four major platforms: outdoor advertising, transit media advertising, street-and-retail furniture advertising, and digital and ambient OOH media channels. The framework serves to inform marketers of viable and cost-effective traditional and contemporary OOH advertising media options. It also indicates what platforms are appropriate to reach specific audiences effectively in a variety of environments outside their homes. This is the first framework of its kind for the South African context that offers an orderly, integrated basis for future research.

This article, in part, tries to introduce some of the difficulties in writing about the realm of ‘represented’ or ‘representational’ masculinity that I have faced in my own limited research on the representation of men in South African art and media. My encounter of visualised masculinities is briefly sketched in the hope that having this backstory will add depth and texture to my analysis of the ways in which ‘South African masculinity’ might have been communicated to or be ‘read’ by the viewers of the Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography exhibition held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2011. This exhibition is specifically chosen as the subject of this article as an example of the representational construction of South African-ness by South Africans but curated with a predominantly non-South African viewer in mind. A photographic exhibition seems a helpful site to talk about the importance of the representational realm since photography seems intuitively geared towards selecting and amplifying subject matter which, on a collective level, is thought to be curios, worthy of attention or interesting. As a photographic exhibition, Figures & Fictions is also balanced between the genre of ‘documentary’ with all the associations of objectivity, activism and agenda this brings with it and the critique of these connotations typically embedded in postmodern photographic art. Photographic art has been at the forefront of exposing a sort of masculine crisis and for this reason too forms the focal point of this essay. Throughout I return to Susan Sontag's conception of ‘the interesting’ as tool for unpacking whether the representation of men specifically is interesting and what exactly this might mean.

The idea of peace has gained a hegemonic place in the discourse of intellectuals and the mass media. From being a preoccupation of religious and utopian sages throughout history, a vision of a peaceful world emerged as a fashionable occupation for peace activism in the 1960s and ultimately in the 21st century peace research has become a fast-growing industry. The assumed need to end wars and violence and to enforce peaceful existence on individuals, groups, societies and the entire world has been unquestionably accepted as if a self evident truth. By accepting such dubious claims many scholars have consciously and unconsciously distorted historical data in order to produce an image of an ideal peaceful world. Yet increasingly the belief in the ability to abolish war and eliminate conflict is being questioned and conflict prevention is seen as unrealistic, undesirable and based on misguided assumptions. Thus, if achieving peace is counterproductive what are the motives, aims and consequences of peace enforcement? This article begins a critical interrogation of the idea of peace and peace discourse and the formative value of war as human reality. The article uncovers the genealogy of peace, evaluates the relationships between peace and war and exposes the deceptive strategies and tactics of peace discourse as it manipulates language and the mass media. The article concludes that the consequences of enforcing peace do not produce a beautiful society but a nightmare where war is seen once again as a blessing.

Since 1994 a collection of films, referred to here as post-apartheid South African history film, has thematically represented South Africa's apartheid history, and in so doing has engaged with the representation of the white figure in ways which suggest a reformulation of collective South African white identity construction. Part of this process is the phenomenon of the remythologisation, or the counter myth construction, of whiteness as an identity on film. Such mythic representations frequently describe the white figure as connected to aspects of guilt (whether individual or collective), remorse and forgiveness. Often the mythic construction of whiteness on film is delivered in a seemingly oversimplified binary fashion, reducing the representation of white identity in the post-apartheid South African situation to one that is robbed of complexities and nuances.

Some changes of an evolving language regime are moderate in nature as they do not necessarily entail the removal of a language from the linguistic landscape. They can be deemed less moderate when a former prestigious language is removed, as is the case in post-Soviet countries where former bilingual signs are physically replaced by new, predominantly monolingual signs, no longer displaying Russian. South Africa's constitutional language requirements do imply the re-profiling of public signs in order to feature an African language; changes that seem compatible with a moderate approach to linguistic landscaping. Do the different policies that regulate the linguistic landscape – and the resulting changes themselves – actually reflect this moderate approach? This article analyses two aspects of linguistic landscape change: language visibility policy and linguistic landscape data collected in three towns in the Kopanong Municipality, Free State Province. A central finding is that it is left to provinces and municipalities to promote bi- or multilingual language visibility and that the Kopanong Municipality plays a conservative role in this. Significant changes in the linguistic landscape are being introduced by external role-players such as national government agencies. The removal of Afrikaans from the linguistic landscape may be linked to the latter.

The initial celebratory response that hailed the Internet as some kind of utopia has been tempered, and gender scholars increasingly interrogate the Internet in relation to gender (in)justice. There is still a scarcity of work that engages with non-normative identities, and while there is a growing visibility of gay sexuality in the literature, lesbian usage is seldom considered – particularly in South Africa. Against the background of homophobia and limited Internet access, the article first presents an overview of sites relevant to lesbian users by mapping the South African lesbian web sphere, and categorising dating, lifestyle and political sites. It then considers the responses of lesbian users of the Internet as pertains to the value they ascribe to it. While the overview of the websites suggests a fragmented or elusive online lesbian community, the respondents insist on the value of the Internet as a space for community engagement. This contradiction points to the potential for personal and political engagement through the Internet – one that is arguably not yet fully realised.

In view of the Brazil–South Africa Journalism Research Initiative, the purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to some of the main themes and topics in South African (SA) journalism research, and to contribute to the further theoretical conceptualisation of the initiative against the background of the opinion raised in this article about the nature of SA journalism research. The article is structured around four arguments: how the legacy of apartheid has guided, if not dictated, SA journalism research and continues to do so; how the dichotomy of SA society, being both a Third and a First World, affects SA journalism research; how being primarily quantitative, empirical research has produced a mainly self-reflexive and self-indulgent body of journalism research and has obstructed the way for a more phenomenological approach to SA journalism, as being first and foremost a communication phenomenon and a part of cultural production and the production of the SA semiosphere of mediated meaning; and how representation could form a metatheory for future research and contribute to the ontological and epistemological points of departure of the comparative research between South Africa and Brazil.

This article deals with the shifting media discourses of nationalism in the South African media in relation to two victories in the Rugby World Cup (RWC) tournaments in 1995 and 2007 respectively. Through an analysis of discourse in three mainstream daily newspapers, the article seeks to establish how media attention to the South African team's performance in the 2007 RWC articulated changing notions of nationhood. While the dominant discourse in 1995 was that of reconciliation and the ‘rainbow nation’, played out on the rugby field, nationalism in 2007 seemed to be defined more in terms of ‘Africanness’ and transformation. The article maps this shift from ‘rainbow nation’ to ‘Africanness’ by examining key issues and topics that featured in three local mainstream newspapers in 2007, using theoretical concepts from Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. The argument is that commentators in the mainstream press were unable to move beyond their divisive discourses, even when evidence to the contrary emerged in the form of inclusive fever-pitch grass root support for the Springboks during RWC 2007. In closing, it is argued that the gap between popular perception/actions and political discourse in the media can be explained in terms of the fact that in the media rugby has become a symbol of the failure of the ‘nation-building’ rhetoric in the discourse of the African Renaissance.