The Media and Consumer Culture

When asked to pick either a text, an event or a phenomenon that I think exemplifies consumerism one thing sprang to mind.

Fashion Magazines.

For me they are the epitome of consumer culture all wrapped up in a neat package with a glossy front and shining celebrity staring at you from the cover. Depending on what fashion magazine you buy, whether its considered a more high end one like Vogue or a high-street one like Look, can affect your social ranking and status amongst other fashionistas. Which in my opinion is just plain silly. However everything about fashion magazines screams consumerism and highlights our ever growing consumer culture because they tell us what clothes to buy and which celebrity styles to admire which subsequently lead to the 'advise' of more clothes to buy in order to 'get the celebrity look'. Not to mention the 'what's hot and what's not' sections of these 'bibles'.

As for key features:

- Glossy cover with a well-known celebrity on it entices you to buy the damn thing.

- Sub-heading on the front cover outlining the best bits of the magazines contents, usually relating to the latest fashions, tips and sometimes fashion nightmares. (All 'juicy' news to us females)

- 'How to' pages. How to get the latest catwalk look or celebrity look by buying clothes that are affordable.

- Tips on make-up for different skins types, how to dress for your body shape etc. the things to buy for said shape and skin type, where to buy them, how much they cost and how taking their advise on what to wear and buy will help you look your best.

I'm sure there's countless other features, but these are the ones that jump out at me and well, to me one fashion magazine is very much like the other and they all seem to follow the same format and say the same things just the clothes featured are more expensive in some than others.

The media text I've chosen offers a form of escapism for the consumer much like most media texts. By being a regular buyer of fashion magazines you can keep up to date with the latest fashions, get tips from people in the know and find out the latest celebrity news/gossip. All in all, they appear to contain everything a woman would want in a magazine and contain some of the things that we seem to be more than marginally obsessed with within society, celebrities and the way we look.

As for how I relate to this type of media text, I'm afraid I don't. For me, fashion magazines are just something you skim through to pass the time while you're waiting at the hairdressers.

Joshua Gamson - 'The Name and The Product: Late Twentieth-Century Celebrity' and Holmes and Redmond - 'Understanding Celebrity Culture'

'Celebrity has become industrialised'

Gamson talks about how we separate fame from achievement and how the link between the idea of status and excellence has never truly been absolute. Throughout the text he explores the idea of celebrity and out fascination with celebrity culture looking at reality TV stars and how they help to create the 'illusion of intimacy' and make us believe we are really viewing someone else's world.

He also looks at the idea of how stars are 'made' and the notion that 'those who posses star quality have it onstage and off'. Celebrities are used to sell things to us because they are instantly recognisable and this helps to a certain degree to boost their celebrity status.

Celebrities are a 'powerful elite: the media, the industry, the star-makers, are able to control images and are able to direct mass attention through marketing machinery'. In other words, beware...

Holmes and Redmond state that 'if you are not famous then you exist at the periphery of the power networks that circulate in and through the popular media' and the idea that if your not famous your largely responsible for making the famous so ridiculously famous by being fans.

The relationship between fans and celebrities is something Holmes and Redmond go onto explore in order to analyse fame and the idea that stars and celebrities stand in as surrogate friends and family to their fans.

They go on to talk about how we, as a society, talk about fans and how celebrity talk/gossip becomes part of our everyday activities where we often talk about them as if we actually know them based upon the information we gather about them from magazines, TV appearances, photos and interviews.

On the whole they explore out relationship with celebrities and the surrounding culture and how 'fame, like power, could be evenly distributed'. However this thought becomes void because 'if everyone were famous then no one would be famous' and the power relationship between fans and 'celebritisation' wouldn't exist.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright - 'Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire'

Sturken and Cartwright talk about modern consumer culture and the use of imagery is used to sell things to us through advertising.

Advertising images are often use to construct cultural ideas about self-image, lifestyle, self-importance and glamour by presenting whatever is being advertised as things one should desire, people one should envy and how life 'should be'. These constructions based around consumerism can lead to capitalism ideologies, commodity fetishism, and images becoming ISA's or Ideological State Apparatuses to be exact.

Sturken and Cartwright examine how what we now recognise as consumer culture started, looking at the development of department stores in Paris in the 19th century and the invention of mail-order catalogues meaning converted items were readily available to the masses for the first time. Consumerism wasn't just for the cities anymore, it was spreading to the rural areas.

They go onto explore many different aspects of a consumer society and how consumerism can spark desire and envy and help create subcultures depending on what's being marketed and to whom its being marketing to. However this can have a reversed desired effect too. For example band merchandise is obviously marketed at people who like the band, but it's marketed on such a level that it often becomes desired not just to fans but to people who don't even like the band. In this sense it becomes a brand. A good example of this would be Sex Pistols merchandise, thousands of people buy bags, t-shirts, notepads etc with countless recognisable Sex Pistols imagery on such as 'Never Mind The Bollocks' and 'God Save The Queen' when they neither like the band or follow the associated punk culture.

In conclusion the line between what we really need and what we simply desire has become blurred and 'the boundary between the mainstream and the margins is always in the process of being renegotiated'.

Matt Hills - Fan Cultures Reading

Matt Hills' 'Fan Cultures Between Knowledge and Justification' explores the idea of individuals identity through the concept of 'fandom'.

Hills concentrates on four individuals that have written about their own personal interactions with 'fandom' and being a fan. He outlines and analyses what each one says about their own experiences before conducting his own analysis of his 'fandoms'. The individuals, including their accounts, he uses to explain the context of 'fandom' and the idea that within a fan base individuals can form a sense of identity, are John Fiske, Scott Bukatman, Sue Wise and Janet Wolff.

He looks at individuals experiences with being a fan in an attempt to explore the idea that fan 'justification's are accepted cultural facts by ethnographers when they are different for everyone. Their are similarities and crossovers between individuals experiences of 'fandom' but they are mostly unique to the person involved and when looked at in a wider and more analytical context are rudimentary forms and aspects of individuals personalities. Instead of becoming 'home-truths' about a particular type of fan they are more narratives of the self.

In conclusions Hills explores the many different aspects of being a fan and concludes that 'fandom' is a way of exploring who you are as a individual and getting to know yourself, often helping to shape your identity because sometimes 'fandom' doesn't last forever. What we once were fans of, we often grow out of or move on to other interests that then become our new 'fandom'.

Post-Postmodernism Theories - Hypermodernity

So what exactly comes after postmodernism in cultural theory? Why post-postmodernism of course...
So out of three possible new ideas in which to explore, hypermodernity/supermodernity, performatism or new sincerity, I decided to choose the first one.
So what's it all about....

Key features/ideas:
- Hypermodernity explores a stage of society that reflects an intensification of modernity.
- It's a theory that's big on looking at the way we understand, control and manipulate the aspects of our existence.
- It's used to explain how we regard technology and biology as factors that contribute to the above.
- Hypermodernity places emphasis on how highly we value technology within society and the notion that 'yesterday's knowledge is always less than today's'.
- It differs from postmodernism that rejects the idea of 'reasonable change'. Hypermodernity is a term that relies on change, in a technological sense, in order to exist as a way of analysing how society has changed.

Key Theorists:
The main two that I could find and after numerous google searches kept popping up are:
- Sebastian Charles
- Gilles Lipovetsky

Reading List:
- 'Hypermodern Times' - S. Charles and G. Lipovetsky
- 'The Empire of Fashion: Dressing a Democracy' - G. Lipovetsky
- 'Development as Modernity, Modernity as Development' - L.S. Lushaba
- 'Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity' - G. Benko and U. Strohmayer

How it could be used:
I don't feel hypermodernity would be a theory that would really fit with the media text I've chosen for my research repost but I can see where the ideas behind the theory have come from. We appear to live in a very consumer driven society these days and
we go nuts for anything and everything technology. We can never seem to get enough of the stuff and are constantly developing it. When the term hypermodernity comes down to explaining our behaviour then I might be able to relate it to my media text. The way of thinking for one of my media text's, BBC drama 'Small Island', character's isn't really postmodern as that's a theory that isn't big on the whole idea that society can actually change but a truly hypermodern way of thinking for the era the drama's set in. In a time where different ethnicities weren't treated equally, the character dismisses her societies values and believes we are all the same no matter the colour of your skin and that societies way of thinking really can change.

'Postmodernism And 'The Other side' - Dick Hebdige

This week's reading, by Dick Hebdige, looks at the term 'postmodernism' and what exactly the term means. Hebdige applies postmodernism to several different cultural aspects, including different cultural events, as examples to reinforce the points he makes about postmodernism. The main point Hebdige makes is that the term is had to define or pinpoint because used in the many different contexts that are described as 'postmodern' it means different things.

To try and put some of the various ways postmodernism is used to describe things, to put it in context, he relates it to people describing the decor of a room, the design of a building, an arts documentary, a TV commercial etc. In a cultural context, as in society, these types of things can be described as postmodern.

Hebdige explains that no matter what perspective you view postmodernism, it's hard to deny that it doesn't carry some remnants of Marxist ideas. Postmodernism is sort of 'follow on' or progression of earlier, more dominant theories. Hebdige says that you can't 'move back from or go beyond' modernity as the terms of postmodernism are too generally defined, the meaning just isn't specific enough.

I agree with Hebdige because from first studying Postmodernism at college and now re-visiting it at University, it still doesn't seem clear what exactly Postmodernism is. It's a very ambiguous term, with no clear definition, what's postmodern to one person isn't postmodern to another. Postmodernism and our understanding of it is different to everyone.

Useful Quotes and Their Meanings:

'It becomes more and more difficult as the 1980s wear on to specify exactly what it is that 'postmodernism' is supposed to refer to as the term gets stretched in all directions across different debates, different disciplinary and discursive boundaries, as different fractions seek to make it their own, using it to designate a plethora of incom-measurable objects, tendencies, emergencies'. - Postmodernism is such an ambiguous term and applies to a wide variety of different things, it's hard to define.

'A Marxism of whatever kind could never move back from or go beyond 'modernity' in the very general terms in which it is defined with the Post, which is not to say that Marxism is necessarily bound to a 'dynamic' and destructive model of technological 'advance'. - Postmodernism has been built on Marxist ideas and is one of the theories that has evolved against Marxism as times have progressed, but the ideas are still there, and it wouldn't be right to say that Marxism was totally against advances in society, culturally, in terms of technology which we see as a very postmodern thing, but is it really?

While I was looking for something else....

While I was looking on the internet for interesting conservation stories as part of my Online Journalism module. I came across this on The Birmingham Post website about how close Birmingham is to becoming the 'City of Culture'.

I thought it was quite fitting with the culture debate and the events that Birmingham would get to hold if it we're named the 'City of Culture' well, can they really be classed as cultural? I think any of The Frankfurt School theorists, if they were still alive, would have a heart attack....