Tiger Woods and Accenture

http://blogs.zdnet.com/sommer/?p=717

Currently it is nearly impossible to discuss branding without bringing up Tiger Woods. Though most of his sponsors have ended their deals with Tiger, except unsurprisingly Nike (there are just too many jokes to be made here with their slogan), Accenture is a particularly interesting case. Many journalists/bloggers have noted that Accenture has gotten some of the best publicity because of the Tiger scandal, because before no one really knew what Accenture was. Accenture is a consulting firm, but everyone just knew them has a company that endorsed Tiger. This issue is extremely relevant to the Naomi Klein chapter. She discusses the risks companies take when using the images of celebrities. Often, the celebrity can become bigger than the brand and the brand gets lost. For Accenture, they never really had a brand to begin with. For them, Tiger Woods became their brand, which is especially odd as I personally do not see the connection between a consulting firm and golf/Tiger Woods, and clearly neither did anyone else.

The above article also mentions how risky it is for any company to use a celebrity because, after all, celebrities are human and extremely capable of making mistakes like anyone else (probably more so). Not that the Tiger Woods episode is going to end celebrity endorsements. However, perhaps it will make companies think more carefully about who they choose.

"American Beauty: A Brief History of Abercrombie's Hiring Practices"

Great little piece about Abercrombie & Fitch's image machine. It speaks to our upcoming topic of consuming difference:

http://jezebel.com/5479980/american-beauty-a-brief-history-of-abercrombies-hiring-practices

"Star Wars" and "Avatar"

This post is partially in response to Charlie's. but it was too long for the limiting comment boxes to display it easily. The Seabrook article had me thinking about "Avatar," and particularly the so-called "Pandora Effect."

I liked Seabrook's analysis of the Lucasfilm employees he met, that they are happy because "feeling successful in their jobs for "Star Wars" helped prove that the lessons of "Star Wars" do come true. The narrative of the film and the power of its brand becomes so ingrained in the consciousness of its fans that it has (for Seabrook, who certainly takes some speculative liberties in his otherwise journalistic analysis) a measurable impact on their quality of life. It is important to remember that Lucas was basically taking an American master narrative--one that he felt a particularly strong connection to--and re-branding it as something new and appealing to a technologically-obsessed generation. There is nothing particularly original about "Star Wars" as a story--and even the visuals are culled from numerous other sources--but the way it was sold was part of the key to its success.

I wonder if the obsession with Pandora in Cameron's film--which is based rather blatantly on the fictional European/American post-colonial narrative about infiltrating and sublimating the "other"--appeals to an inherent desire to become another. Just as Seabrook applies Lucas' biography to "Star Wars," I would apply Cameron's noted obsession with deep sea diving to his newest blockbuster. Certainly the "Pandora Effect," a psychological malaise that occurs after realizing that the in-theater world isn't real, reflects the power of the narrative mixed with the technology. I think that's what's so smart about the way that Cameron and his PR experts branded his new form of 3-D and motion capture technology. People were convinced going into "Avatar" that it would be an experience of experiencing another world first hand. It was sold almost as a 2.5 hour vacation, and it's only natural that people who bought into the 3-D and the adventure narrative it supports would have difficulty coming back to reality.

I don't think that "Avatar" will enjoy quite the same merchandising success as "Star Wars"--partially because the narrative isn't quite as ripe for expansion as Lucas' universe, but more importantly because the brand that has made it such a popular film is so reliant on the technological aspect of the experience. In some ways Cameron's film is closer than Lucas' to an unadulterated cinematic experience--it seems almost self-contained, a world that cannot be expanded upon because the technology is so essential to the brand's impact on the psyche. Just days after the film premiered, I began seeing new ads for old Second Life-style social MMOs that emphasized the ability to become and play as a Na'vi. Whereas, as Seabrook's article discussed, "Star Wars" was a perfect bridge between cinematic narrative and real life, giving a grandiose meaning to the lives of its fans, "Avatar" doesn't seem to make that connection. The desires created by its narrative and the technological brand--most importantly becoming the other"--cannot be applied to or satisfied by "normal life" as a whole. "Avatar" is "Star Wars" for a virtual reality age--if someone could develop an MMORPG based on the game for 20th Century they would be a billionaire.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/business/media/18adco.html?ex=1358398800&en=df3e65772e15460e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/fashion/23DRES.html?_r=1

American Apparel Clothing/Activist Branding

Hey all,

I thought some of these articles may be relevant for today's discussion on consumer branding/marketing and the larger ideological threshold of corporate activism through a brand and embodiment (ie: case study in looking at American Apparel).

American Apparel has begun an ad/marketing/activist campaign on legalizing immigration in the U.S. ("Legalize L.A.").
Here are some articles- I will post a clip to watch as well; however, I recommend taking a look on America Apparel's website- paying attention to the construction of a particular identity brand that revolves around the notion of "borderless."

Brands and toys

So as I'm sure is expected of me at this point, I was intrigued by John Seabrook's chapter about Star Wars and the way that brand has played a role particularly related to the licensing of products. The article, for me, largely recalled something I read a while ago by Jonathon Gray that is all about the role toys played in that franchise, and I think it's an interesting point to bring up in the context of brands and brand identity.

Not only does Star Wars have toys, but those toys have been an essential part of constructing the entirety of the Star Wars universe and (as many people know) are a large part of what helped make George Lucas a very, very rich man/makes the franchise so incredibly rich. The toys are part of what helped sustain the franchise during the decades between trilogies, and even between the films by providing a space for play for fans, who could take up action figures and vehicles and the like and create their own stories (some even thinking this is part of why there are temporal gaps between the films).

Yet at the same time, the merchandise helped construct the brand in a number of ways. Not only did the huge amount of merchandise/some people's extensive collecting of it set up Star Wars as a clear phenomenon (as if the box office sales hadn't already), but they also are clearly part of the idea of looping. Sales of particular figures were tracked, and fan reactions to particular characters were used in continuing the brand (Fett is a really good and easy example from the series - but it happened all the time, as there are tons of figures/vehicles released that are either of background characters without lines [hammerhead], or vehicles that never appear in the films) and making it expand far beyond just the films.

The sort of personal, emotional value that certain brands can take on is really interesting, as well; some people make incredibly strong connections to a product/brand. The example of a car does give a clear understanding of what it is to continually buy the experience of driving (leasing a Ford), but I think that it understates the role that emotions may play in the experience. I wish I could find it somewhere online, but the short film "The Robot Fixer" is about this convergence - (Bernice Chin (Wai Ching Ho) has never really known her estranged son Wilson. Now a car accident has put Wilson into a coma. And the only clue he's left behind is a box of twenty-year-old toy robots. As her daughter Grace (Cindy Cheung) presses her to deal with Wilson's deteriorating condition, Bernice becomes obsessed with Wilson's toys, as if repairing the robots will help her connect with her unreachable son.). She is trying to complete a collection, but the toys are essentially never ending - she is buying to constantly be trying to get an emotion that ultimately is unable to come from the purchasing. And it comes from a brand of toy, a particular line that. Talk about the power a brand can have over emotion.

The other brand identity that has always intrigued me is the Air Jordan line by Nike, particularly in reference to the Spike Lee commercials - Nike being willing to pay the fine so that Jordan would wear the shoes and attract attention, while making the very stylized commercials...

Update:

In walking to class from the CTCS office, I noticed the poster for Gallipoli and that made me think about The Truman Show - talk about the creation of a total brand identity, with a singular star representing all the products. Jordan could only aspire to have that kind of all encompassing reach (though I'd imagine he'd want to be informed about it all). That unawareness, though, relates nicely to Seabrook's other chapter, and the unrecognition of many people of the role their clothing plays in being advertising.

Watch this Video!

DS Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5

Click here for linked version

So John and I watched this video for a course we're taking in video games and critical theory, but I feel as though it is also particularly germane to our discussion of the brand as new media object. Specifically, I'm interested in the video's discussion of the game-ification of culture and how a system of surveillance, competition, and incentivization can be exploited by corporations under the benevolent auspices of "play." Throughout, it's also very interesting to see the speaker, Jesse Schell, tread that very fine line between utopian and dystopian rhetoric...

However, before I get into the video, I think it would definitely be useful to talk a little bit about my reaction to Celia Lurie’s essay so that I might better appropriate its concepts in a clear and specific way. First off, let me just say that while I definitely feel as though Lurie’s claims to the metaphorical equivalence of brands and new media sometimes seem like a bit of a stretch, I do think that the large majority of her points have validity. In line with Canclini, I appreciate the fact that she imagines the brand as an interface between producers and consumers, a dynamic “image instrument” for facilitating a communicative feedback loop between the two parties. Brands really do have a profit incentive to be malleable and heterogeneous in response to the varied and constantly updating demands of consumers. At the same time, I’m also glad that she recognizes that the way the brand works as an information management tool in mediating the dynamic relationships between producers and consumers doesn’t operate under some pure “interactivity,” but under an “asymmetrical” distribution of power.

However, my main point of contention with Lurie’s article is that she seems to imply that because the brand deals in the language of “personality,” “image,” “value,” and “qualitative” judgment, its operation as an object is somehow not rational (I don’t think she is quite saying that it is irrational). On the contrary, I feel that if we just slightly tweak the framing of her key insights, the “totalizing” (but not “total”) impulses of the brand’s “dynamic unity” can be seen as a form of hyperrationality. True, as Eva Illouz told us last week, the mode of address to the consumer must take into account the idea of emotion, but isn’t the whole point of market research to try and figure out how to statistically pinpoint and utilize various emotions as tools in the generation of profit? (Illouz’s notion of emotion as more precise and differentiated than the notion of “desire” might have a relationship to the concept of modality here…) And as Naomi Klein has told us this week (and Baudrillard has told us previously), brands are in the business of signs, culture, and lifestyles rather than just products, but in order to better target their desired demographics, entire armies of marketing researchers and psychologists must do their best to engineer a brand image which simultaneously differentiates itself from other brands within the market, while also establishing a continuity for the brand to which various products can be seen to recognizably belong.

It is within this “logos” of hyperrationalization and the expansion of the brand that I now turn to the video. Although I think that the speaker makes some outlandish claims and sort of makes the opposite value-judgment from the one that I would make, I do think that he is useful in projecting many of the relationships between technology and branding that I think may constitute our near future. In line with what Henry Jenkins calls the “black box fallacy,” Schell recognizes that technological convergence does not necessarily mean the creation of digital swiss army knives, but instead will entail the proliferation and expansion of diverse technologies into ambient space, subsumed under the dynamic unity of the brand. (Although he doesn't choose to call this process "convergence" and retains none of the nuances of Jenkins' use of the term, I would argue that Schell's vision of the proliferation and expansion of technologies at least doesn't fall into the naive reductionism of the black box fallacy). In Schell's vision, user-feedback loops will not just be conducted via consumer surveys and market research but will be incentivized via ubiquitous gaming which melds the brand and aesthetic object so well that we no longer have mere brand sponsorship but complete brand-content integration. Here, those age-old, neoliberal signifiers of freedom, choice, and empowerment get pushed to the next level in the rhetoric of interactivity, which seem to allow consumers to, as Baudrillard so eloquently said, “make the choice imposed on them.”

At this point in Schell's talk, I also couldn't help but think of how surveillance allows g-mail to read your e-mails and profile you in order to generate advertisements customized to your needs. Here, there is a relation between digitization, what Lisa Nakamura calls “menu-driven identities,” and market research that I find particularly troubling. And, as Schell seems to imply, if we can only co-opt ubiquitous sensoring to more "noble" purposes, maybe we can craft better citizens, progressive societies, and, perhaps even most importantly, more efficient and expansive economies. Somewhere, Foucault is turning in his grave...

Sorry for the overly dramatic rant on the dystopian future, but needless to say, this video sort of struck a chord with me. While I do agree that digital technologies offer particular affordances for decentralization and grassroots empowerment, I do think that they also can be implemented in the branding sense for a more efficient methodology of control. I personally think we need to pay more attention to the discourse of the latter if we don’t want to trump the potentially liberating possibilities of the former.

P.S. for Charlie: Watch out for his discussion near the beginning of Wii Games and Facebook applications as more "authentic" or "realistic" gameplay in distinction to more traditional, fantasy oriented games. Third order simulacra anyone?

some of you guys may remember when this commercial first came out. I don't consider myself to be a really emotional person, but sometimes a commercial will move me more than the actual show I am watching.

this one too:





"consumption create fantasy worlds that offer to the modern individual a variety of identities, vicarious experiences and emotions"

"emotions frequently entail a sense of urgency --they compel one to action. Emotions are not to be equated with action, but compel us to it"

from Eva Illouz's essay, Emotions, Imagination and Consumption

yeah... I agree with what Illouz says and I found The Persuaders really interesting as well as the new(-ish) advertising strategies that target a consumers emotions, however the doc never says how effective these techniques are. Some commercials literally make me tear up but I don't have any desire at all to buy their products. From reading Pearl's post, I think her presentation tomorrow will go into this but I think it would be interesting to see how many of us have made purchases based on commercials we have seen.

Rehabilitating Fan Art

Austrian artist Albert Exergian has created a series modern art posters inspired by (primarily) US television shows, thus elevating fan art from internet fan sites to gallery walls. Fundamentally these prints are no different than the hobby art created by fans around the world, but these pieces are to be taken seriously as the description of the series points out. “CREATED OUT OF A LOVE FOR POSTERS, MODERNISM AND TELEVISION, THERE WASN'T A CLIENT OUT THERE TO COMMISSION SUCH A JOB SO AUSTRIAN DESIGNER ALBERT EXERGIAN WROTE HIS OWN BRIEF AND CREATED THIS SELF INITIATED SERIES OF POSTERS THROWING ALL OF THE ABOVE INSPIRATIONS INTO THE CREATIVE MELTING POT.” (http://www.blanka.co.uk/Art/Exergian/Iconic_TV)

The implication is that a certain class would be uninterested in commissioning such art, but instead of implying this series is low-brow it is imagined as innovative. The artist takes a symbol of each show and creates a graphic and modern representation of popular television programs. These pieces should be valued as they are not products of hysterical and feminized fans, but these pieces are instead a product of a designer and fan of “modernism and television.” The artist is unique in his love for television. These posters are inherently “masculine” as they are not easily accessible, they are removed from the market (as they have not been commissioned), they are auratic, and there is an implied labor occurring outside of the home. Traditional fan art instead is devalued in it’s feminization as it is widely available and accessible, unproductive, emotional, and an implied hobby-like labor occurring in the home. Exergian’s labor is productive as it’s use of modern graphic design can enter a high-art sphere and available for purchase, whereas traditional fan art is inherently unproductive as it will remain monetarily valueless and a product of low-culture.

The Failure of Emotional Branding?

Because I am doing the sponsorship for this coming week, I have re-watched The Persuaders a couple of times and I found the case study on Song Airlines particularly thought provoking. Throughout the documentary, Song Airlines has been praised for evoking emotional appeal to potential customers. Using Andy Spade's words, the most important attribute of the airline was not its service, its product nor its benefits, but instead, it was the emotions and ethos that Song Airlines attempted to create. The documentary could not stress more on the shifting importance of emotions over product attributes over the years. It is true that customers nowadays want more than just information and functionality of the products. They want something deeper, and more substantial, something that can make them part of the experience. Adidas, for instance, has followed Song in creating an online virtual community where its sneaker fans can participate, rather than just owning a pair of the collectibles. This Adidas augmented reality campaign is still under construction, but the teaser already shows a lot of emotions, that we as consumers do not know what the commercial is selling anymore. It is definitely correct that consumers pay more attention to their emotional attachment/ detachment they have towards certain brands.



The Persuaders was made back in 2004. By 2006, Song Airline completely failed and eventually closed down. If emotional branding is that important to consumers nowadays, what made Song fail? I have come to conclusion that:

1) Consumers are still directed by price. Low price doesn't necessarily appeal to general public anymore. In fact, low prices often signal low quality, thus consumers are unsure of the quality of the brand.
2) Traditional media may not be the most effective way to convey messages anymore. But while Song is creating buzz by opening concept store in Boston, it is also important that this "buzz" is well managed. Because information is spread so quickly, poorly managed buzz could create inconsistency of image.
3) And of course, it just happened that Song launched in an economic downturn.

It is certain that emotional connection is and will still be essential to marketing and branding, but there are certain trends in consumer behavior that marketers have to pay close attention to. After all, emotional appeal is not the one size fit all solution to all the marketing crises.

More Men Marrying Wealthier Women

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/us/19marriage.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/fashion/07campus.html?scp=3&sq=more%20women%20in%20college%20than%20men&st=cse

This first article is about how there is an increasing trend of couples where the wife makes more money than the husband. However, I found the most interesting quote of the article to be, "We’ve known for some time that men need marriage more than women from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being...” from Stephanie Coontz, a college professor. Her assertion goes against all of the essays we have read regarding post-feminism and specifically the TV show Sex and the City. Of course it's not surprising that such a statement would come from a woman, and it is very unclear where the evidence for this comes from. Mainstream culture and media would suggest that it is actually the opposite. Perhaps such a statement is meant to be empowering for women, but it appears completely unfounded. On the other hand, perhaps her statement is true and it is the media which has worked to appease the anxieties of men by showing the opposite.

The second article discusses the recent trend in colleges of women outnumbering men. The article focuses on how the imbalance affects the dating scene and barely makes mention of the fact that such statistics show the progress women have made in education. Nor does it mention that even though women are topping men in education, the job market is still incredibly skewed male. While the article does point out many problems women have in college when trying to find a relationship that lasts more than one night, it fails to offer suggestions to change the situation and there is absolutely zero critique of the way in which college men treat college women. Thus it is not surprising that this article was written by a man, who most likely does not find any problems with the situation.

Both articles negatively spin what should be positive advancement for women. Because neither article offers a solution, both imply women must accept the situation. Furthermore, both articles imply that this female predicament is no one's fault but their own. I highly doubt that is the case.

South Park and Drawn Together

Here's the episode guide for the South Park episode that mocks Super Nanny - if you want to just watch the Super Nanny part, scroll down. But the episode also mocks Nanny 911 and other similar shows.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/1007

Here's the Drawn Together episode all about Super Nanny

http://www.hulu.com/watch/56815/drawn-together-super-nanny

Alters and the Mann family in Supernanny.

Reading Diane F. Alter's article on Class and Taste in the Simpsons, and Eva Illouz's Emotions, Imagination and Consumption, I can conclude that firstly, emotion is, instead of desire, a better way to measure or examine the sociology of consumption. Thus, emotion provides a better way for sociologists to investigate the pattern of consumption, in other words, how our tastes are formed. Secondly, taste is largely altered by class distinction. Thirdly, gender differences and gender roles also have a lot to do with our value to different cultures.

I think these few points are relatively easy to grasp, but I found Alter's article really interesting in a way that the families she interviews have emphasized a lot on the importance of being middle class, even though they might not be on an economical, and financial point of view. This reminds me of the Mann Family from Supernanny. The Mann's is clearly a middle class family, from the way they dress, the car they drive, the house they live in, to their leisure activities (going to the beach), we can obviously call them a middle class bourgeois. Yet, the mother still remains traditionally the home maker of the household. This family, in this sense, looks very similar to the Hartman family Diane Alters interviewed. (the dad is the primary breadwinner, and the mom works part time but mainly does all the housework) I don't know if it was the working class values that make the kids behave the way they did, but it is quite obvious that Supernanny is trying to reinforce some middle class quality to the family. By getting the dad involved in teaching the kids, for example, she certainly has broken the gender stereotypes traditionally portrayed in working class family. By successfully taming the children, especially the eldest child, it looks like Supernanny does not only bring harmony to the family again, she also leads the Mann's to a higher class privilege.

Tourism

Before discussing something particularly interesting to me in Illouz's article, I want to say that I really enjoyed reading it because it was a. so well grounded with simple examples at points where the language is mildly ambiguous, b. very cogently written, and c. it is a very clear nuancing of older ideas that does not "call them out" as being wrong, but very appropriately recognizes that these ideas may be latent in other critiques/analyses of consumer culture, but ought to be made explicit - simultaneously recognizing this article is a point of departure/expansion, rather than the end all be all of articles on emotion and consumerism.

So, I'm not sure if we're going to talk about this later, but I want to talk a little bit about the tourism that is mentioned in the article. I think the points made about LA Gang Tours are really interesting, so I'm going to work in a slightly different direction - towards the particularly hyperreal tourism that goes on. Of course, disaster tourism is itself in many ways hyperreal by constructing a safe space of experience while looking at disaster, but I'm more interested in the particularly hyperreal tourist attractions. Which of course brings up Disneyland.

Mainstreet USA kind of defines hyperreality; it is a sign for the idealized America of the 1950s that never really existed. Not to mention the rest of the park - and Disney even went a step further by making it so for most people, once they visited the park, it was already nostalgic since they already knew the park because of the TV show The Wonderful World of Disney. Here's the opening:

This is really interesting to me from a consumer level because it means not only is there nostalgia present in the literal presentation of Mainstreet USA (which at the time must have been very surreal - an attraction that is already nostalgic for itself), but there is also some feeling of nostalgia/etc for the show/watching the show. Further, we know it is unreal, yet it still evokes a sense of nostalgia for the past. I think Baudrillard's point about the function of Disneyland is really salient in this particular case - "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation." In the context of LA Gang Tours in particular, this makes a lot of sense - the tours seem more real because Disneyland is less than an hour away, and those tours are NOT the idealized America (well, maybe they are in some sense) that Disneyland marks. Indeed, our nostalgia/emotions towards the rest of our consumer society are in some way taken out of the realm of fictional emotion because of places like Disneyland. I think this works further on the level of other advertising (like for toothpaste), where our emotions that are derived from consumer habits (like going to the mall and whatever else) seem more real because they do not flow directly/they do not copy exactly the model presented by advertisements.

Zoo-ifying South Central

Los Angeles is known for tour bus excursions that intrude on the star-studded neighborhoods in West Los Angeles, but not as known are the tour busses that schlep curious tourists into the gang and poverty stricken South Central Los Angeles. I was recently reading the LA Times when I came across a story about LA Gang Tours, a company that proudly touts that it will reveal to tourists “the history and origin of high-profile gang areas and the top crime-scene locations.” The company was created by a former gang member who has made a pact of sorts with local gang members to not disturb the tour, and he in turn will hand out micro-loans and find jobs for gang members. I do not know why this concept surprised me, in fact it makes just as much sense as the tours on the other side of town.

The most rudimentary explanation for this phenomenon can be linked to the glorification of thug life through hip-hop or to the promise that to visit or immerse oneself into these neighborhoods will lead to a transformation or redemption as seen in The Blindside, Southland, or Dangerous Minds (to name a few.) I however would push the explanation further and in line with the arguments of Bell Hooks or Renato Rosaldo. By consuming the “other,” or by seeing the “other” in a state of suffering one is experiencing “nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed. Os as a process of yearning for what one has destroyed that is a form of mystification.” (Rosaldo Culture and Truth) To venture into these neighborhoods that are primarily inhabited by Hispanic and African Americans the Anglo American is obscuring actual human suffering through the novelty and kitsch of tourism. Furthermore, by marking the other as primitive, dangerous, and exciting the other becomes fetishized as a reparation to the sterility that is whiteness. There is no attempt to enter these neighborhoods and change them, but instead to temporarily inhabit them and to witness them through the eyes of the other. By establishing a difference between one culture and the other, one is able to feel empowered by their status after experiencing or consuming the other’s.

At the risk of sounding completely awful I do not find that much difference between gang tourism and the videos that celebrities keep posting of themselves visiting Haiti. There is an overwhelming desire to consume human misery. Misery may not be “cool,” but to be there first person to experience it is. Celebrities post videos of their recent voyages to Haiti, while German tourists can brag about experience the LA thug life. By observing or consuming raw human suffering you become an authority or at least a witness. Celebrities do not have to post the videos of themselves doing charitable work, but it is imperative that they prove their authority. By proving you were there or experienced it first hand you are placing yourself in history and raising your own cultural value.

Another show that I find to be really interesting in the context of feminism/post feminism is Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. While I think the whole show is really interesting in its various portrayals of female empowerment (Buffy as the most powerful, but being a singular female whose strength can't for most of the show also be within other girls, Willow as gaining a lot of strength in a form of synthesis from being around another female) which are sometimes pretty problematic (Buffy/Spike, anyone?), I think that in terms of the consumerist, post-feminist issues brought up by the articles, the final episode of the show is really interesting. In it, Buffy/Willow find a way to turn every potential slayer in the world into a real slayer, giving them all the mystical strength that before had only existed in one (or at most two) girls at any given time. This, in many ways, seems like it could be an endorsement of one of the modes of postfeminism brought up by Negra - the equality model. It doesn't quite fit, though, because not every female is a potential slayer, so it doesn't quite make feminism un-useful to the girls (especially since evil is running rampant). Certainly it doesn't fall into the same category as Sex in the City in terms of its presentation of consumerism, but I think it's an interesting counterpoint in the sense that it deals explicitly with issues of female empowerment and the issues of femininity in the current "post-feminist" landscape.

Now please excuse a slight diatribe on the issue of why both my above post and many academic articles about media tend to bother me.

I've always been intrigued by the approaches taken to media criticism in relation to contemporary culture. Angela McRobbie seems to fairly soundly criticize from a textual standpoint the positive image of feminism supposedly shown in television shows such as Sex in the City (as is argued by Diane Negra). Negra, however, is not really arguing that the show is unabashedly feminist or trangressive or subversive - rather, she specifically says in the conclusion that "some of the series' limits need to be linked to a lwoered sense of expectation for what constitutes subversive or trangressive media content in an era of great suspicion about feminism." These two things hint at my fairly fundamental problem with a lot of this criticism - it seems to care significantly more about how images of the female are represented rather than how they are received. Certainly, representation is important in that it delimits and largely structures what interpretations are feasible, but it does not operate in a deterministic model. McRobbie's article even seems to grant this point by arguing at various points that a particular interpretation exists, but is flawed because of (x).

And I feel like that is fairly fundamentally at odds with what seems to generally be the goal of many stances/movements/people, which is to work towards a shift in the way people act/view/believe. These nearly entirely textual models of analysis seem to largely dismiss the way that viewers wind up interpreting images from a particular show. Certainly pointing out who is actually able to watch these shows and the tours/etc that result is part of it, but I think the emphasis is somewhat misplaced - in short, I feel like many times feminist/anti-classist/anti-racist/etc readings are more concerned with the representation of the struggle than with the way that representation is reacted to. Yes, I know that it's one of the only things that can be talked about without extensive ethnographic research/heavy speculation, but it still tends to irk me a bit - especially when I know that my friends are largely split on Sex in the City, as half read it ironically and half don't. And while this may seem like an incidental point, McRobbie seems to really clearly point out that she sees fan/alternative readings as problematic because of their relationship to pleasure is (in her mind) not unruly or chaotic or deeply ambivalent (a point I find strange for various reasons, not the least of which is that she assumes that a cultural studies approach cannot be constantly problematized).

target women

I think McRobbie brings up an interesting point when she discusses issues of post feminism in Sex and the City and why women (who consider themselves feminists) enjoy watching the show. She writes that "fandom then seems to be the key to understanding complicity." That statement made me examine my own viewing habits and why I watched the first two seasons of Gossip Girl.

In the entire show, there is no character that I can identify with or sympathize with. The reason I stayed with the show for so long because I loved the character of Blair and *spoiler alert* I wanted to see when she and Chuck would get together...they do. I think fandom is part of the reason these shows are so popular but I can't really imagine viewers actually liking Blair or Serena. Fandom in this case results from wanting to be those characters or at least be their friends(never their equals...ex: Blair's token asian and black friends.) Blair and Serenas consumption (of clothes, boys, etc) gives them status. I've had friends argue that Blair and Serena are examples of strong female characters, but they can't be that strong if they only find fulfillment in buying the trendiest clothes, dating the hottest (or richest) guy and backstabbing their way to the top. The first year the show came out, teen fashion magazines would have pages devoted to how to look like Blair or Serena and later Vanessa (Dan's ethnically ambiguous friend from Brooklyn... which brings up issues of whiteness and race in Gossip Girl and Sex and the City.)

In order to be these girls, you have to buy clothes like them and dress like them. A show that glorifies consumption is not shocking at all, but it is sort of disturbing. The show falls under McRobbie's critique that within these shows is embedded "the constant focus on femininity as requiring the regular consumption for fear of repudiation by others." Gossip Girl is literally all about the fear of repudiation by others.

random clip from Current:

Post-feminism and Gossip Girl

I'm having some difficulty with post-feminism as an idea. As I understand it, it seems more like a catch-all for the various responses that dissatisfaction with third-wave feminism. The Negra and McRobbie articles seemed to offer up different definitions of a post-feminist ideal. Negra connects it (not exclusively) to neoconservative efforts to return women from the working world to the home. McRobbie sees it as--and this is the way that I've learned it in other classes--a new kind of illusory gender/sexual independence that is dangerous because it tends to ignore the fact that the world is still quite patriarchal.

I like the comparison we've created between Sex and the City, which is oriented toward adult women, and Gossip Girl, which is oriented (somewhat horrifyingly) toward teenage girls. While marriage does not seem to hold the same obsessive value for the high school students of Gossip Girl as it does for the four women of Sex and the City, the show does place a lot of moral value in monogamy, especially for the two main female friends/rivals. This is an easy double standard to point out, but the guy who sleeps with Blair and Serena is held far less responsible for his actions than the girls (and their social circles) hold them.

Regardless of whether a particular program is advocating neoconservative family values or the image of the independent career woman, clearly both Sex and the City and Gossip Girl are structured to promote the value and femininity of consumption, particularly of fashion consumption. Sex and the City seems to approach this in two ways: that consumption is both the duty and the play of the career-oriented woman, and that fashion consumption is ultimately intimately connected with the ability to find a mate. Gossip Girl is even more brazen with its product placement and foregrounding of the importance of dressing right as a means to fit in with other girls. I wonder about the significance of the (excuse me while I wiki this) Dan Humphrey character, who seems to prize values running contrary to the excess consumption practiced by Blair and Serena--perhaps someone who has seen the series can enlighten me as to his character arc and traits. I particularly liked McRobbie's reflection on her studies of women's magazines in the '90s. These magazines can promote the image of the independent woman all they want, but at the end of the day such an image is directly connected to a complex marketing strategy meant to encourage further consumption. All in all, post-feminism seems very suspect to me.

The Perplexing Social Economy of "Gossip Girl"

I find “Gossip Girl” to be rather bizarre. Most CW shows I have seen are, but “Gossip Girl” is a particularly potent example. I don’t understand the stakes here. I don’t understand why certain things matter in this world and why certain things go without notice or comment. I don’t understand the value system. By “value system” I don’t mean the moral structure per se, but, rather, the entire system of assigning and recognizing value in its various forms. Basically, I am perplexed by the social economy of “Gossip Girl.”

It is clear that, while economic capital is a major theme, the primary form of capital is socio-political capital. Money is a ticket past the threshold of representation (although there seem to be exceptions), but once inside this world, cultural cache pays the bills. This is not entirely surprising. What confuses me are some of the ways this cache ebbs and flows (and the reasons). Lynne Joyrich discusses this odd dynamic in her discussion of Television and melodrama:

This rhythm, in film melodrama and the TV soap opera, is one of exaggerated fluctuations, marking the discontinuities of emotional experience as the plots slowly build, amidst much delay, to dramatic moments of outbreak and collision before sudden reversals of fortune begin the movement again.[i]

Why is Dan so incensed when he finds out that Serena slept with Blair’s boyfriend a long time ago? He doesn’t even like these people (in fact, it seems that he barely knows them). I can imagine being disappointed to find out that Serena would do such a thing, but he seemed personally offended. Why is this immediately a deal breaker? Serena has already explained that she has actively tried to make changes in her life since that time, even leaving town for an extended period. What I assume is an attempt to paint Dan as having integrity ends up looking like morally superior posturing. Like other shows of this kind, “Gossip Girl” assigns oddly excessive value (or, to put it another way, stakes) to certain plot points and character developments. But, of course, that is the bailiwick of a sensational drama, particularly about teenagers – inflation of value.

---

[i] Lynne Joyrich, “All that Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture,” Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, eds. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 229.

Baudrillard and Canclini/Trentmann

Hi everyone!

So in re-visiting Baudrillard this weekend with the help of Aniko’s notes, I definitely think I understand his argument a bit better. I’d love to discuss him in relation to the readings for this week a bit more in class today, so here are just a few of my questions/preliminary observations (by no means is this an exhaustive list):

1) Baudrillard’s theory shifts the focus away from Marxist theories of production towards consumerism. In what ways can we consider his work a theory for post-industrial societies?

2) Baudrillard’s emphasis on a self-regulating system of objects and desires seems to disavow any possibilities for resistant appropriations (in the cultural studies sense). I think that Canclini provides a necessary corrective to Baudrillard in this respect, for while Baudrillard improved on Marx by shifting the emphasis from producer to consumer, Canclini provides a model in which he imagines a communication circuit between producers and consumers.

3) In looking again at Baudrillard, I find a fundamental contradiction in his essay between his emphasis on communicative systems of objects and ideological control and his notions of sign play and slippage. How can he invoke Claude Levi Strauss’s structural approach on one hand and Derrida (at least implicitly) on the other? In my opinion, Canclini brings Baudrillard one step further by more specifically articulating how commodities as codes can be used in the process of communication, citizenship, and identity/community formation (and without Baudrillard’s apocalyptic tone). Canclini’s critique of postmodernism halfway through his essay seems almost like a direct refutation of Baudrillard’s later work. (In my opinion, I don’t think “Consumer Society” is purely postmodern just yet….)

4) Trentmann’s article on the relationship between consumerism and modernity seems to provide a historical refutation to Baudrillard and Marx’s conception.

Some interesting comparisons

I think the brief Hartley reading was really interesting since it put forth a few things that would "benefit from interdisciplinary and international comparison." I'm particularly interested by the second and third points from his list - and the third seems to me to be fairly related to Canclini's article (I'll explain the relation I see in a little bit).

On the second, though, I think that's really interesting is the difference between the way different copyright holders in different countries deal so very differently with their intellectual property. In the US, we see pretty frequently companies holding onto their IP for dear life and refusing to change the way they interact with it. Large music and film companies sue people for downloading and look at piracy as a problem to be eliminated rather than as symptomatic of a need to change the way they're going about distribution (TV stations seem to have caught on to this idea much more quickly, hosting their shows online in better quality than is possible on megavideo and the like). This almost seems to be part of a digital divide - hinting that one place where it may be located is across sectors of use and to what extent it defines interaction with the world (deriving from socialization, job, and so on - more on this in a few moments).

And yet, some industries are so incredibly different. Japanese anime, for example, wound up being distributed in the US largely because the people who owned the IP were so much more willing to let their property be distributed by fans to another country. Originally, it was thought that there wasn't a very large market in the US for it, partially since much of the themes are more adult while animation is traditionally viewed as something for kids in the US. However, fan distribution circuits (largely helped by fansubbing practices, which were sped up by the digital boom in the 90s because creating subtitled videos became much easier) proved a market within the US. Had companies cracked down, this may not have happened and probably wouldn't have happened nearly as quickly. Though now the market is shifting where the race to be the first to create/release a fansub has meant that tons of shows are being released and the anime market is starting to be in a bit of trouble by releasing dubbings (which are often not well loved by fans - the constant mocking of Naruto's voice actor, as well as the many voices in Yu-Gi-Oh! illustrates this pretty well) much later (you can see one fan subber's comments on this process at http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2008-03-11/3). He says the solution is to speed up the market - similar to what seems to have happened with television distribution online.

Anyway, I digress. Sorry for that rant, now on to the digital divide stuff and Canclini. The stuff about the digital divide, to me, comes from around page 45 where a split is talked about in who has creative understanding of the products and who doesn't. This hints at what seems to be a large part of the current divide - not so much who sees the knowledge as important (indeed, it seems the recognition of the ability to use it is pretty well recognized - and given an earlier point, for anyone to care everyone has to recognize the value of that use), but who has the ability to actually creatively use the tools. Here, Canclini argues that it comes from those who can afford to subscribe to information services and more exclusive networks - but I think this is a really limited view. I think, to a large extent, that creativity comes from the ability to have free time to practice - in short, who has a computer/tv/camera to use at their discretion, without worrying about the time. I think Ellen Seiter makes this point really well in her article "Practicing at Home" by comparing higher level uses of technology to playing a piano - sure, everyone may get to play some at school, but the children who can only practice there are not the ones who will become concert pianists. They need to have a piano at home that they can practice on. Likewise, to creatively use a computer means having the time when you can use one (implying often having multiple computers at home) to play around with various tools. The divide as it will continue to exist, then, seems to be still largely related to money - though not in the direct sense of being able to buy things, but being able to buy time to gain the skills that enable people to have "decision making capacity."

Thoughts on Canclini's "Consumers and Citizens"

Since this is my first blog post, I think it would be more constructive to the class discussion if I compare the readings with the films we have watched so far, and from there, I wish to raise some questions I have when I was reading the articles.

While reading Nestor Garcia Canclini's article "Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts," I found the concept of class in consumption particularly interesting. Canclini mentions that scholars have been actively looking for ways to investigate consumption patterns and the rationalities behind consumption, and one way of researching is to look at one's class and group distinctions. It is certainly true that people from different upbringings and backgrounds might very likely to consume differently. Some forms of consumption specifically create major divisions. On one hand, cannibalism, for example, in many media platform, is often performed by people from upper class e.g. foreign movies such as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, and Hollywood productions like Silence of the Lambs. On the other hand, cannibalism is sometimes portrayed as uncivilized and grotesque, one example being the Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd. Canclini believes that consumption is motivated by an interactive sociopolitical rationality, does that mean consumers from different classes reproduce different rationalities during consumption? While Canclini does mention that the shortcoming of this research model is that it understands consumption primarily as a means to creating divisions, I think it's worth discussing if consumption can be influenced by these differences and distinctions? Or in other words, do these divisions make consumerism and capitalism work?

Going from Canclini's article, he also devotes the last part of his essay to transnational consumption and identity. He says that different cultural subsystems often generate different complexity and capacity for innovation. I agree with this statement, especially after seeing that different regions in the world have such different patterns of consumption, yet I find it fascinating that the West is often portrayed as consumers, whereas the East as producers. Frank Trentmann touches on this issue by talking about how, ironically, China had been the major consumer in the world just one to two centuries ago. The shift of consumption patterns from East to West is quite intriguing to me, and I'd love to invest more time on discussing why this trend might have appeared. Industrialization certainly has something to do with that, but I believe consumers from both cultures must have contributed to this unequal participation in production and consumption. Relating this back to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatball, it is quite certain that the film is making fun of waste and excess the West has created, yet I can't seem to find a film or a fairy tale from the East that touches upon these issues on obsessive/ excessive consumption.

Until then, I think Cloudy does not provide an ethical lesson on the danger of excess as it refuses to face the consequences of Flint's action. What do you think?

- Pearl