DS: the Media and Consumer Culture

Cosmopolitan Magazine

The media text I recognise as exemplifying consumer culture in contemporary society is Cosmopolitan magazine. Its tagline on their website is 'fashion, beauty, sex, relationships'. It offers to women the 'wanna-be' model by offering them beauty products, slimming advices, tips for the perfect relationship and sex life etc. It is consisted of number of advertisements of products, that would create for them the image of the perfect woman. It also provides information on celebrities lives, and tips 'how to do that as a certain famous person'.
I used to be a regular reader of that magazine when I was of younger age (about 18- 18 years old), and by then I used to be fascinated of the articles, giving me all this 'glamorous' information and advices how to 'have the perfect life'. When I grew older, I realised it is all a market strategy to make women buy the magazine. After the vast amount of issues of the magazine I bought, I realised the articles are quite similar, and would not provide me that 'perfect' lifestyle. After all this is just a magazine full of pictures of beautiful ladies, and good looking men, and expensive beauty products etc. The sections on relationship advices would not make your own personal love life more successful, just by reading an article. As I said it is all a market driven product, which is made to be sold. I believe that publications of that sort (also 'Glamour') and such, are just made to create an image of the life we want to have, but we simply cannot afford. Even though reading the articles makes you think 'I can have a life like Paris Hilton if I buy this expensive lipstick', after purchasing it, you come to realise you are not having a celebrity life. I don't tend to buy and read these magazines anymore, unless I just happen to have one around, and want an easy read to entertain.

Holmes and Redmond

Chapter 1
Understanding Celebrity Culture

The I and Me of fame

Adulation, identification and emulation are key motifs in the study of celebrity culture. Being famous appears to offer an enormous material,economical, social and physic rewards. That creates a desire of stardom, and a need to be wanted in society. Contemporary fame circulates in like a spider web. It is at the beginning, and at the end of many important social relations.
The discursive strand of the 'me, me, me' fame also relates to the the incomplete nature of (post)modern identity. On the one hand it is argued that the modern self is overly vain and narcisistic. On the other hand, the modern self is said to be marked by a great deal of anxiety, doubt, and confusion on who-to- be in the world. To be famous is to be famous, and that is all that matters.
The fan/ star/ celebrity relationship might be on of the most intimate and far- reaching forms of sociability. Fandom is often a creative enterprise,involving production of artwork. It also opens up new networks of communication and interaction between fans.Something else fandom deals with is to 'search' for the 'authentic' person behind the mask of fame. The body of the celebrity is either used to reproduce racial, and heterosexual gaze, or to emerge queer feelings and fantasies.
Fame is explored in terms of the destructive damage it does to the famous, and to the fans of the famous.

Talk about Fame

The famous are constructed, circulated and consumed through the busy channels of media production. For example Reality TV contestants can be described as 'an epitome of the fabricated celebrity'.
There are two points in relation to discourses of cultural value. Firstly, it is impossible to discuss contemporary celebrities without addressing judgements. secondly, issues of cultural value necessarily structure the varying perspective our contributors offer on celebrities.

Joshua Gamson

The Name and the Product: Late Twentieth Century celebrity

The reading follows the developments in the entertainment industries over the 20th century, and the way they have affected the celebrities culture. There are several important components which have a very important impact on celebrities.
First one was the overall trend targeting the market such as product development, and advertisement that are seeking to attract. Second was the daily practices and interests of PR operatives and journalists that have come to depend on the practices of the entertainment industry, and celebrity in particular. Third, the technologies for providing a visual image that imitates the representation of an activity or an event, or person,rather than representing it directly have become highly developed. Finally in the beginning of the 1970s came the success of magazine and newspaper writing about 'people' and 'personality'. Publications such as People's and Newsweek were the most successful titles of that time.
Television's flow needed filling, so that created the most significant outlet new outlet for image creation.

Celebrity Making Revealed: Late twentieth Century Texts

The narratives and explanations of fame that were developed in the beginning of the century have remained dominant. Since the 1970s when TV Guide has become one of the top selling magazines, celebrity making has become a central theme as business. Fame has always been used as sales device. Stars have shared that 'I'm a piece of merchandise. And the more important I am, the more money I'm worth.' Terms began to change and celebrity was becoming 'merchandise', 'inventory', 'property', a 'product', 'a commodity'. Entertainment production began to be revealed and TV Guide published an article in 1967 offering instructions 'How to manufacture a celebrity'. Several years later a press agent has been quoted that his client could been 'sold...as anything'.
Once an agent's job was to discover celebrity. This has turned into an agent's job is to find a market and produce a celebrity for it.

'Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture', Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright

Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire

The reading suggests the idea that images have a driving role in the market, and that visualising is of high importance, when promoting a product to the consumers. Advertising is a way of making customers believe that they desire a certain product, and that it will provide them a style of life "the way it should be" or can be called "good life". Advertising images are everywhere around us in out daily lives- on TV,on the internet, on billboards, in magazines and movie theaters, etc... Most companies work with advertising agencies whose job is to create a visual image for corporations, products and such.

Consumer Society

Advertising plays a massive role in consumerism society and capitalism. capitalism is an economic system, where the investment in an ownership of goods is primarily held by individuals, or corporations. Consumer society is when the individual is constantly confronted with enormous amount of goods. The increased industrilasation in the 19th century decreased the number of small enterpreneurs, and increased the number of large manufacturers. In consumer society there is a constant demand of new products. Consumer societies are also part of modernity. The urbanisation of life also takes an important part in the consumer society. Window shopping is first introduced in the 19th century.

Commodity Culture and Commodity Fetishism

A consumer culture is a commodity culture. This is a culture in which commodities are central to cultural meaning. Clothing, music, cars, cosmetic products among other products are commodities that people use to present themselves to those around them. Advertising is suggested to be very influential on people's choices.
On of the most important aspects of the Marxist analysis is the idea of commodity fetishism. This refers to the process by which mass produced goods are emptied of the meaning of their production. Commodity fetishism operates through reflection.

Matt Hills: 'Fan Cultures between 'knowledge' and 'justification'

The aim of the reading is to reconsider the fan discourse as a justification for fan passions and attachments. It is suggested that 'asking the audience' does not always mean it would provide us with knowledge. However if the 'asking the audience' is sufficient in itself, then these discursive structures and repetitions would be accepted at face value, rather than being considered as defensive mechanisms designed to render the fan's affective relationship. Another related problem to fan etnographies is what they would assume 'the real'.
Autoetnography is considered as an useful exercise that places tastes, values and attachments of the fan under cultural studies analysis. It indicates that the personal is the core of our cultural identity as we perform it.
It is suggested that the best autoetnographies should be successful in a type of self- destruction and self- destructiveness in which all possible grounds of cultural value are eroded. Autoethnography is considered to place fandom within the cultural and personal setting of networks of friends and family.
It is also suggested that ethnicity is been mirrored back through what texts we become fan of by forming a shared cultural discourse. On the other hand sexuality is not to affect our fandom. As a conclusion it is added that fan ethnographies are limited by narrative structures and moral dualisms.

David Parker and Paul Long 'The Mistakes of the Past'? Visual Narratives of Urban Decline and Regeneration

The reading follows the urban development of Birmingham city. It tells the story of the city's architecture and infrastructure changes. It also provides information about recent cultural events, such as exhibitions of photographers and visual artists. It is suggested that the vision of the artists mentioned has been influenced by post- war Birmingham's architecture. The image of the city creates a narrative of modernisation, both achieved and yet to come. There is an urban renaissance is the redevelopment of contemporary British cities.
Birmingham has paid a heavy price for embracing redevelopment. Nevertheless, the city has gone through major changes including housebuilding and office developments, building shopping centres and other city landmarks. The formation of post-war Birmingham has been an interplay between economics and engineering. Four landmarks defined the image of the city: The Bull Ring Centre opened in 19654,The Rotunda built in 1965, The Central Library which opened 1973 and The Town Hall and the Council House building.
In early post-war period the priority was the free movement of exported goods within and out of Britain. Today commerce depends more on the consumption of imported goods by pedestrians, the tourists.

Performatism, or the end of post-modernism

Performatism, or Post- Postmodernism is a term applied to set developments in culture, art, philosophy that are emerging and reacting to postmodernism. Performatism is heterogeneous and hence impossible to define summarily. It is antithetical to conceptions of postmodernism based on the absence of perspectival view and an ironic coexistence of temporalities. Performative works create their own temporalities and perspectives. They create worlds and ways of seeing performances in and of context.

An appropriated formulation from George Quasha and Chuck Stein: "If traditional representational art is 'figurative,' in the sense that it seeks to capture the 'figure'-the structure and shape-of the object it represents; and if art that moves away from the figurative is 'abstract' (in the precise sense of 'drawn away from'); then later art that allows a non-referential yet identifiable image to form anew can be thought of as con-figurative or re-configurative." Or performative.

Popular readings of Jacques Derrida in comparison to the actual content of his texts provide an interesting analogue for the distinction with "postmodernism". Widely considered to be a figurehead of the version of postmodernism under consideration here, Derrida has been charged with denying and dissolving any standards of evidence and argument, asserting that all texts and all interpretations of texts are on par. A purely negative project. Destruction of all points of view.

His own words and explicit refutations of these accusations suggest a different picture. It would be more appropriate to say that his project undermines a strain of thought present in Western discourse since its inception, one which relies on the illusion of hegemony and the suppression of all alternative forms of thought. Language as vehicle, something external and incidental and used. Referential. Limiting oneself to the words of one sentence when an entire--living, polymorphic--language is available. Entirely different ways of expression and communication. Communication as communion.

The principles developing in this context are not new, but they do run counter to certain entrenched cultural sentiments. This website is intended to focus energies that are otherwise already operative. Promoting community. Noticing overlaps as well as discrepancies. Exploring the question: how do these creative non-referential forms appear?