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?

Dick Hebdige- Postmodernism and "The Other Side"

The term postmodernism could be described within a varied range of critical and descriptive discourses. It gets stretched in all directions between different debates, different disciplinary and discursive boundaries. As it is been used to designate so much it could be argued it might become a meaningless term. Although words as complex and contradictory as this, have formed the focus for historically significant debates and have occupied a semantic ground in which something important felt to be embedded.

There are three closely linked negations which bind the compound of modernism together and thereby serve to distinguish it in an approximate sort of way from other similar beliefs. They are: against totalisation, against teleology and against utopia. All of these negotiations incidentally serve as an attack on Marxism as a total explanatory system. They could be tracked back to two sources. On the one hand historically to the blocked hopes and frustrated rhetoric of the late 1960s and the student revolts. On the other hand through the philosophical tradition to Nietzsche.

Gramsci's approach requires us to negotiate and engage with both power and popular through a range of populist discourses. To engage with the popular we need to force into purely theoretical analysis of a 'negative dialectic '(Adorno) in favour of a more 'sensous (and strategic)logic'. "The Gramscian model demands that we grasp these processes not because we want to use them but because we want to expose them or to understand them in the abstract...".

Critique on distribution of popular music

According to the theorists of the Frankfurt school the production and reproduction of culture is somehow alienating and inherently bad. I would like to make an overview on the distribution of popular music in the contemporary society. This sort of music is produced to be easily memorised, which implies it has simple and repetitive lyrics. The usage of language is on a poor and basic level, so that it would be accessible to a wider audience. The 'issues' tackled in 'art productions' like these are often on a basic level of emotions, expressing sexual desires or telling stories of crime etc (e.g. Pitbull: '..I know you want me, you know I want you...' and then in Spanish: ' you have big mouth, start playing with it...', etc). There is no cultural, educational or any sort of value, neither in the lyrics nor in the acoustics. In order to be syncronised with the repetitiveness of the lyrics, the melody is also on a very low productional level. The aim of popular music (as well as most of popular 'art') is to make profit, not to educate. Productions liked by the mass aren't likely to carry any cultural significance. They are made to be simple and easy to understand. This in a sense also links to the reading "On Popular Music" we've already reviewed, and supports Theodor Adorno's theories on popular culture.

Week3 Reading Response Pierre Bourdieu- 'Distinction & The Aristocracy of Culture'

Pierre Bourdieu suggests that there is no economy of cultural goods but there is a specific logic to them. According to the reading no one can fully understand cultural practices unless 'culture' is brought back into anthropological sense.

According to scientific observations 'cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education'. Cultural visits and sharing tastes in music, art and literature refer to a certain educational level and social origin. The family background has a huge impact on our cultural development.

Consuming any work of art is a process of communication, and an act of deciphering and decoding. Nevertheless, in order to understand the meaning of a work of art, the consumer needs to possess cultural competence. This links with Leavis' theory for preserving culture withing the minority and that culture is for the ones that consider themselves educated.

There are different ways of relating to realities through economic and social conditions. Taste classifies the classifier, and the antithesis between quantity and quality corresponds to the oppositions between the taste of necessity and the taste of luxury. Studying cultural consumption is done in order to discover the preferences in art, music, literature etc. It is predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences.

As Bourdieu says "But the apprehension and appreciation of the work also depend on the beholder's intention, which is itself a function of the conventional norms governing the relation to the work of art in a certain historical and social situation and also of the beholder's capacity to conform these norms, i.e. his artistic training". This refers to me as that then again he suggests that culture is for the ones that have the capacity to interpret the forms of art, and that art should be preserved within the upper class society. Forms of art could carry different cultural significance that could be interpreted by their historical and social conventions.

I believe that if culture wasn't made accessible to the mass, there also would not had been any development of knowledge. At a contemporary society getting education and seeking self improvement are opened to the public. In my opinion this leads to a more civilised society in the long run. Although there is a majority of nowadays "art products" which are offered to the mass that don't have any cultural value, there is still plenty to be learnt from what is accepted to carry knowledge. Example of that is what we recognise as "quality" television.

'Sweetness and light' in contemporary media

The media text I recognise as offering us 'sweetness and light' is the American Drama series 'Lie to Me'. The programme was released in January 2009 on the Fox network. The tag line for the show is 'The Truth is Written All Over Our Faces". The programme is about Dr.Lightman and his colleagues of The Lightman Group that collaborate in FBI investigations with applied psychology. They read through people's gestures in order to understand whether they are telling the truth or not. The story is based on real scientific discoveries. It is believed that people have universal gestures that point out the way they feel.

I find the programme to have productional and educational value. It goes into deep knowledge of psychology and offers interesting plot and story. Editing is of high standart, as well as the choice of actors. It could be labeled as 'the best that is thought or said' because it is a unique programme and nothing like it has been broadcasted before. The application of psychology distinguishes it from all other crime and police series, which normally have detectives as main characters.

Jeremy Kyle's show- cheap, sentimental and appealing to basic emotions

I personally find Jeremy Kyle's show to attract people from an uneducated background (or in other words that refers to the 'populace'). The show doesn't carry any cultural or educational significance. I personally find the stories shown and told on screen for absolutely inappropriate for broadcasting. The participants have created the impression on me as being of a low class society, tending to have lack of education, manners, values etc. Some lines I have heard on screen have been such as "I hope I am not the dad of my cheating ex-es baby, I wanna live me own life...". Participants on the show have also behaved aggressively and violently at times. In regards to that, I would assume that people that are to watch this sort of programmes, should be a low class uneducated audience to whom cheap and basic programmes appeal to.

As much as I wonder why programmes like that have been put on screen, I know that broadcasters are seeking for higher viewings and they need to deliver programmes to suit all tastes. Unfortunately, they are completely controversial to Arnold's aims for social improvement throughout culture and education, but in nowadays society there could not be such thing as universal value (e.g. culture).

Week2 Reading Response 'Mass Civilasation and Minority Culture'

The reading by F.R.Leavis suggests that culture is at a crisis, and that changes have a catastrophic impact on society. The inventions of machines have been seen as bad influence on religion and family.

The study of Middletown (work of antropology) is dealing with a typical community of the Middle West. Although some refer to Middletown as America but England. Although changes in America have been more rapid, the same processes are valid for England and the rest of the Western world.

Films are suggested to have even a more disastrous impact, as they are to be an illusion of actual life and to have a more potent influence. Films and broadcasting are of passive diversion, but tends to make active recreation.

The reading also discusses "culture" been in minority keeping,among the ones that consider themeselves educated. These might be called the "high- brows". Civilasation is seen to be with a harmful effect on culture, and culture no longer has positive prospects.

My Culture

"Closer" (2004, American Drama film)

"A Love Story For Adults", TIME

I have to admit I needed some time to figure out what would define "My Culture" close enough to the real me. I am with a foreign background so I can't easily describe myself with a British show. That is why I chose my favourite film. I have always felt it expresses my own point of view on how people interact between each other in friendships, relationships etc.

The film is based on an award winning play by Patrick Marber. It follows a London based story of four characters- two males and two females. The opening scene is of Alice (Natalie Portman) meeting Dan(Jude Law) just after she arrives in London from the US. Next thing happening is them in a relationship and Dan being photogrpahed by Anna (Julia Roberts,recently divorced American photographer). Shortly after that is been introduced the last charatcer, who is Dr Larry (Clive Owen).

The film follows the story of these four people being into realtionships with each other and then falling out of them. What mostly attracts me in the film is the way the dialogue is been structured. It is very blunt and forward. The emotions within the film are well expressed through these dialogues. The editing brings the film quite forward as well moving shots from one timeline to another.

I like the openess of the dialogue in the film. Things are said the way they are, and the

way they would be in real life. Despite being a love story, it is not a happy ending Cinderella story and exposes human relationships the way they really are or can be.

I would describe "My Culture" with this film, because it reflects my own personality and has for me a realistic point of view on human emotions. I also like its production value, choice of actors, locations etc.

Cultural Diary for MC513