1. practices of looking an introduction to visual culture
by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright
powerpoint by Donnie Taylor

2. Contents Practices of Looking: Images, Power, and Politics
Viewers Make Meaning
Spectatorship, Power and Knowledge
Reproduction and Visual Technologies
The Mass Media and the Public Square
Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire

3. Practices of Looking: Images, Power, and Politics
Chapter 1

4. Practices of Looking
Everyday we are in the practice of looking to make sense of the world around us.
To see is a process of observing and recognizing.
To look is to actively make meaning of that world.

5. Practices of Looking To look is an act of choice.
Looking is a practice much like speaking or writing.
Looking involves relationships of power.
Looking can be easy or difficult, fun or unpleasant, harmless or dangerous.
Looking can be conscious or unconscious.
Looking is used to communicate, to influence and to be influenced.

6. Practices of Looking
A single image can serve a multitude of purposes, appear in a range of settings, and mean different things to different people.
This image, of school children in the early 1940s who see a murder scene in the street, was taken by Weegee.

7. I. Representation
Representation refers to the use of language and images to create meaning about the world around us.
These systems have rules and conventions about how to express and interpret meaning.

8. I. Representation
Do systems of representation reflect the world as it is, as a form of mimesis or imitation, or do we construct the world around us through our use of the systems of representation?
Social constructionists argue that systems of representation do not reflect an already existing reality so much as they organize, construct, and mediate our understanding of reality, emotion, and imagination.
However, the distinction can often be difficult to make.

9. Pieter Claesz, 1642
Is this image simply a reflection of this particular scene or does it produce meanings about these objects?

10. I. Representation
We learn the rules and conventions of the systems of representation within a given culture.
Many artists have attempted to defy those rules and conventions and to push at the definitions of representation.
Images such as this show the complexity of how words and images produce meaning in our world.
Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images,

11. II. The Myth of Photographic Truth
The creation of an image through a camera lens always involves some degree of subjective choice through selection, framing, and personalization.
Despite this, photography has historically been regarded as more objective than painting or drawing.
The combination of the subjective and objective is a central argument about photographic images.

12. This picture was taken by the Mars rover Spirit on January 14, 2004.
What scientific evidence can be derived from this photo?
What other meanings can you infer about this photo?

13. II. The Myth of Photographic Truth
All images have two levels of meaning.
The denotative meaning of the image refers to its literal descriptive meaning.
The connotative meanings rely on the cultural and historic context of the image and its viewers.

14. Robert Frank, Trolley-New Orleans, 1955-1966

15. II. The Myth of Photographic Truth
The term myth, as used by Roland Barthes, refers to the cultural values and beliefs that are expressed through connotations parading as denotations.
Myth is the hidden set of rules and conventions through which meanings, which are in reality specific to certain groups, are made to seem universal.

16. II. The Myth of Photographic Truth
Myth allows the connotative meaning of a particular thing or image appear to be denotative.

17. II. The Myth of Photographic Truth
The cultural meanings of and expectations about images are tied to the technology through which it is produced.

18. III. Images and Ideology
All images are produced within dynamics of social power and ideology.
Ideology is the shared set of values and beliefs through which individuals live out their complex relations to a range of social structures.
Ideologies often appear to be natural or given aspects of everyday life.

19. III. Images and Ideology
Ideologies are produced and affirmed through the social institutions in a given society, such as the family, education, medicine, the law, the government, and the entertainment industry, among others.
Images are also used for regulation, categorization, identification, and evidence.
Images often move across social arenas from documentary images to advertisements to amateur video to news images to art works.
Each change in context produces a change in meaning.

20. III. Images and Ideology
What ideological assumptions might be said to underlie the differences in these two magazine covers?

21. IV. How We Negotiate the Meaning of Images
We decode, or read, complex images almost instantly, giving little thought to our process of decoding.
We decode images by interpreting clues to intended, unintended, and even suggested meanings.
These clues may be formal elements of the image, such as color, shade, and contrast, or the socio-historical context in which it is presented.

22. What does this image mean. When and where was it taken
What does this image mean? When and where was it taken? What kind of event does it depict? What is the advertiser hoping to communicate about its company to consumers?

23. IV. How We Negotiate the Meaning of Images
The process of interpretation is derived from semiotics, a theory of signs which is concerned with the ways things (words, images, and objects) are vehicles for meaning.
We live in a world of signs, and it is the labor of our interpretation that makes meaning of those signs.
The sign is composed of the signifier (a sound, written word, or image) and the signified (which is the concept evoked by that word or image).

24. What is the signifier, signified, and sign in this advertisement?

25. V. The Value of Images What gives an image social value?
Images do not have value in and of themselves, they are awarded different kinds of value – monetary, social, and political – in particular social contexts.
For example, in the art market, a painting gains its economic value through cultural determination concerning what society judges to be important in assessing works of art.

26. Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises sold for $53.8 million in 1991.
Why is this painting worth so much?

27. V. The Value of Images
Fine art objects are also valued because it can be endlessly reproduced for popular consumption on posters, postcards, coffee mugs, and t-shirts.
Hence, the value of the original results not only from its uniqueness but also from its role in popular culture.

28. A Bold Bluff, 1903, by C.M. Coolidge sold with another ‘dogs playing poker’ painting in 2005 for over $590,000.

29. V. The Value of Images
The value of a television news image lies in its capacity to be transmitted quickly and widely to a vast number of geographically dispersed television screens.

30. VI. Image Icons
An icon is an image that refers to something outside of its individual components that has great symbolic meaning for many people.
An image produced in a specific culture, time, and place might be interpreted as having universal meaning.

31. Raphael, The Small Cowper Madonna, c
Raphael, The Small Cowper Madonna, c. 1505; Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936
How do each of these images represent different icons of motherhood?

32. VI. Image Icons
Andy Worhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962) comments on the star’s iconic status as a glamour figure and a media commodity.
He emphasizes that cultural icons can and must be mass-distributed in order for them to have mass appeal.

33. VI. Image Icons
When images acquire status of icons, they also can become the object of humorous or ironic interpretations.
Through cultural appropriation, Madonna acquired the power of icons and reflected ironically on their meaning in the climate of the 1980s and 1990s.

34. Viewers Make Meaning
Chapter 2

35. Viewers Make Meaning
Meanings are produced through a complex social relationship that involves at least two elements besides the image itself and its producer: (1) how the viewers interpret or experience the image and (2) the context in which an image is seen.
Works or art and media rarely “speak” to everyone universally.
Just as viewers create meaning from images, images also construct audiences.

36. I. Producers’ Intended Meanings
Artists, graphic designers, filmmakers, and other image producers create advertisements and many other images with the intent that we read them in a certain way.
However, people often see an image differently from how it was intended to be seen.

37. The visual clutter of the context alone may affect how viewers interpret these images, in addition to juxtapositions with other images.

38. I. Producers’ Intended Meanings
This does not mean that viewers wrongly interpret images, or that images fail to persuade viewers.
Rather meanings are created in part when, where, and by whom images are consumed and produced.
An artist or producer may make an image or media text, but he or she is not in full control of the meanings that are subsequently seen in their work.

39. II. Aesthetics and Taste
The criteria used to interpret and give value to images depend upon shared concepts of what makes an image pleasing or unpleasant, shocking or banal, interesting or boring.
All viewers interpret two fundamental concepts of value – aesthetics and taste.
Aesthetics refers to philosophical notions about the perception of beauty and ugliness.
Taste is something that can be learned through contact with cultural institutions that instruct us in what is in good taste and what is not.

40. How do museums and other cultural institutions influence our interpretations of taste?

41. II. Aesthetics and Taste
The notion of connoisseurship refers to one who is considered to be an authority on beauty and aesthetics and is more capable than others to pass judgment on the quality of cultural objects.
Thus, taste is not inherent in particular people, but rather is learned through exposure to social and cultural institutions that promote certain class-based assumptions about correct taste.

42. II. Aesthetics and Taste
The distinctions between different kinds of culture have traditionally been understood as the difference between high and low culture.
Traditionally, high culture has meant fine art, classical music, opera, and ballet.
Low culture was a term used for comic strips, television, and initially for cinema.

43. How have divisions of high and low culture been criticized in recent years?

44. III. Reading Images as Ideological Subjects
When taste is naturalized, it embodies the ideologies of its context and time.
In the 1960s, French Marxist Louis Althusser argued that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”
In other words, ideology is the necessary representational means through which we come to experience and make sense of reality.

45. III. Reading Images as Ideological Subjects
The process of interpellation refers to how we are constructed by the ideologies that speak to us everyday through language and images.
According to Althusser, we are not so much individuals but rather we are “always already” subjects.

46. III. Reading Images as Ideological Subjects
Althusser’s concepts of ideology have been influential, but can be seen as disempowering.
How much agency do we have in our lives?

47. III. Reading Images as Ideological Subjects
In the 1920s and 1930s, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci introduced the concept of hegemony to understand the plurality of ideology.
Hegemony emphasizes that power is not wielded by one class over another; rather, power is constantly negotiated and changing among all classes of people, who struggle with and against one another in the economic, social, political, and ideological arenas in which they live and work.
Counter-hegemonic forces are political movements or subversive cultural elements which emerge and question the status quo in ways that may not favor the interests of the marketplace.

48. Barbara Kruger’s work functions as a counter-hegemonic statement.
Who is the “you” of this image?

49. IV. Encoding and Decoding
All images are both encoded and decoded.
An image or object is encoded with meaning with meaning in its creation or production and when it is placed in a given setting or context.
It is then decoded by viewers when it is consumed by them.
These processes work in tandem.

50. How does encoding and decoding work in a television show?

51. IV. Encoding and Decoding
Three positions viewers can take as decoders:
Dominant-hegemonic reading – identify with the hegemonic position and receive the dominant message of an image or text in an unquestioning manner.
Negotiated reading – negotiate an interpretation from the image and its dominant meaning.
Oppositional reading – completely disagree with the ideological position embodied in an image or reject it altogether.

52. IV. Encoding and Decoding
The dominant-hegemonic position can be said to decode images in a relatively passive manner.
It can be argued that few viewers actually consume images in this manner.

53. IV. Encoding and Decoding
In negotiated reading viewers actively struggle with dominant meanings, allowing culturally and personally significant meanings to transform and even override the meanings imposed by producers and broader social forces.
Image decoders are active meaning makers and not merely passive recipients.

54. How would a dominant hegemonic reading of the show Who Want to Be a Millionaire be different from a negotiated reading?

55. V. Appropriation and Oppositional Readings
Appropriation can be a form of oppositional production and reading.
To appropriate is to take something for oneself without consent, to steal.
Cultural appropriation is the process of “borrowing” and changing the meaning of cultural products, slogans, images, or elements of fashion.

56. Andy Warhol appropriated Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
How does Warhol change the meaning of the dominant ideology of Da Vinci’s work?

57. V. Appropriation and Oppositional Readings
As viewers, we can also appropriate images and text by strategically altering their meanings to suit our purposes.
For example, Great Garbo has a cult following among lesbian viewers appropriating her sometimes gender-bending performances.
This is one method of oppositional reading.

58. V. Appropriation and Oppositional Readings
Bricolage is a tactic of appropriation meaning literally to “make do” or piecing together one’s culture with whatever is at hand.
How is the owner of this low-rider changing the meaning of an automobile?

59. VI. Re-appropriations and Cultural-bricolage
Appropriation, however, is not always an oppositional practice.
For example, vintage thrift store clothing fashions originally associated with oppositional youth were re-appropriated by the mainstream fashion industry.
When hegemonic forces re-appropriate tactics of marginalized cultures into the mainstream, it is a form of counter-bricolage.

60. How is the mainstreaming of rap music an example of counter-bricolage?
How does the mainstream culture constantly mine the margins of culture for meaning?

61. Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge
Chapter 3

62. Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge
We invest images with the power to incite emotions within us, and images are also elements within the power relations between human subjects, and between individuals and institutions.
This chapter focuses away from reception to concepts of address.
Address refers to the way that an image constructs certain responses form an idealized viewer, whereas reception is about the ways in which actual viewers respond.

63. I. Psychoanalysis and the Image Spectator
Psychoanalytic theory has addressed most directly the pleasure we derive from images, and the relationship between our desires and our visual world.
Spectatorship theory emphasizes the role of the psyche – particularly the unconscious, desire, and fantasy – in the practice of looking.
When psychoanalytic theory talks of the spectator, it treats it as an “ideal subject.”

64. It can be said that particular films, targeted toward specific categories of viewers during particular periods create and offer to their views and ideal subject position.
Who is the ideal spectator for Star Trek films? How can the ideal spectator be constructed

65. II. The Gaze
The concept of the gaze has been the focus of inquiry in both art history and film studies.
In common parlance, to gaze is to look or stare, often with eagerness or desire.
In psychoanalytic film criticism, the gaze is not the act of looking itself, but the viewing relationship characteristic of a particular set of social circumstances.
The concept of the gaze is fundamentally about the relationship of pleasure and images.

66. II. The Gaze
In 1975, filmmaker and writer Laura Mulvey published an essay about women in classical Hollywood cinema.
She argued that conventions of popular cinema are structured by a patriarchal unconscious, positioning women represented in film as objects of a “male gaze”
Her theory stated that the camera is used as a tool of voyeurism and sadism, disempowering those before its gaze.

67. Jean-Desire-Gustave Courbet, Woman with a Parrot, 1866
II. The Gaze
In the history of art, most of the collectors and primary viewers were men.
In a typical female nude, a woman is posed so that her body is on display for the viewer, who is implied to be male.
John Berger wrote that in his history of images, “men act, women appear.”
This way of viewing women thus defined them by their appearance, in essence their ability to be pleasing to look at.
Jean-Desire-Gustave Courbet, Woman with a Parrot, 1866

68. III. Changing Concepts of the Gaze
Today, we are surrounded on a daily basis by images of fashion models whose looks conform to a rigid set of normative codes about beauty.
The traditional roles of men and women are in upheaval and the theoretical concept of the male gaze has been rethought.

69. III. Changing Concepts of the Gaze
The concept of regressive cinematic viewers, who are encouraged to repress their identities and to identify with the screen has been replaced by a broader set of models about the multiplicity of gazes and looks that mediate power between viewers and objects of the gaze.

70. IV. Discourse, the Gaze, and the Other
Images can both exert power and act as instruments of power.
French philosopher Michel Foucault uses the term discourse to describe a group of statements which provides a means for talking about a particular topic at a particular historical moment.
For Foucault, discourse is a body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something.

71. IV. Discourse, the Gaze, and the Other
Photography has been central in the functioning of discourses since the 19th century.
Photographs have been deployed as a means of categorization in order to distinguish the normal and the abnormal according to the discourses of a particular time.

72. V. Power/Knowledge and Panopticism
Foucault believed modern societies are structured on a basic relationship of power/knowledge.
Modern societies power relations are structured to produce citizens who will actively participate in self-regulating behavior, such as obeying laws, participating in social norms, and adhering to dominant social values.
Certain kinds of “knowledges” are validated in our society through social institutions such as the press, the medical profession, and education while other knowledges are discredited.

73. Who in these images are you most likely to believe?

74. V. Power/Knowledge and Panopticism
For Faucault, modern power is not something that negates and represses so much as it is a force that produces knowledge and particular kinds of citizens and subjects.
In order to function, the modern state needs citizens who are willing to work, to fight in wars, and to reproduce, and to have healthy and capable bodies to do so.

75. V. Power/Knowledge and Panopticism
Photographic images are instrumental in the production of what Foucault called the docile body of the modern state – citizens who participate in the ideologies of the society through a desire to fit in and conform

76. V. Power/Knowledge and Panopticism
According to Foucault, we internalize a managerial gaze that watches over us, and this imagined gaze makes us behave and conform. This is called panopticon.
It idea is that the structure of surveillance, whether active or not, produces conforming behavior.

77. How prevalent is the idea of photographic identification
How prevalent is the idea of photographic identification? To what extent is the photograph integrated into institutional life? How are these photographs tied to questions of power?

78. VI. The Gaze and the Exotic
The photographic gaze helps to establish relationships of power, to represent codes of dominance and subjugation, difference and other.
Images operate within binary oppositions such as civilization/nature, white/other, and male/female.
Binary oppositions designate the first category as unmarked (the norm) and the second as marked (the other.

79. How is meaning established through difference?

80. VI. The Gaze and the Exotic
Images are central in the production of Orientalism, the ways in which Western cultures attribute to Eastern and Middle-Eastern cultures qualities of exoticism and barbarism.
The consumer is interpellated in this ad as a white person who can buy an “authentic” exotic experience.

81. Reproduction and Visual Technologies
Chapter 4

82. Reproduction and Visual Technologies
Both the conventions of imaging and the concepts of the visual have changed throughout history, through the evolution of art, photography, and electronic imaging.
A viewer may make assumptions about the historical status of an image from its style, medium, and formal qualities.

83. I. Realism and the History of Perspective
Examining the role of realism in art throughout history helps us to see how images indicate changing ways of seeing the world.
The concept of what makes an image realistic has changed throughout history and varies between cultures.

84. I. Realism and the History of Perspective
The development of perspective as a convention of European art during the 15th century Renaissance marks a fundamental shift in the depiction of reality.
Linear perspective requires objects to recede in size toward at least one vanishing point.

85. I. Realism and the History of Perspective
The European Renaissance has been defined as a time of intellectual and artistic resurgence that was fueled by a renewed interest in Classical art and literature.
Perspective emphasizes a scientific and mechanical view toward ordering and depicting nature, and focuses a work of art toward a perceived viewer.
Thus, through the development of perspective, the relationship of science/technology and vision is firmly established in Western philosophy.

86. Raphael, School of Athens, 1510-1511

87. II. Realism and Visual Technologies
The history of image production in Western culture can be viewed in four periods:
(1) ancient art produced prior to the development of perspective in 1425
(2) the age of perspective until the era of the mechanical, including the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Romantic periods
(3) the modern era of technical developments with the rise of mechanization and the Industrial Revolution
(4)the postmodern era of electronic technology

88. II. Realism and Visual Technologies
It can be said that photography emerged as a visual technology because it fit certain emerging social concepts and needs of the time.
In combining scientific technique with art, like the technique of perspective, yet also employing a mechanical device, photography is in many ways the visual technology that helped to usher in the age of modernity.

89. II. Realism and Visual Technologies
Many styles of modern art that followed the invention of photography defied the tradition of perspective.
For instance, the style of impressionism shifted its focus to light and color and aimed for visual spontaneity.
Claude Monet, Section of the Seine Near Giverny

90. II. Realism and Visual Technologies
Cubism was a style in which painted objects as if they were being viewed from several different angles simultaneously, and focused on the visual relationship between objects.
According to Cubists, it is a means of depicting the restlessness and complicated process of human vision and a new way of looking at the real.
Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911

91. II. Realism and Visual Technologies
Modernist styles declared vision to be infinitely more subjective and complex.
The idea that a perspective-based realistic view is actually no more than one of the many ways of representing human vision has been taken further by many contemporary artists.

92. What is the “real” image here. At what “moment” was this image taken
What is the “real” image here? At what “moment” was this image taken? Where is the spectator of this image positioned?

93. III. The Reproduction of Images
Mechanical reproduction changes the meaning and value of an image and, ultimately, the role images play in society.
For instance, the invention of photography coincided with a cult of originality.
Thus the value of the one-of-a-kind art work is derived from its uniqueness and its role in ritual.
This aura of the image is a quality that makes it seem authentic because of its unique presence in time and space.

94. III. The Reproduction of Images
The concept of authenticity refers to something that is thought to be genuine or original.
Paradoxically, we live in a world in which the concept of authenticity is routinely reproduced, packaged, bought, and sold.

95. III. The Reproduction of Images
Many copies can exist of a photographic image, of which their value lies not in their uniqueness but in their aesthetic, cultural, and social worth.
The original, however, is more valuable, in both financial and social terms, than the copies.
Some argue that the higher value comes not from the uniqueness of the image as one of a kind, but rather from it being the original of many copies.
Through reproduction, an image can now be seen in many different contexts.

96. How is the meaning of Edvard Munch’s, The Scream (1893), changed in each new context? How does the reproductions change the meaning of the original?

97. IV. Reproduced Images as Politics
Propaganda can refer to any attempt to use words and images to promote particular ideas and persuade people to believe certain concepts.
This definition could also fit advertising images.
This is what is meant by the use of images as politics.
John Heartfield, Adolf as Superman: “He Swallows Gold and Spits out Tin-Plate,” 1932

98. IV. Reproduced Images as Politics
Text can dramatically change to signification of the image and can ask us to look at an image differently.
This appropriation, however, depends on the viewer being familiar with the original meaning.

99. V. Visual Technologies and Phenomenology
Phenomenology is the belief that all knowledge and truth derives from subjective human experience and not solely from things themselves.
This is a criticism of the rational age of scientific inquiry.
Perception, memory, and imagination are key concerns of phenomenology.
Phenomenology offers a means to examine the distinct materialities of how various media – such as photography, film, and television – affect the viewer’s experience of it, and its impact on the lived body of the viewer.

100. VI. The Digital Image
Since the 1980s, the development of digital images began to radically transform the meaning of images.
Analog images bear a physical correspondence with their material referents and are defined by properties that express value along a continuous scale, such as gradation of tone.
Digital images are encoded with bits of information and can be easily stored, manipulated, and reproduced.
A “copy” of a digital image is exactly like the “original.”
The digital image gains its value from its accessibility, malleability, and information status.

101. VI. The Digital Image
Most digital images and simulations cannot be said to have been in the presence of the real world that they depict.
How does this effect the idea of photographic truth?
What impact does this have on news and historical images?

102. VI. The Digital Image
The discovery that a news organization has altered an image often sparks controversy and debate.
These organizations’ reputations were based on modern notions of photographic truth that clashed with the digital possibilities for image manipulation.

103. VII. Virtual Space and Interactive Images
Virtual images are simulations that represent ideal or constructed rather than actual conditions, and can be both analog and digital.

104. VII. Virtual Space and Interactive Images
Virtual reality (VR) describe the way that users experience the computer worlds in science and computer games.
Virtual reality systems attempt to create an experience in which the user feels as if he or she is physically incorporated into the world represented on all sensory levels.
These include pacemakers, hearing aids, flight simulators, and game systems.

105. VII. Virtual Space and Interactive Images
Virtual space exits in opposition to the rules of traditional physical space.
Users can navigate the space to create their own individual pathway.
How can traditional cultural notions of authorship remain in place with the introduction of digital images and virtual space?

106. The Mass Media and the Public Sphere
Chapter 5

107. The Mass Media and the Public Sphere
Those of us in Western industrialized cultures live in a multimedia environment in which mechanical and electronic images, text, and sound are an almost constant presence.
The term mass media has been used to define those media designed to reach large audiences perceived to have shared interests.
The mass media refers to forms and texts that work in unison to generate specific dominant or popular representations of events, people, and places.

108. The Mass Media and the Public Sphere
Some critics of the media have argued that radio and television largely control the exchange of information by restricting authorship of information to those with access to the means of media production.

109. The Mass Media and the Public Sphere
There are phenomenological differences in the way that we experience media that are particular to their material qualities.

110. The Mass Media and the Public Sphere
It can be argued that the term “mass media” is no longer entirely applicable.
As more diverse media forms emerge, such as cable television and internet, more fragmented audiences form to replace the undifferentiated mass, and the mass media are less pervasive.

111. I. Critiques of the Mass Media
The historical critique states that TV and radio provided a centralized means for mobilizing the new mass culture or mass society around a unified set of issues and ideas.
Current critics of the mass media argue that the new electronic technologies are powerful new tools for propaganda or mass persuasion.
These critiques see viewers as passive if not gullible recipients of media messages.
Leni Reifenstahl, Triumph of the Will, 1935

112. I. Critiques of the Mass Media
The concept of a narcotic effect refers to the way that time spent with the media replaces actual participation in organized action.
The mass media, in this concept, is understood as convincing people that being informed about a social issue by seeing it covered in the media is the same as doing something about it.

113. I. Critiques of the Mass Media
A group of cultural critics known as the Frankfurt School describes the culture industry as an entity that both creates and caters to a mass public that, tragically, can no longer see the difference between the real world and the illusory world that these popular media forms collectively generate.
In their view, the culture industry generates false consciousness among its consumers, encouraging the masses to buy mindlessly into the ideologies that allow industrial capitalism to thrive.
They hold a traditional Marxist view of ideology.

114. II. The Mass Media and Democratic Potential
Another view of the mass media is that it is a promising tool for democratic ideals which will promote an open flow of information and exchange of ideas.
This view challenges the very idea of a mass media or mass society.
It stresses the potential of individual media forms for the development of community and identity on a much smaller scale.
Goddess of Democracy, Tiananmen Square, 1989

115. II. The Mass Media and Democratic Potential
A technologically determinist way of viewing media implies that content is not as important as the medium through which you receive it.
Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan argued in the 1950s-1970s that media technologies give greater potential for power to our individual bodies by extending our senses and thereby extending our power in the world.
To put the means of media production in the hands of ordinary citizens they would be empowered rather than being molded.

116. III. Television and the Question of Sponsorship
Consumers watch television programs primarily to see programs, but what keeps television afloat is the viewers not-so-incidental exposure to advertisements for products.
In U.S. television’s early years, product endorsements were enmeshed with programming itself, making it difficult to separate the product from the program.

117. III. Television and the Question of Sponsorship
Some Western countries, such as Canada, England, France, and Germany, have opted for state-controlled television, in which the government plays a more active role in the industry and programming.
Meanwhile, U.S. television is shaped by free market forces which relies on corporate sponsorship and advertising.

118. IV. Media and the Public Sphere
A public sphere is ideally a space where citizen come together to debate and discuss the pressing issues of their society.
In events such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the funeral of Princess Diana, and the attacks of Sept. 11th, 2001, the media serve to create a sense of community at local, national, and global levels.
Princess Diana’s Funeral

119. IV. Media and the Public Sphere
The television talk shows creates a forum for contemporary issues and thus promotes the formation of public spheres.
Who is the audience of this genre?

120. IV. Media and the Public Sphere
Some critics have faulted the media for sensationalizing events involving stars and notorious individuals over important global news, such as wars, famine, and international politics.
Scott Peterson on trial for killing his wife Laci and their unborn son.

121. V. New Media Cultures
The status of media in contemporary culture is contradictory and mixed.
It is diverse at both the level of the media themselves and at the level of national and cultural boundaries.
What constitutes a medium?

122. Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire
Chapter 6

123. Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire
Visual images play a primary role in the commerce of contemporary societies.
Commodity culture and consumer societies are dependent upon the constant production and consumption of goods in order to function.
Advertising images are central to the construction of cultural ideas about lifestyle, self-image, self-improvement, and glamour

124. Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire
The advertising world works by abstraction, a potential place or state of being situated not in the present but in an imagined future with the promise to the consumer of things “you” will have, a lifestyle you can take part in.
Images can be presented as art, science, documentary evidence, or personal memories.

125. I. Consumer Society
Fundamental changes in the experience of community in the rise of the consumer society came through an increased complexity and diversity of the urban population, increased immigration, and a loosening of the hold of small and stable communities and families on social values.
It has been argued that people derive their sense of their place in the world and their self-image at least in part through their purchase and use of commodities which seem to give meaning to their lives in the absence of the meaning derived from closer-knit community.

126. I. Consumer Society
The late 19th century rise of the department stores represented the merge of commerce and leisure.
Window shopping is thus related to a more mobile vision of modernity.
French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote about the flaneur, a man who strolled the streets as an observer, never engaging with surroundings but taking an interest in them.

127. I. Consumer Society
Today, consumption is thought of as a form of leisure, pleasure, and as a form of therapy.
Commodities can fulfill emotional needs but those needs are never truly fulfilled as the forces of the market lure us into wanting more or different commodities.

128. II. Commodity Culture and Commodity Fetishism
The term commodity self is the idea that our selves are constructed in part through our consumption and use of commodities.
Advertising encourages consumers to think of commodities as central means through which to convey their personalities.
What precisely is it that ads sell?

129. II. Commodity Culture and Commodity Fetishism
Marxist theory critiques the emphasis in capitalism on exchange over use value, in which things are valued not for what they really do but for what they’re worth in abstract, monetary terms.
Why are diamonds more expensive than a necessity such as water?

130. II. Commodity Culture and Commodity Fetishism
Commodity fetishism refers to the process by which mass-produced goods are emptied of the meaning of their production and then filled with new meanings in ways that both mystify the product and turn it into a fetish product.
The experience of the labor process is devalued and makes it harder for workers to take pride in what they have produced.

131. II. Commodity Culture and Commodity Fetishism
Pop Art in the late 1950s and 1960s engaged with mass culture in a way that did not condemn it but demonstrated their love of and pleasure in popular culture.
Andy Warhol, Two Hundred Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962

132. III. Addressing the Consumer
Like other images, advertising images interpellate their viewers in particular ways, hailing them as ideological subjects.
The “you” that advertising addresses is always implied to be an individual.
Ads perform the very contradictory work of convincing many different consumers that a mass-produced product will make them unique and different from others.
This concept is known as psuedoindividuality, a false idea of identity.
Thus, it can be said that advertising asks us not to consume commodities but to consume signs.

133. III. Addressing the Consumer
The advertising strategy of repeating a motif can be used to establish familiarity with a product and to keep viewers’ attention.

134. III. Addressing the Consumer
Ads operate with a presumption of relevance that allows them to make inflated statements about the necessity of their products.
Ads also create a relationship of equivalence between elements within the frame and between the product and its signifier.
Companies also differentiate products from their competition.

135. IV. Images and Text
It is through complex compositions of photographs, text, and graphics that ads speak to consumers.
Text can often have a powerful effect in establishing or changing the meaning of the photograph or image presented.

136. V. Envy, Desire, and Glamour
All advertisements tell consumers that their products will change their lives for the better.
They often do this by presenting figures of glamour that consumers can envy and wish to emulate.
Advertisements make references to art to give their products a connotation of prestige, tradition, and authenticity.

137. V. Envy, Desire, and Glamour
The world of advertising speaks the language of self-management, self-control, and conformity.
Ads use anxiety by suggesting to consumers the ways in which they may be not only inadequate but potentially endangered or weakened without a particular product.

138. VI. Belonging and Difference
Sometimes when advertisements ask us to consume commodity signs, they attach to their products concepts of the nation, family, community, and democracy.

139. VII. Bricolage and Counter-bricolage
Bricolage is a mode of adaptation where things are put to uses for which they were not intended and in ways that dislocate them from their normal or expected context.
Counter-bricolage refers to the repackaging of bircolage commodities to be resold to mainstream consumers.
Counter-bricolage: Pablo Picasso and Apple Computers

140. VIII. The Brand
The circulation of brand names, trademarks, and logos are a means through which identities are constructed not only for goods and corporations, but for people who appropriate signifiers of products for a style of themselves or their culture.

141. IX. Anti-ad Practices
Advertisements can be the subject of artistic parody and the site of on-site political messages.