Consumer Culture and the Media

Two key characteristics of the contemporary age of late capitalism are that it is saturated with media texts and technologies, and that it is fundamentally organized around a consumer economy. We live in the age of consumption; we live in the age of media. These features of modern life are particularly apparent in the urbanized global north: cities such as London, New York, Paris, Johannesburg and Shanghai are shaped by the abundance of media forms visible throughout the cityscape as well as the variety of options for consumption, entertainment and leisure available therein. That consumer culture and the media are interdependent — although perhaps plainly obvious — is at once the starting point of this book and the dilemma that it seeks to unravel. These questions — how are consumer culture and the media intertwined, and to what purpose? — underwrite the pages that follow.

In exploring the extent to which consumer culture is constructed and promoted in media texts, there is more at stake than simply describing its discursive operations — as important as that project is in its own right. Precisely because media texts are so common and pervasive, and contribute so significantly to the repertoire of images and ideas that are collectively shaped into culture and individually harnessed into lifestyle and identity projects, and precisely because the market ethic has come to define so many aspects of everyday life — questioning the dynamics of consumerist mediation inherently involves questioning the concepts of the public and identity. Underlying both of these are questions of power. This chapter engages with these three concepts, drawing on a variety of disciplinary perspectives where necessary, in order to delineate an analytical framework for this study, as well as to contribute to theories of consumerism and the media more generally.

This chapter articulates a research approach for the study of magazine-commodities and consumption-messages in the light of the complex theoretical landscape characterizing consumer culture. The paradigm put forward in this book entails a combination of ethnographic methods, appropriated as a reflexive mode of data collection in mediated spaces of consumption, and socio-semiotic approaches, employed in order to analyse consumer texts and construct accounts of their social contexts. Underlying both methodological approaches is an acknowledgement of the idea of multimodality: that meaning is constructed through a variety of modes, the visual and verbal, plus texture and materiality, space and lighting, sound and more. An integration of multimodal approaches to the ethnographic and socio-semiotic allows for the complexities of consumer texts and spaces to be more fully and fruitfully addressed. This chapter articulates the specific ways in which these methods were employed in looking at newsstands and consumer magazines covers, so as to clarify the empirical work underlying the analysis developed in this book. It also argues that these methods are broadly applicable to all consumer media and consumption spaces. The newsstand and magazine cover thus serve as examples and counterpoints for future research into mediated consumerism.

This chapter provides a thick description — a critical interpretation or reading of an element of social life (Geertz, 1975) — of the newsstand. By painting a picture of the semiotic and social dynamics of this space of media consumption, the analysis that follows provides a detailed social contextualization for magazine covers and highlights how the newsstand itself is a locus of the mediation of consumerism, operating in dialectic with magazine covers. But it also makes an argument that spaces of consumption populated with commodities are texts in their own right requiring analytical attention. All retail spaces, from pound stores to high-end luxury brand boutiques, feature carefully designed commodity displays which create specific aesthetic landscapes. Because all commodities are carefully designed, packaged and marketed aesthetic objects in their own right, their display in public space renders the consumer landscape semiotic.

This chapter engages with the multimodal representation of the ‘world of goods’ on magazine covers. It explores the ways in which commodities are glorified in their own right, as well as the ways in which they are invoked to construct narratives of luxurious lifestyles revolving around their acquisition and display. Both forms of commodity representation on the magazine cover rely upon visual and verbal modes of communication. An empirical account thereof explores the dynamics of commodity choice promised by consumer culture and relates these to consumerist mediation more broadly. By focussing on the mediation of commodities, this chapter straddles material and hyperreal cultures. The ‘world of commodities’ on the magazine cover is semiotic and carefully produced to communicate perfection and desirability, but it exists in dialogue with the unremarkable material world of the urban landscape. Both newsstands and magazine covers are ‘worlds of goods’ in their own right. This doubling in space and text of a universe of commodities signifies their proliferation and a paradoxical sense of chaotically unlimited choice.

This chapter examines the role that sexiness plays in selling consumerism. The adjective ‘sexy’ has gained a certain ubiquity and influence in contemporary media and culture. It is used broadly to describe not only individuals who are considered sexually attractive, but also a wide variety of commodities, particularly those that adorn or accentuate the body, and practices and experiences which are not directly related to sexual activity, such as hairstyling and shopping. Sexiness has become more than a catchall description of desirability. It has become a mode of communication that is used to sell not only a wide variety of commodities but also a certain kind of pleasure to which consumerism promises access. The maxim goes: sex sells. But in the analysis of consumer media texts it is not enough to merely assume this. We need to account for how sex sells, and why images are considered sexy (Schroeder and McDonagh, 2006: 220). In typography, the lettering of the word ‘sex’ has an ‘eye’: that semi-circular part of the ‘e’ that forms a closed slit (Carter, 2000). The argument made in this chapter builds on this suggestion to claim that sexiness is produced partially but significantly through visual forms of communication. Consumer media construct narratives of sexiness and sexual pleasure through the presentation of bodies and it is precisely the visual consumption thereof that can be reconfigured as a sexual act in its own right (and thus pleasurable).

The previous chapter discussed ‘the eye’: the conceptual intersection of the scopophilia of consumer culture, the power of the gaze and images of bodies on consumer magazine covers. This chapter explores ‘the I’: the intersection of the discourse of individualism and the internalized power dynamics of self-care and self-management. Taking as its focus the representation of faces and the language of direct address on consumer magazine covers, it provides an account of how consumer media in general provoke a regime of self-examination and consumption-oriented subjectivity. Precisely because the public in consumer culture operates as a space of appearance more than participation, agency becomes shaped by visibility and appearance, and self-image becomes a crucial fulcrum around which notions of self-worth revolve. Media texts such as consumer magazine covers provide brightly lit spaces for the performance of self-identity and, as such, play a fundamental role in the discursive construction of the individualist values so central to contemporary neoliberalism. As such they are a useful empirical launch pad for considering the ways in which extremely visible ideational images of people are one of the primary resources for the construction of self-identity made available in the contemporary mediascape.

By taking a narrow empirical focus — magazine covers constituted collectively as a genre and in public retail space — this book has contributed to a broader agenda aimed at giving an account of how consumerist discourse is structured, and thus why it is so powerful and effective. By way of conclusion, and to bring together the key analytical themes explored in this book, this chapter takes as its focus the broader issue of how a research agenda in consumer culture and the media can be taken forward. Before doing so, it is necessary to briefly point out the specific contributions made to more discrete areas of scholarship.