Cultural Diary - Week 11

I have chosen to look at Adidas which is one of the top famous shoe, clothing and Apparel Company. Adidas also is the second largest budget for sponsorships among sports gear companies and therefore to study the strategy of Adidas can help to understand how they affect the consumer culture.

By tying its products to successful Adidas uses celebrities in it adverts to create an image and impression that the shoes or the clothes play a role in the success of the sportsperson. Thus they are creating a way of connection between the consumer and the celebrity which is sometime very risky for the reputation of the company because if the sportsperson or celebrity makes a mistake in any field, it directly harms the reputation of company as well.

The good reputation of Adidas and other famous sports companies among consumers can also pass a positive message to consumers which can help to refine their culture.

For example:

“Nike aims to change the negative perception of hoodies, which it admits are identified with criminal behaviour and young louts.”

“England soccer star Rio Ferdinand has been enlisted by Nike in an advertising campaign aimed at changing the negative image of hoodies.”

Reference link: http://www.clickliverpool.com/culture/culture/122188-can-nike-change-the-image-of-the-hoodie-in-liverpool.html

Olympic Games is an event which has an strong impact on many culture and Adidas and other sport companies play important roles to sponsor these events and also to show themselves as part of consumer culture.

Famous celebrities plays important role to promote these companies for example David Beckham. 

In the link below David Beckham shows off his new Adidas shoes at a store in Milan which whose that fandom is also paying important role to expand consumer culture.

http://www.zimbio.com/photos/David+Beckham/David+Beckham+Presenting+New+Shoe+Adidas+Store/zVJzhrpuc-D

Reading Response to "The Consumer Society and Advertising" by Paul Long and Tim Wall

The key points that I have found in the readings are:

“The history of consumption and advertising are intimately and perhaps innately tied together.”

“The industrial revolution brought with it a drive to consume and thus challenged all of thus previously necessary virtues.”

“Many ecenomists argue that consumers are rational and purchase products on the basis of functional decision making to further their own interests (miller, 1995).”

“Consumption is, in this case, a stage in the process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code.(Bourdieu, 1984: 2).”

“Baudrillard argues that mass media and, of course, advertising in Particular have greatly enhanced and generalised what he calls a process of ‘simulation’. “

“In consumer society, advertising agencies thus represent expertise in reading trends, fashions, signs and other codes.”

“Brands are much more than product identifiers, then: they are a way of being.”

“Bauman observes that the avid, never ending search for new and improved recipes for lives is also a variety of shopping.”

“Advertising can be thought as a form of communication designed to generate awareness of products, services and organisations.”

“Marketing refers to the process of identifying consumer needs and thus producing products and services.”

“Public relations (PR) refer to the management of communication between organisations and publics.”

“Culture jamming is the disturbance of the cultural logic of branding.”

“Culture jamming intends to throw a spanner into circuits of culture and what its practitioners believe to be the predominance of advertising and corporate culture in defining that we are what we purchase and the identities that are created and sold to us by advertisers.”

Reading Response to "Understanding Celebrity Culture" by Su Holmes and Sean Redmond

The key points that I have found in the readings are:

“Adulation, identification and emulation are key motifs in the study of celebrity culture. The desire for fame, stardom, or celebrification stems from a need to be wanted in a society where being famous appears t offer enormous material, economic, social and pshysic rewards (gamson, 1994; rojek, 2001; turner, 2004).”

“Nick couldry (2000, 2003) argues that, in the modern world, being famous gives one access to a social space that sits at the centre of meaning generation and belonging.”

“According to Kobena mercer, ‘in political terms, identities are in crisis because traditional structures of membership and belonging inscribed in relations of class, party and nation-state have been called into question’ (1994: 4).”

“Fandom is often a creative enterprise, involving the production of artwork, fiction and dedicated websites.”

“The body of the star or celebrity is key to this search for the ‘truth’ about the star or celebrity.”

“The body of the star or celebrity either functions to reproduce dominant culture’s patriarchal, racial and heterosexual gaze, or it allows transgressive, oppositional and queer feelings and fantasies to emerge.”

“Braudy argues that we ‘live in a society bound together by the talk of fame’ (1986: 1).”

“Framing celebrity is a text which is capitalizing on the popular, as well as the academic, interest in contemporary celebrity.”

“Dyer famously argued for the analyses of stars in the realm of representation and ideology. Stars could b understood as ‘signs’- read as ‘texts’ and ‘images’ – and investigated using the tools of semiotics (barker, 2003: 6).”

“Couldry argues that the media constructs and maintains a symbolic hierarchy between media/ordinary worlds, in which the media is presented as the privileged “frame” through which we access the reality that matters to us as social beings’ (2004: 58).”

“The term celebrity has various uses in academia. It can function to indicate how the media contexts of fame are now less specific, with individual celebrities rarely restricted to a single media form (Bonner, 2005: 65).”

My Cultural Diary - Week 9

Identify a celebrity to investigate

Arnold Schwarzenegger

- What is the image of your chosen celebrity?

He is an Austrian-born American former professional bodybuilder, actor, model, businessman and politician. He went to win Mr. Universe award at age of 20 and Mr. Olympia contest a total of seven times. He is worldwide better known as a Hollywood action film icon and as well as a major sports icon.  Some of his top films are Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, Commando and Predator.

Reference link

- What do they represent?

He made a new international audience for bodybuilding and gym memberships worldwide swelled by the tens of thousands inspired by him as he proved himself a major sports icon. Reference link

- What is the narrative of your chosen celebrity?

 The key narratives that I have found for my chosen celebrity are that:

 “The amazing story of uber-star Arnold Schwarzenegger is a true "rags to riches" story of the penniless immigrant making it in the land of opportunity, the United States of America.” Reference link

- What attitudes/ideologies are exposed here? (gender, class etc)

“With an almost unpronounceable surname and a thick Austrian accent, who would have ever believed that a brash, quick talking bodybuilder from a small European village would become one of Hollywood's biggest stars, marry into the prestigious Kennedy family, amass a fortune via shrewd investments and one day be the Governor of California!” Reference link

Reading Response to "Fan Cultures Between ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Justification’, Fan Cultures" by Matt Hills

The Focus on this reading is the ethnographies of fandom and the author is trying to differentiate between knowledge and justification explosion in fan studies and also explains that how these are accepted as cultural facts by ethnographers.

The key point that I have found for this answer are:

“Fan justifications are accepted as cultural facts by ethnographers rather than being subjected to further analysis.”

“Work on fandom has formed a key part of the move towards valorizing active audiences, and this use of the fan has resulted in an extremely partial and limited examination of fan practices.”

“Fan- ethnography has typically been limited by its view of the real as matter of discourse and articulation, or by its one- sided accounts of fandom either as a social coping mechanism [bacon-smith 1992] or a valuable ‘interpretive community’ [Jenkins 1992; Amesley 1989]”

“Autoethnography aims to create a partial ‘inventory’ of the ‘infinity of traces’ deposited within the self by cultural and historical processes.”

“Autoethnography also displaces the problems of assuming that the ‘real’ is always primarily discursive.”

“Autoethnography is contracted to psychoanalytic and ideological approaches, since there are viewed as approaches where theory is imposed on experience.”

My Cultural Diary - Week 7

I have chosen to look at Liverpool to see how the city is represented.

I have chosen to look at website www.liv.ac.uk and how Liverpool is represented in timely research undertaken by The University of Liverpool.  Reference Link 

The University of Liverpool discovered the fact about its home city through an original study. Through their research they argue that Liverpool “a century ago Liverpool was regarded as the ‘second city’ of the British empire’ – though subsequently it gained a reputation for militant politics in the face of economic adversity.” They also state that “Liverpool is proud to be European Capital of Culture 2008.” Reference Link 

 The city’s changing fortunes and multi-faceted identity make it an interesting case study – as does the fact that it was first captured on film in 1897 – just two years after ‘moving pictures’ were first shown in public. Since the footage was shot for the pioneering Lumière Brothers, it was faithfully preserved – offering the potential to investigate how Liverpool’s form and identity have been portrayed in moving images over the course of a century.

 Reference Link 

The research also states that Liverpool was first captured on film in 1897. The research further notes that “The footage was shot for the pioneering Lumière Brothers, it was faithfully preserved – offering the potential to investigate how Liverpool’s form and identity have been portrayed in moving images over the course of a century.” Reference Link 

Some more facts that are described in the research about Liverpool states that “Liverpool had achieved the world’s first fully enclosed wet dock system, creating 140 acres of docks and 10 miles of quay space – and the world’s first elevated electric railway, a mass transit system which ran all along the waterfront.” Reference Link 

I think that this representation of Liverpool is very original. Almost all cities in the UK are of high importance because of their history but the fact the each city has got its own reputation increases its importance to study each city in the UK in details. I love Football and the Football clubs in the UK are my favorites. Liverpool Football Club is most winning club of the 20th century and one of the most successful clubs in the history of English football. This fact made me to think to select Liverpool as a research that how media texts represent the cities.

Reading Response to "Postmodernism and 'The Other Side' " by Dick Hebdige

This reading looks at Potsmodernism and Hebdige talks about the word Postmodernism and what it’s supposed to refer to for example he notes that postmodernism can be referred to as the 'buzzword', because it has so many distinctions and at some points Hebdige refers to Jean-François lyotard tendencies.

“Jean-François lyotard (1986a) has recently used the the postmodernism to refer to 3 separate tendencies: (i) a trend within architecture away from the modern movement’s project ‘of a last rebuilding of the whole space occupied by humanity’, (ii) a decay in confidence in the idea of progress and modernization (‘there is a sort of sorrow in the zeitgeist’) and (iii) a recognition that it is no longer appropriate to employ the metaphor of the ‘avant-grade’.

The other key points that I have found in the readings are:

“The degree of semantic complexity and overload surrounding the term ‘postmodernism’ at the moment signals that a significant number of people with conflicting interests and opinions feel that there is something sufficiently important at stake here to be worth struggling and arguing over.”

“If the unity, the boundaries and the timing of modernism itself remains a contentious issue,, then postmodernism seems to defy any kind of critical consensus.”

 “ ‘Critical’ alternative (the one favoured by foster) postmodernism is defined as a positive critical advance which fractures through negation (i) the petrified hegemony of an earlier corpus of ‘radical aesthetic’ strategies and proscriptions, and/ or (ii) the pre-Freudian unitary subject which formed the hub of the ‘progressive’ wheel of modernization.”