MEP 203 CONTEMPORARY MEDIA THEORY 9. CONSUMERISM AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Consumerism – theoretical ideas Media literacy Merger between consumption and production Consumer ‘tactics’ Cultural empowerment Symbolic creativity / DIY cultures Habitus theory / field theory

Children’s media literacy (Buckingham 1992) Respondents (7-12) were sceptical about the intentions of advertisers They categorised TV programmes according to formal, not generic features Research showed “the complex ways in which children actively make meaning and pleasure from television” (p. vii).

Consumer/producer merger Marxist theory of “almighty production” (Adorno 1991) is now out-dated Consumer culture, the consumer industry – advertising, PR, marketing, direct mail, etc. Consumer sovereignty eg. film ‘on-demand’ “Consumption is not the end of a process, but the beginning of another, and thus itself a form of production” (MacKay 1997)

De Certeau’s (1984) ‘tactics’ Encoding is seen as a process of consumption, NOT production Tactics – consumers make their own meanings from products and create personal uses for them Speed reading – texts as read Other egs – tax evasion, smuggling, ‘bunking off’ work, etc.

Empowerment (Fiske 1989) Practices, NOT structures Consumers can radically reinterpret media texts for subversive pleasures Commodity appropriation e.g. torn (or faded) jeans, Grolsh bottle stops Guerrilla warfare between producers and elusive consumers

Symbolic creativity (Willis 1990) DIY cultures - “the hardware and software of consumption have become the instruments and the raw materials of a kind of cultural production” (p. 77) Home taping – now LEGAL Mixing – ?? MP3 file-sharing – mostly ILLEGAL

Some criticisms of consumerism Consumerist theories stress the power of audiences to oppose producer intentions Contemporary media developments can be understand in terms of consumerism HOWEVER, do consumerist theories go too far and ignore media power? Accusations of populism (McGuigan 1992) Freedom and choice – how much?

Habitus theory (Bourdieu 1984) Taste is not about personal choice, it is socially and economically structured Habitus: an invisible system that classifies consumer tastes for music, food, etc. The habitus is a structured and a structuring principle – we partly make, partly are made by our habituses Cultural capital (education/knowledge) and economic capital (wealth) are closely linked

Field theory (Bourdieu 1996) Field: the site of struggle and possibilities practised in various arenas of cultural production EG – the journalistic field restrains innovative voices, novel approaches to news-telling, etc. due to preconceptions of the market, regulatory restrictions, etc. In turn, consumers only see a narrow, mainstream political view of the world