Consumer Identities: Agency, Media and Digital Culture

First published in the UK in 2019 by

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First published in the USA in 2019 by

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Section I: Introduction

Myles Ethan Lascity

Chapter 1: Branding Desire: Strategies of Consumer Affectation in Early Classical Hollywood Film

 David Blanke

Chapter 2: The PushmiPullu of Fandom

 Paul Booth

Chapter 3: MySpace Music’s Pivotal Role in the Digitalization of Music Culture

 Mary Beth Ray

Section II: Emerging Dynamics in Contemporary Consumerism

 Candice D. Roberts

Chapter 4: A Qualitative Comparison of Mad Men Fans in New Zealand and Italy

 Carmen Spanò

Chapter 5: This Is so Bad, We Have to Watch It: Acquiring Subcultural Capital through Oppositional Viewing Strategies

 John Donegan

Chapter 6: The Cannibals: Consuming Celebrity through Digital Mourning

 Ashley Pattwell

Chapter 7: Brick by Brick: De/Reconstructing the Children’s Animated Film Genre

 Joseph V. Giunta

Section III: Ongoing Tensions of Structure and Agency in Consumer Identities

 Candice D. Roberts

Chapter 8: I Protest! A Postcolonial Critique of Media Fan Activism in a Globalized World

 Rukmini Pande

Chapter 9: Big Data and Twitter: Finding the Stepping Stones in Consumer Communications

 Laura A. Seroka

Chapter 10: Ethical Consumerism in the Emerging EU Digital Contract Legislation

 Sanne Jansen

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Editors

Index

Acknowledgments

This book is truly the culmination of one idea, shared by two friends and colleagues, supported by numerous individuals. The Consumer Identities and Digital Culture Symposium, held at St. John’s University, New York, on March 28, 2017, was the impetus for the project. This book would not have been possible without the assistance of all symposium participants and attendees, as well as those who have offered continued encouragement. The symposium was generously sponsored by the Institute for International Communication at St. John’s University and facilitated by the Institute’s director, Basilio Monteiro, as well as Katia Passerini, dean of the College of Professional Studies at St John’s.

First and foremost, we must thank the authors — David, Paul, Mary Beth, Carmen, John, Joseph, Ashley, Sanne, Laura, and Rukmini. Truly, this book exists because of your innovative ideas and strong contributions. We would be remiss if we did not also extend appreciation to Kimon Keramidas, Dara Persis Murray, Chris Odinet, Nicole NeSmith, and Emily West, whose presentations and discussion helped make the original symposium a success. Special recognition goes to St. John’s International Communication graduate students Julia Theilen, John Anthony DiMaria, and Hallelujah Lewis; your help in conference organizing and excellent panel moderation was invaluable.

We are also indebted to everyone at Intellect, especially our editor, Naomi Curston, for her guidance and support through this process, to Tim Mitchell, and to James Campbell who guided us in the proposal process.

Finally, we’d like to thank our fellow faculty members in the Division of Mass Communication at St John’s University and the Department of English and Communication at Chestnut Hill College, respectively, whose ongoing collegiality helped ensure the fulfillment of this project.

Section I: Introduction

Myles Ethan Lascity

I got it, says attractive cheerleader Catherine to nerdy, homely Janey. It might sound crazy, but you’re just going to have to trust me.

Then, moving in lasciviously, Catherine removes Janey’s thick-rimmed glasses and tosses them on the bed, before reaching to the back of Janey’s head and undoing her ponytail. As Janey shakes out her hair, the frame pans to a bedroom mirror where Catherine stands behind the freshly transformed teen.

That’s it, Catherine states. I did it. I’m a miracle worker.

The exchange is a scene from the satirical Not Another Teen Movie (Gallen, 2001), which takes aim at a slew of films in the teen genre. Specifically, the exchange between Janey and Catherine mocks the makeover of clearly attractive actresses, such as the Clueless (Heckerling, 1995) makeover of Brittany Murphy and the transformation of Rachel Leigh Cook in She’s All That (Iscove, 1999). The message from teen movies is clear: a little work and a new wardrobe can change your entire identity.

Tales of identity transformations certainly predate the 1990s, as both Clueless and She’s All That are updates of Emma (1815) and Pygmalion (1913), respectively. Documenting the history of transformation in film, McDonald notes, […] Hollywood films have found a variety of ways to suggest that such external changes are necessary, even salutary […] to mitigate the anxieties of the very fluid self seemingly propose by such films (2010: 199). However, this is hardly contained to works of fiction, as McCracken states, [t]ransformation used to be what gods did to one another. Now it’s what we do to ourselves (2008: xxi).

Gabriel (2013) suggests that seeing people primarily as consumers was a specific development over the past century or so. Starting from the philosophical and religious dualism, he makes the case that the importance of individuality and liberalism in U.S. society was able to transform the ways we see ourselves. Most notably, this has led to expression through one’s craft to be prioritized (Gabriel 2013: 39), while our taste has been positioned as a representation of the inner self (2013: 47). Others like Lynes ([1949] 1980), Bourdieu (1984), Twitchell (1992), and Gans (1999) have also interrogated the process of taste, and it largely remains something created through interactions with others. Gabriel’s argument suggests that consumerism does not have to be the default way we understand ourselves, just the one that is currently given priority.

While it may be true that we have placed a priority on consumerism like never before, the processes of negotiating identity remain a critical topic in understanding ourselves and society (Bauman 2007; Butler [1990] 2006; Dunn 2008; Goffman 1959). Identity is a work in progress Taylor and Spencer write, a negotiated space between ourselves and others (2004: 4). In this way, our identities are never stable, but change with our experiences. Bauman suggests that fluidity in our identity is a product of contemporary times: In the liquid modern society of consumers no identities are gifts at birth, none is ‘given’, let alone given once and for all and in a secure fashion (2007: 110).

Today, entire bodies of theory and research focus on how people act as consumers and work within their own identity projects (Arnould and Thompson 2005; Askegaard and Scott 2013), even as Cova, Maclaran, and Bradshaw remind us that there is no pre-actuality given to being a consumer; that is to say the word ‘consumer’ does not refer to a state of being but rather is a bestows frame (2013: 220). Practically, whether we like this aspect or not, we and the world around us are influenced by what we consume (Muratovski 2016: 3). In this book, we view consumption as having a broad definition, not only including the purchase and use of goods and services, but also watching entertainment media, interacting with celebrities, and using social media.

Throughout this, we maintain that identity is an ongoing process and one that consumers have an active hand in creating. Consumer culture may have made identity a more provisional and ambiguous character (Dunn 2008: 161), but individuals are largely aware of how consumption choices can strategically guide how they see themselves and how others see them (Featherstone 2007: 84). Consumer goods are seldom if ever identity neutral, Bauman reminds us, they tend to come complete with ‘identity supplied’ (2007: 112).

Consumer Identities: Agency, Media, and Digital Culture

This book reflects on consumer culture’s past and current influence on identity in order to suggest some future directions. It begins with the assumption that there are multiple consumer identities individuals are able to take on — from fan (Hills 2002; Booth 2010) and antifan (Gray 2003) to hate-watchers (Donegan, Chapter 5, this book) and even mourners (Pattwell, Chapter 6, this book). The emergence of social media and digital platforms has made it easier for people to take on and enact various identities (Belk 2013; Hearn 2008, 2012; Marwick 2013; Solomon 2010), even as the roles of consumption and production have merged (Duffy 2017; Luvaas 2012).

The first section of this book explores the foundation of identities formed through media, starting from the films of Cecil B. DeMille. David Blanke shows how both the film-maker and the studio helped construct a reflexive audience and promote mass consumer culture. Despite early success, DeMille bucked the trend by refusing to follow Hollywood’s star system and in doing so demonstrated that consumers could be motivated in different ways.

As film was integral in the development of people seeing themselves as consumers, Paul Booth (Chapter 2) and Mary Beth Ray (Chapter 3) note the ways the culture industries continue to feed off of consumer action. Booth suggests that fans could see themselves in works on screen and did not necessarily like what they saw. Fan studies developed largely in reaction to the derision of fans, but it was not long until these identities were again recycled within popular culture. In doing so, the media industry was able to prioritize certain fan practices over others (see also Pande, Chapter 8, this book) and push the fan identity toward a consumption model. When crossed with the ease of digital production, fandom is now commodified and spread in a much more pervasive manner.

The relative mundanity of fandom and consumption practices within digital culture is further exemplified by Ray’s interrogation of Lily Allen’s MySpace community. MySpace, as well as other social network sites (boyd and Ellison 2008), and digital streaming services have been adopted and normalized by consumers, similarly to media systems that came before. Those who took to Allen’s MySpace and helped influence the artist’s production, embodied not only consumers and fans but also producers as their feedback helped direct Allen’s music.

The four chapters in Section II continue to explore consumer agency and self-reflexiveness in contemporary consumption. For example, Joseph V. Guinta (Chapter 7) interrogates the ambivalence of consumerism within The Lego Movie (2014). While the film is largely seen as a promotional vehicle for Lego, Guinta notes that the movie can be read as offering activist and rebellious consumers identities for children, since much of the movie is based on a child’s creativity and remixing of the movie’s structural elements. Likewise, John Donegan (Chapter 5) points out that oppositional viewing strategy — where media consumers watch texts that are admittedly bad — is a reflexive way to show that they have good taste. While the consumption of guilty pleasures may be done ironically, it also works to validate that the viewer can distinguish between good and bad content.

Carmen Spanò (Chapter 4) and Ashley Pattwell (Chapter 6) pick up on a similar reflexivity within television shows and online mourning, respectively, and unite it with earlier instances of fan activism discussed by Booth and Ray. For Spanò, viewers of Mad Men (2007–15) use online fan communities to identify themselves as fans of quality TV. This validation is more traditional than Donegan’s case but helps viewers build social capital nonetheless. The same can be said for Pattwell’s interrogation of the online mourning of Prince and David Bowie. In both cases, fans took to social media sites to identify themselves as fans and express their grief over the singers. This, Pattwell argues, is a form of parasociality that allows people to consume celebrities and continue to identify as fans even after death.

The final chapters of this book focus on critical and structural issues that will influence the future identities that consumers take, and also showcase a variety of methodological tools that researchers can use to explore these identities. First, Rukmini Pande (Chapter 8) offers a colonial critique of fans, fandom, and fan research to argue that dominant western fan practices have largely been prioritized over others. Through globalization and increased connectivity, more voices are able to be heard and contribute to academic and fan discussions and Pande is correct to remind us that all voices deserve to be heard within these discussions.

In Chapter 9, Laura A. Seroka turns her attention toward research aspects of big data in an attempt to make sense of identities online. While methodological in nature, Seroka’s chapter also offers a different epistemological understanding of consumer identities. While many of the chapters approach identity through qualitative insights, the importance of contending with data analysis in consumer research is unmistakable.

Finally, Sanne Jansen (Chapter 10) looks at the legal contracts in the European Union to suggest that legal means could — and should — be explored to promote more ethical consumption. In Jansen’s work, we’re reminded that despite consumers having a large amount of agency, outside factors such as product availability and producers’ legal requirements can influence consumption habits.

In total, this book traces a trajectory of consumer agency from its beginnings in film, fandom, and digital space to contemporary practices of consumer identity, and ends with the focuses that might shape and constrain consumer action into the future.

References

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Chapter 1

Branding Desire: Strategies of Consumer Affectation in Early Classical Hollywood Film

David Blanke

Commercial mass culture serves as one of the defining features of modern societies. Taking root in the United States around the turn of the nineteenth century, its influence spread through the rapid growth of new mass media, transit, and urban electrification. While few today doubt the radical changes wrought by these new communities of consumption, there is less agreement over the dominant modes of cultural production. This division is typically rooted in scholars’ particular research methods — how they approach cultural producers, consumers, or artifacts — and this can cause problems for an interdisciplinary dialog. As a result, even a conventional term like modern conceals substantive analytical distinctions. For example, modernization refers to the material processes that transformed labor and capital, established new networks of power, and undermined traditional assumptions about work and leisure that fostered a widespread crisis in group identity. Modernity, by contrast, touches on the social aspects of this structural makeover, highlighting the distinctive experiences common to groups of people within a world now segmented by time and space. Finally, modernism emerged as a cultural aesthetic about the meaning of modernization. First identified as an artistic and literary trend, by the end of the nineteenth century modernism welcomed new cultural opportunities for personal self-expression and pleasure, particularly through the consumer marketplace that linked these broader economic, social, and political changes to the tangible satisfaction of new products, experiences, and services. Accordingly, the sources one studies largely determine the nature of cultural production they find.

This challenge was magnified as Americans struggled to understand the ideological consequences of modernization. Both conservatives and radicals fixated on the threat to personal freedom posed by the growing influence of commodity culture. Derisively labeled mass culture by the right and the culture industry by the left, critics feared a passive, feminized citizenry too willing to cede their fundamental liberties to satisfy fleeting desires for novelty and pleasure. The semantic makeover offered by terms like popular culture and consumer agency, which gained traction in the second half of the twentieth century, largely ignored these ideological questions by concluding, logically, that studying mass culture made it somewhat pointless to rue the wholesale commodification of culture. Rather than Other-ing one of the two perspectives, today most take on assumption that, in the words of Michael Denning, there is no mass culture ‘out there,’ rather, it remains ‘the very element in which we all breathe’ (1990: 17).

The growing interest in the study of consumer culture, beginning in the 1970s, offered something of a neutral meeting ground. Given its focus on all three modes of cultural production — by producers, consumers, and artifacts — the discipline placed interpretive limits upon the ideological powers of industrial capitalism and the totalizing assumptions within literary theory. Linking the social and material changes of modernization and modernity to the individual perceptions and pleasure of modernism, scholars found that early consumer culture offered acceptable means by which participants could negotiate and, for a nominal fee, claim their place within an increasingly atomized world. It did this through obviously ideological means — by the commodification of culture and the development of new work patterns that validated consumerism (i.e., Fordism) — but also by legitimizing subjective assessments of personal fulfillment as the measure of a just society. As historian Gary Cross argues, through consumer culture an individual’s material acquisition and use of mass-produced goods far more concretely expressed these beliefs than the traditional political ideologies of both the right and left (2000: vi, 2). This new aesthetic relocated ideals of democracy and independence within the marketplace, where the taste, feel, and comfort of manufactured objects, designed to maximize physical satisfaction and to intensify pleasure and excitement, created new understandings of personal freedom (Cross 2000: vi, 2).

Admitting to these contingencies neither validates nor nullifies one particular analytical method. It does, however, magnify the need to acknowledge that multiple modes of cultural production act concurrently within commercial mass culture. This indeterminacy played a particularly important role in the re-examination of commercial cinema. Reflecting the low regard typically granted to early consumers, initial assessments of commercial film demonstrated a pattern that held throughout much of the twentieth century. Both sociologists — such as those involved in the Payne Fund Studies — and neo-Marxist scholars — like those comprising the Frankfurt School — generally avoided efforts to discern the perverse reception of film by consumers to focus on capitalists’ desire to position the mass audience along lines deemed suitable by producers. Preliminary efforts to identify the linguistic structure of film — begun by the Russian Formalists — were equally biased in privileging the progressive qualities of an artifact over consumer affectation.

Beginning in the 1980s, after nearly half a century of scholarly inquiry into film, a more nuanced appreciation for cultural production sought to address this methodological segregation. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, for example, found that while classical Hollywood cinema (c. 1917–60) remained remarkably stable, its production methods were neither monolithic nor the product of a unified culture industry. Production of popular film, they concluded, was rooted in a set of widely held stylistic norms sustained by and sustaining an integral mode of film production. These conventions were practiced by real people, not a deterministic ideology, through their assumptions about how a movie should behave, about what stories it properly tells and how it should tell them, about the range and functions of film technique, and about the activities of the spectator (Bordwell et al. 1985: xiv, 13). Acknowledging the divided functions played by cultural producers, consumers, and artifacts, the authors loosened the strict application of theory to show how all three modes affected the historical construction of popular motion pictures (Bordwell et al. 1985: xiv, 13).

Corresponding with the rise of cultural studies, film scholars like Tom Gunning and Mariam Hansen redoubled efforts to locate the empirical motion picture audience. Driven by their own aesthetic appreciation of a film’s visual performance and the intertextual appeal of stardom, genre, and plot, the real fan pushed back against the theorized passivity of the positioned spectator. Significantly, both scholars shared an interest in primitive cinema — a period predating the dominant narrative practices characteristic of the classical era. Gunning famously termed this phase the Cinema of Attraction, driven not by narration but rather by the monstration (or acting out) of spectacle (1986: 63–70). Hansen wrote for a growing cadre of scholars when noting the dynamism of cultural reception by early film audiences — which she found to be profoundly intertwined with the transformation of the public sphere, in particular the gendered itineraries of everyday life and leisure — and that further undermined claims regarding their passivity and subjectivity (1991: 11–13).

The combined effect of these intellectual trends in film, peaking just as scholars re-examined modern consumer culture and other forms of mass media, was to highlight not only the historical contingencies affecting producers and artifacts but the equally provisional experiences of cultural reception. The affectation by an audience, in this guise, revealed an observable agency keyed to an emerging worldview (modernism) and driven by individualism. Patrons brought their race, gender, sexuality, and distinct intertextual understanding of film plots and stars with them into the theater. The appearance of product branding reveals the way that the studios and leading directors sought to authenticate these feelings through means that legitimized these producers’ role in cultural production (for example, by highlighting early film’s ties to the legitimate stage as a means to consecrate their work as art). Coinciding with the rise of fandom studies, by the end of the twentieth century scholars no longer felt the need to justify the value of aesthetic forms — soap operas were as valid as Giuseppe Verdi — but looked instead to the many ways that an audience could take meaning from commercial culture.

Mindful of these contingencies, this essay examines the early career and popular films of Cecil B. DeMille as a case study to explore these conflicting modes of commercial cultural production. More specifically, the analysis looks to the divergent ways that DeMille and his employer — Famous Players-Lasky Company (FPL), later known as Paramount Pictures and headed by Adolph Zukor — appealed to the affectations of the early motion picture audience. By highlighting these methods and the historical context in which they appeared, the chapter reveals surprisingly divergent assumptions made by producers about the relative agency held by the consumer of mass culture. This distinction certainly proved meaningful to DeMille. The director’s unwillingness to follow the developing corporate order of the young studio system — specifically in the ways he sought to address the perversity of his patrons — led Zukor to fire DeMille, disdainfully concluding Cecil, you have never been one of us (Zukor cited in Koury 1959: 107–08).

While most know DeMille, if at all, through the late-career excess of his Biblical epics, like Samson and Delilah (1949) or The Ten Commandments (1956), his films of the 1910s and 1920s proved to be far more interested in exploring aspirational consumption and the social significance of modernity. His first pictures (1914–15) were largely photographed stage productions, but their commercial success and his growing confidence behind the camera convinced him to begin filming original works. For the next decade, all but three of the 30 feature films he released addressed the promise and perils of modernity. This consistent thematic focus produced a popular DeMille brand that goes a long way toward explaining both his sudden success and the inevitable