Task 4 Hyper Reality (Apple Store)

Hyper reality is hard to interoperate but once your look closely at some aspects of society it becomes far more clear. The Apple store is a good example of hyper reality, they take a slightly different approach to marketing their store as the standard high street outlet.

The Apple store is not solely for the upperclass although it has been designed to represent a higher class shopping experience.  The Apple store associates itself with a lifestyle rather then a shop, it gives the idea of a perfectly designed environment which designers can look up to. The apple store convinces consumers that their products will make you a better designer if you use their products allowing people to keep coming back and buying the same things. Apple makes Young designers feel that they need to use their products to be the best in their creative fields

The design of the store makes it feel exclusive which allows Apple to represent the products to have a higher value, much higher than what it took to necessarily make the product but this value is easily exploited by placing the products around the shop leaving a lot of space around them to give the idea that they only sell a limited number of products but they are the best you can buy.

There are also only a limited number of Apple stores around this is to make it more exclusive and to give the consumer a feel of being a tourist or actually having to make an effort to go visit the store. This feeling of being a tourist makes them more inclined to spend money and to make them feel like it hasn't been a wasted journey. 

Panopticism Task 1

We are constantly reminded in various ways that our lives are being recorded and watched, in today’s modern society one of the main panoptic systems in our society is CCTV, it records and watches our every action, Foucault states, “visibility is a trap” the idea that our every action is being watched is enough to spark off a panoptic effect which will make the individual regulate themselves due to the fear of being caught out. 

This CCTV sign even though its not an actual recording device also sets off the idea that were being watched or as Foucault states “a system of permanent registration” the sign is a permanent reminded that you are constantly being watched.

Wherever we go we are faced with CCTV camera’s everywhere within our modern day society Foucault states, “he is seen, but he doesn’t see” the feeling of being watched is constant which controls the individual, Foucault describes it as “a guarantee of order”.

CCTV is very obvious wherever you go, the camera’s aren’t well hidden and the signs are bright and in the open, you are able to see the camera but you cannot see who is watching you, Foucault describes this as, “visibility that assures the automatic function of power”.  The idea of CCTV is not to catch people out but to make them aware that they are being monitored in order for them to control themselves.  

Lecture 7 - Identity

• Historical conceptions of identity
• Foucaults discourse methodology
• Post modern theorys of identity (Zygman Bauman)
• identity in the digital domain

Cesare Lombroso (1835 - 1909)

Founder of positive criminology, notion that criminal tendency's are inherited

Physiognomy Legitimising Racism

Trying to legitimise racism, by looking at specific facial features. Facial features in paintings and photos get over exaggerated to show give the idea that their evil.

Hieronymous Bosch, Christ carrying the Cross.

Historical phases of identity

•  Premodern identity - personal identity is stable - degined by long standing roles
• Modern identity - modern societies begin to offer a wider range of social roles. Possibly to start 'choosing' your identity, rather than simply being born into it. People start to 'worry' about who they are.
• Post - modern identity - accepts a 'framented' 'self'. Identity is constructed. 

Pre Modern Identity

Institutions determined identity

Marriage, the church, monarchy, government, the state, work

Pre Modern identity

'secure identies'

Farm worker, soldier, factory worker, housewife, gentleman....

Modern identity

Thorstein Veblen - Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

Georg Simmel - The metropolis and Mental Life (1903)

- Social anxiety, who you are, where you fit in. 

Georg Simmel

The higher classes where high end fashion, the lower classes see that and try and emulate what they see. Lower classes try and copy the higher class.

You feel alienated within the city and theres an expectation to go out with an identity.

Discourses to be considered

Class

Nationality

Race/ethincity

Gender and sexuality

Class

The higher class want to keep the lower classes in their place so you can actually maintain your own role within your set class. 

'Members of Mass observation' worktown project, 1937

He approaches the project with a preconceived idea and shows the lowerclass/working class from up north and how uncultured and poor they are.

Martin Parr, The last resort,

The photos have a slightly condesating gesture to it.

Z, Bauman

"soiety... reminds one of a particularly sherw, cunning and pokerfaced player in the game of life, cheating if given a chance, fliuting rules whenever possible'

Postmodern condition

liquid modernity and liquid love

Post modern theory

• identity is constructed through our social experience
• Erving goffman the presentation of self in everyday life
• goffman saw life as theatre made up of....

Yes indeed identity is revealead.

Barbara Kruger,  defining yourself by the thing your buy not by the person your are "i shop therefore i am"

'the famil trip to a shopping mall is the present day incarnation of the sacred' identity page 71 bauman

Essay Proposal

Title


"Identity and Desire in Consumerism"


In my essay i plan to talk about the brand Apple what it stands for and how it has build its brand identity through its advertising campaigns to not only make the brand well recognized but to make it a "necessary" commodity in today's culture. I will touch on the Ipod adverts and how they use celebrities to grab their identity so the brand will exist in society with the same identity.
I want to talk continue and talk about the message apples brand is sending society and how it is influencing people to buy their products within today's consumer society.

Main points

• Break down of apples brand and identity
  -detailed break down of what the brand stands for and how this influences buyers 
• Ipod adverts and how they use celebrity influence to help sell their product.
  -Integrating all the associations with celebrities within the actual product and promoting the product by you consuming it yourself back to you. 
• Consumer society and apple products

Potential points

• How apple's itunes has become the decline for HMV stores

Reading List:

Noami Klein - No Logo

Gives a good break down of adverts and how they integrate themselves within society to end up being a consumer commodity. Apple Case Studies.

Z. Bauman - Consuming Life

touches on consumerism within society, talks about how by falling into the consumerist society you invest in your own social status ect. Very good book for the break down of consumerism.

O. Wallis - On Brand / The Brand Handbook

Breaks down branding and large corporate identities,  also gives some Apple Case Studies.

The Rebel Sell

In Short, talks about how "rebellion" is cool and how its been marketed within society and the professional workplace.

J. Berger - Ways of Seeing

Always helpful, good old John, B.

G. Cook - The Discourse of Advertising

Theories


Michael Fuacult - Panapticism

How a brand can influence us to buy their product within the store for example the apple store and how their "brand experience" may influence buyers.

Karl Marx - Commodity Fetish

How we will buy things we dont need.

Lecture 6 - Cities & Film

Georg Simmel (1858-1918)

Simmel is asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the city but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual.

Urban Sociology

The resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up the social technological mechanism. 

Architect louis Sullivan 1856-1924

• creator of the modern skyscraper
• an influential architect and critic in chicago
• form follows function

Details from Guaranty Building

Charles Scheeler

no figures present in his photographic work.

Photographing ford motoring company plant.

Severe Dyslexia and bad lecturers make a really good combination to not having a clue what this lecture is about, or what to write. Neither does it help to sit through a totally irrelevant lecture to my course. 

Stock market crash of 1923

Factories close, unemployment, Great depression.

"Man With a movie Camera"

explores the role of the movie camera within the city. It expores various types of camera shots, freeze frame, slow motion, double exposure. The camera has access to intimate moments like the bedroom and also the streets. 

Charles Baudelaire

"a person who walks the city in order to experience it"

art should capture this

Simultaneously apart from and a part of the crowd

Walter Benjamin

adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool.

Flaneuse

Arbus/Hopper

shows an inbetween moment, just after or before somehting has happened. Does not say what has happened but leaves it to the imagination. 

Sophie calle suite venitienne 1989

follows people round in Venice. Somewhere between stalking and a love affair.......... 

Venice

City as a labyrinth of streets and alleyways in which you can get lost but at the same time will always end up back where you begin.

The detective

Wants to provide photographic evidence of her existance

His photos and notes on her are displayed next to her photos and notes about him.

Set in Paris

She gets her mother to get a investigator, then she leads him round the city of to places of her childhood.

Weegee Arthur Felig

Followed round the emergency services so he knows when an incident happens, then goes to the crime scenes and takes photo's, he had a mobile dark room in his car. So he could develop the photos instantly and sell to the press.

Lecture 4 - Popular Culture

Critical positions on the media and popular culture

What is culture?

1.    Way of life

2.    General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time.

3.     Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance.

Marx’s Concept of Base/Superstructure

Where the base directly determines the content and form of the superstructure, the super structure then reflects on the base and influences it.

Raymond Williams (1983)

4 definitions of popular

Lesser then a real culture such as art and mass production. Needs a taste setter, historically the ruling classes are the taste setters.

·      Well liked by many

·      Inferior kinds of work

·      Work deliberately setting out to win favour with people

·      Culture actually made by the people themselves

Inferior or residual culture

·      Popular press vs quality press

·      Popular cinema vs art cinema

·      Popular entertainment vs art culture

Mural paintings, people have no right to judge them by societies standards because they have been tought in a different way.

Popular culture can start off by representing the people then then end up representing a few.

Society had a comman culture and there was a tiny  superculture

the first time this changes (base/superstructure) is with industrailsation and urbanisation, people are condensed together physically but clearly separated.

working class moved into slums. The higher class retreat to the nicer areas of the city’s.

This physical separation causes a change in culture to keep the lower class occupied. (own forms of litrature, music, pub…). After years you will see a working class culture which is very much different to a upper class culture.

Matthew Arnold (1867) Culture & Anarchy

Culture is:

·      The best that has been thought and said in the world

·      Study of perfection

·      Attained through disinterested reading, thinking and writing

·      The pursuit of culture

Anarchy

·      Culture polices “the raw and uncultivated masses”

·      “The working class… raw and half developed… long lain half hidden amidst its poverty and squalor…”

Leavisism – F.R Leavis & Q.D Leavis

“Culture has always been in minority keeping” – there has always been an elite to defend the culture.

Says basically working class culture is a form of distraction. Drugs, cheap trills, ways to break away fro reality.

Frankfurt School

Theodore adorno & max Horkheimer

Reinterpreted marx, for the 20^th century – era of late capitalism”

Defined “the culture industry”:

2 main products – homogeneity and predictability

“all mass culture is identical””

“as soon as the film begins, its quite clear how it will end, and who ill be rewarded punished or forgotten”

Popular culture vs affirmative culture

Holy oaks:

They way it has been marketed into and repackaged through the culture industry.

Adorno on popular music

Standardisation

Social cement

Produces passivity through rhythmic and emotional adjustment.

Real culture has been lost:

Individualisation

Imaginisation

Benjamin Walter

Mass production and new production technology has allowed us to redefine culture into how we want and the possibility of challenging high culture.

Lecture 3 - Marxism & Design Activism

Marxism & Design Activism

Aims

·      To introduce a critical definition of ideology

·      To introduce some of the basic principles of Marxist philosophy

·      To explain the extent to which the media constitutes us as subjects

·      To introduce “culture jamming: and the idea of design activism

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the, however, is to change it.”

Marx, K. (1845)

Marxism is:

A political manifesto, leading to socialism, communism and the twentieth century conflicts between capital and labor

A philosophical approach to the social sciences, which focuses on the role of society in determining human behavior, based on concept of dialectical materialism

What is Capitalism?

·      Society where the control of the means of production are held in private hands.

·      A market where labour power is bought and sold (even people)

·      Production of commodities for sale

·      Use of money as a means of exchange

·      Competition/meritocracy

Communist Evolution

1.     Primitive Communism: as seen in cooperative tribal societies.

2.     Slave Society: Develops when the tribe becomes a city – state. Birth of aristocracy

3.     Feudalism: aristocracy becomes the ruling class. Mechants devlop into capitalists.

4.     Capitalism: capitalists are the ruling class, who create and employ the real working classes.

5.     Socialism: dictatorship of proletariat: workers gain class consciousness, overthrow the capitalists and take control over the state.

6.     Communism: a classless and stateless society.

Marx’s concept

Base

Forces of production – materials, tools, workers, skills.

Relations of production – emplyer/emplyee, class, master/slave.

Superstructure

Social institutions – legal, political, culture.

Forms of consciousness – ideology

By changing the base (captilism) you would change the super structure being politics are way of thinking everything.

The state:

“but a committee for managing the comman affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” marx and engels 1848

The queen is a figure head not in charge.

the bourgeosisies, get the state to set laws, get army out to control.

Ideology sets up a system of ideas or beliefs which benefits the political party.

Masking, distortion, or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creation of “false consciousness”

“The ruling class has to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”

Karl Marx, (1846)

Art as Ideology

The only peiople able to be artists are the people who are eductated, women weren’t allowed to make art either. So the only people making art are Rich white men, making art for people who are rich. Made by rich people for rich people.

Society = Economic, political & ideological:

Ideology is a practice through which men and women “live” their relations to real conditions of existence.

Ideology offers false, but seemingly true resolutions to social imbalance.

Becomes a mechanism for how we live our lives.

The media as ideological state apparatus

·      A means of production

·      Disseminates the views of the ruling class (dominant hegemonic)

·      Media creates a false consciousness

·      The  individual is produced by nature; the subject by culture,

The media controls politics.