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01/23/2005 Archived Entry: "Early Show"

Early Show
Insightful segment on this morning's Early Show: the rhetoric of advertising and its power within the networked culture we live in. Yes, the power of advertising is a trope common to many of us, but what I always find insightful about these segments is how the advertising world continues to understand the information economy in terms of new media logics (emotional imprinting, networking, connectivity, iconicity) and how the university resists. The university believes too strongly in the purity of the text, the "ah, the great idea/how beautiful this is" mantra. Because of that, and because of some of its members' purity belief in Marxism, it resists examining how advertising might teach us a great deal about rhetoric in the networked age. Advertising promotes global capital! Sure. But look at how it does what it does.
Tie-ins: I wrote about tie-ins briefly in my textbook because they exemplify the power of linking. How do so many things connect? How can I make them connect even when they appear not to? It's one thing to bemoan the commercial experience of going to the movies today (the candy bar, the t-shirt, the Happy Meal, the toys), but it's another to think about how tie-ins as linking are quite successful rhetorical moves. Google and A9.com seem to understand the tie-in extremely well. WebCt pretends it does, but then removes itself from the Web where a great deal of this activity takes place. Artificial tie-in is more like it in managed courseware.
Affect: I don't write about affect. But the question of associating products with a moment, an experience, an emotion is such a powerful move. Writing within and aligned with a moment is much different than comparing two poems/short stories/novels or critically unraveling the race/class/gender thread in a given text . Blue book that.
Imprinting: this is quite a complex task, but consumer culture understands how to implement it. How do you imprint (a wonderful part of the segment discusses the Coke/Pepsi test; even when folks thought they liked Pepsi better, they still bought Coke)? Repetition? Maybe. Absurdity? Maybe too. Connect the "thing" with a number of other things, moments, experiences, emotions? Probably as well.
The implications could be quite astounding for intellectual work. The lament of student production, I've always contended, stems from misplaced logics: the university and its single thought, textual appreciation, print logic, question and answer, cultural studies' obsessed critical thinking system MEETS the networked, hyper logic of consumer culture. The tropes of "critical thinking," for instance, ("we should teach critical thinking!") are circulated in a very non-critical economy of pedagogy. To be critical, we must re-evaluate our own practices and approaches to contemporary phenomenon. Merely dismissing consumer culture as is does not represent a critical moment. Neither does believing in the cliches of audience or purpose or race/class/gender. I think of all those so called professional writing courses stuck on teaching formal genres (report, memo, resume) without any of the rhetorics of professional discourse - represented in Amazon, eBay, Buzzmetrics, or other networked thinking enterprises. Or I think of Gerald Graff standing for critical pedagogy in Clueless: let's teach popular culture as we taught everything else in our lives. But what does popular culture do that is so important? Ah, that we never find out. . .

Posted by Andrew Mara @ 01/24/2005 10:05 AM EST

"don't you think that a lot of the imprinting techniques depend upon toting around a commodified artifact"

And I guess there the question would be: is that "bad"?

Since I don't want to sink into good/bad binaries, I can't really reject the need to hold onto any kind of commodified artifact (though it is also hard to imagine what the opposite of the commodified artifiact might be). In fact, I don't feel comfortable with the purist feeling of being beyond consumer culture (art as high brow as elevated status/consumerism as low brow, lower status).

When the university merely adapts the end product of consumer culture - let's say the superficial status of "excellence" Readings critiques, then it hasn't accomplished much or it has failed to recognize the rhetorical value of consumer culture. The book is a commodified artifact, right? But its rhetorical value has been absorbed in a number of ways; ways that materialize in output (the essay/the exam) and structure (linearity, narrative). You don't have to own the iPod to invent an iPod practice. But the first step, it seems to me, is to begin to imagine the possibilities of such a practice.

The other side also is that consumer culture didn't come first. Art did. As we know, the avant-garde, Burroughs, Debord all invented the rhetoric of advertising. That a certain segment of the business world tapped into this and the university (or more recently, professional writing) didn't seems important. At the very least it reflects the legacy of high brow/low brow (Lynes' The Tastemakers) culture we come to accept as ideology. We can admire The Situationists. We would never apply their writing strategies, however, to our own methods of knowledge production.

Posted by jeff @ 01/24/2005 09:44 AM EST

I think I have a bit of a better understanding of what you are saying. I'm not contesting a need for ideological shifts--in fact, I was describing a number of shifts I am currently making as a way of saying that I think it is already always happening inside the academy as well as on the outside. I afford those of us in the ivory tower the same kind of consideration that de Certeau and Spinuzzi afford the "man on the street." I think the consumer/academy dichotomy falls prey to the same leftist critique that you say we employ with network culture. I fully agree with experiencing, using, and teaching rhetorical appeals and techniques (especially affective and ecological ones). My tech writing grad students bought a commerical cookbook as their first "genre" for that reason.

I do have a question though--don't you think that a lot of the imprinting techniques depend upon toting around a commodified artifact (XBox in every house, Coke/Pepsi in every cooler, Starbucks in every cupholder, iPod strapped to everybody's arm, etc...)? I think part of branding depends upon the fetishization of the artifact--making the metonymic association with an artifact and draining meaning from the amibient affective experiences into that artifact. Can we do the same thing in an institution that can't hide its productive apparatus into the iUniversity? I guess that's two questions...

Posted by Andrew Mara @ 01/24/2005 09:11 AM EST

"Branding/imprinting works better with commidification"

"Better"? Who knows? It is, however, a rhetorical move. Whether it will work in other kinds of circulations remains to be seen because it is left on the outside.

If I'm right, and branding (among many other things) is part of new media, then pedagogies must be invented in order to integrate it into curricula. Those pedagogies should not merely copy existing pedagogies we already know (if we did that, what would be the point of a new practice?) That would necessitate a number of ideological shifts. We haven't invented the pedagogy yet. So we have no clue as to who is best to employ it: consumer culture or writing instruction.

Posted by jeff @ 01/23/2005 06:02 PM EST

Not so sure I can follow you to the end of this argument here. I agree that the University, as a culturally-conservative institution resists advertising and marketing (in the broad sense of remediated networked culture) as a way of seeing/thinking (for the reasons you stated, and more non-left issues as well). Branding/imprinting works better with commidification (attempts at this in Universities are pretty awkward, considering that you basically have to fire all of us and start selling universities in smaller, reproduceable units if you want to take advantage of economies of scale that make this practice so successful--really hard to do effectively with individualized goods/services. "Have a Stradivarius and a Smile"?) I try to help students situate themselves in a way that holds all elements of their information ecology up for experience AND analysis (just had my class analyze their biggest impulse purchase and what it led to as a way to discussing Activity Theory in a graduate research methods course). Sort of Spinuzzi meets cultural circuit.

The genres emerge because they have use in the culturally powerful order of things. Students may hate it, or disidentify with it, but that has always been a primary duty of the University. I think that using marketing/sales approaches only goes so far in helping students forward their own argumentation strategies. We are studying turntablism in my Online Docs course, but as long as folks like us are involved, it will always feel/smell/taste like a stale University.

The class is what it is, just as the university is what it is. Network logic is imposing itself, however awkwardly, on the University, but it won't ever quite be the carnivale or stadium experience that the culture points to as ideal.

Posted by Andrew Mara @ 01/23/2005 05:17 PM EST