Second time dissertation plan
Name: Han Du
SID: 2362085
The scope of my project
In my project, I want talk about visual culture. Any concept or a product only brings economic benefits to be considered a success. Therefore, the concept of visual culture, in practical application, will be transformed into many different ways. In my project, I want to focus on analysis of visual culture play an important role in visual consumption. The scope of my project is visual consumption form of expression, and using visual consumption in the movies or advertising.
The central idea of my project
Visual selective attention reveals the tendency of contemporary consumer behavior in a considerable extent. From the objective side, a wide range of image is the consumption objects; from the subjective side, consumer behavior, either explicitly or implicitly to be the various commodities and image manipulation effects.
‘In advanced consumer society, the act of consumption need not involve economic exchange. We consumer with our eyes, take in commodities every time, we push a grocery cart up and down the aisles in a supermarket, or watch TV, or drive down a logo-studded highway’ ( Schroeder 2002, P. 4).
This shows that, in the image-bases society, consumer behavior is no longer confined to traditional acts carried out in exchange of direct shopping behavior.
The intended audience and impact of your project
The intended audiences are product designers, product creators and media program producers. The impact of my project is they can better grasp the minds of consumers, access to the best interests.
The planning and organization of my workload
From now to 15th July, finish my research and write the report of research. From 16th July to 10th August finish main part dissertation, I mean 80% of my dissertation. From 11th August to 20th August finish my entire dissertation and go to academic write centre to correct grammar and language mistakes, and then send my dissertation to my supervisor, hope him help me perfect my dissertation. In my plan, the average I complete to 800 to 1000 words per day.
The style or look of my project
I think my project style is argumentative essay. I will put forward my views and use of theory and practice to support my point of view.
Specifically, the visual consumption at least has the following meanings.
First of all, in the consumer society, ‘look’ the act itself constitutes consumption. Not only as film and television works, tourist attractions such as purely visual objects are visual consumption ‘products’, and many of the traditionally items that does not have to be art and aesthetics can also become the object of visual consumption. In the consumer society, almost all goods and services which must be seen and to be displayed got their nature and attention. Specifically, the behavior of watching and being watched are part of consumer behavior. View items has become the way to building self-identity, so the appearance of products, brands and its complicated additional meaning, has become the self-identity and self-discover activity.
‘The spectacle is not a collection of image; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by image’ (Debord 1995, P. 12). So with Debord word, in the ‘Spectacle society’, the show of a product is more important than having a product. In the traditional sense consumer behavior that a person own exclusive possession replaced by the value of exchange or display in the symbol system. Therefore, the visual consumption has become important aspects of consumer behavior in the consumer society. A function of brand-name suit far more than warm or shelter, but that it is a distinguish symbol for owners taste, education, as well as social status. In this complex process of ideographic symbols, visual not only assume the display capabilities, but also played an important functions on significance production and exchange.
Fisk’s analysis on the jeans is a typical example. In a consumer society, the jeans with the complex cultural meaning and identity building functions. First of all, jeans are considered as informal, non-class, both men and women, and on the cities and villages can be used clothing. So the one hand it has negative social difference of function, on the other hand is a sign of freedom that emphasized the liberation from the identity constraints. Second, the jeans but also has a strong, dynamic character, and wearing jeans mainly from two groups—young and blue-collar. But jeans have more complex cultural meaning. It is in the elimination of social differences, while there can be used to convey a sense of resistance, such as deliberately wear torn old jeans, means that the subversion and resistance of clean intact jeans. Meanwhile, the jeans original significance from the working class has been given new meaning in the encoding and decoding process.
Such as Levi’s 501 jeans TV ad, is through description the hard work cowboy-style, demonstrated success through hard work. The ad clearly marked the elite capitalist ideology, tells us: the person can and should be out of the difficult conditions, to achieve personal success and identity. Even more interesting, one hand jeans has a function to eliminate identity difference, on the other hand there is a function to distinguish identity, such as ordinary jeans and designer jeans to represent two different identities and cultures. Therefore, Fisk believe that wearing jeans is a distinguish behavior, is a social orientation, it was characterized by high consumption levels of cultural significance. Consumers need objective their own identity, so consumers bound to find a particular object in all consumer goods; on the contrary, in the consumer society, and commodity is always either explicitly or implicitly convey specific tastes, values and ideology. So as consumer goods in itself has the distinguish identity function.
Second, the visual consumption not only means that visual attention for goods or services, and includes other associated visual concerns. This vision is a process that significance production and exchange. Use advertising for example, the ad function is not simply to sell goods or services, essentially it is a producer of meanings and pleasures. Fiske believes that in the cultural economy, circulation is not cycle of money, but to disseminate of meaning and pleasure. Consumers are the producer of goods significance and excitement.
For example, made by the Beijing artist Pu Cunxin ‘HiTravel’ that is a portable handheld mobile computer television ad, through switching to all kinds of success white-collar workers screen, an electronic tool to associate with the success of middle-class life, it is an electronic tool to give a special significance, seem to have it as a conditions become a success white-collar. In the as, the middle-class lifestyles and values to be a clever fusion of electronic tools, thus creating a directional imagine and enviable purchase desire, to provide the audience a kind of ‘promise’, to have ‘HiTravel’ will have a successful white-collar ‘happiness’. From this example we can see, visual consumption not only in the consumer product, but also through commodity product consumption desires.
In the consumer society, compulsion turned into addiction. Everything in a consumer society is a matter of choice, except the compulsion to choose—the compulsion which grows into addiction and so is no longer perceived as compulsion. The Bauman point out: ‘we shop outside shops as much as inside; we shop in the street and at home, at work and at leisure, awake and in dreams. Whatever we do and whatever name we attach to our activity is a kind of shopping, an activity shaped in the likeness of shopping’ (Bauman 2000, P.73).
More importantly, in the consumer society, the image consumption in the production of a desire on the image, at the same time produce large quantities of images and even excess. In this regard that images consumption has infinite potential and market, with endless images of resources; on the other hand, the excess image has become the joint point of visual culture and social integration. Consumer society to provide a rich, update the images as a consumer, which promoted the consumption of visual culture operation.
When Sontag analysis the relationship between photography and consumption, he point out: ‘the reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to use up—and, therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be ransacked; they are precisely what is at hand wherever the eye falls. The possession of camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: first, because the possibilities of photography are infinite; and, second, because the project is finally self-devouring. The attempts by photography to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletion. Our oppressive sense of the transience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to “fix” the fleeting moment. We consume images at an ever faster rate’ (Sontag 1978, P.179).
Finally, the visual consumption is fundamentally an experiential consumption, during consumption goods or services not only in the physical and material satisfaction to consumers, more importantly, is the psychological satisfied by the visual. Therefore, the visual consumption to a certain extent is a visual pleasure to satisfaction, a kind of self-identity through the visual sense of satisfaction. On the one hand, visual consumption depends on some consumer goods taste of edify, and this taste is a vision of training. On the other hand, it is through this vision of training, which in turn restricts the consumers in the goods markets find their own things, and then were self-identity or collective identity.
There is so much advertising only because it can never finally succeed in its tasks—those of containing social diversity within the needs of capitalism and of reducing the relative autonomy of the cultural economy from the financial, that is, of controlling not only what commodities people buy but the cultural uses they put them to.
‘Consumption is, in this case, a stage in a process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code. In a sense, on can say that the capacity to see (wir) is a function of the knowledge (savoir), or concepts, that is, the words, that are available to name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmers for perception’ (Bourdieu 1984, P.2).
Use this idea to resolve the visual consumption is the most appropriate. Different consumers have different consumer perspective, actually the advertising different positioning for different consumer groups and consumer vision to shaping and strengthening. This allows consumers got the specific visual sense of the option direction, they can find their own favorite and delightful products quickly. Consumption itself is a culture, however, lead to us pay more attention phenomenon is that many of today’s consumer goods and services have been painted with the temptation of ‘cultural features’. From the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ to ‘white collar’, from ‘pioneer’ to ‘cool’, these demands are in fact attributable to convey some sort of identification and psychological experience. So, with some consumer goods, or to enjoy a service, which is designed to get people who they added symbolic value.
