Producing Identities: How we define ourselves and how we define other people (aka CMN 2180B - Fall 2019 - Class 8)
An underlying theme (and the point, really) in my class is that popular culture has an impact. It affects not only our perceptions of, say, crime scene investigation techniques and the reliability of evidence, but also our perceptions of ourselves and our perceptions of other people. In other words, popular culture influences how we understand our identity and how we understand the identity of those around us. But how does this happen?
First, we have to remember why this has happened. As the importance of traditional sources of identity-related information declined (like family, church, and work), we’ve turned to the media, and to popular culture in particular as the source of our information. Our identity can be understood politically, socially, culturally and economically.
In the context of the media, we are all part of an audience, which according to Grossberg, refers to a conglomeration of potential and potentially overlapping markets. This means that we fall into groups that can be associated with an identifiable product or sets of products. Markets vary according to their size, their duration, their stability and their flexibility. Fans are a particular type of market that links themselves with a specific subculture, fad, fashion, or celebrity. At least part of our identity can be defined by our fandoms and by our participation in one or more markets.
Markets can be understood in 3 ways:
Our demographics includes all of the social and sociological variables that you find on the Census, and at the end of a survey, like age, race, gender, employment category, employment status, place of residence, type of residence and income, to name a few. Demographics are relied upon by media producers to determine strategies for marketing and advertising.
Our taste culture is our continued commitment to a type of product. One example of this is to think about genres - like say science fiction. If you like science fiction, you’ll probably enjoy a whole spread of products dedicated to the genre.
Our lifestyle clusters group us into segments with others who tend to buy and use the same kinds of products and services. Some examples are hippies, yuppies, outdoorsy people, active people, gamers, punks, vegans, and vegetarians.
Combining all three of our market categories allows marketers to be very specific - they can even target different versions of a product to different markets. In this sense, audiences are a commodity; they are packaged and delivered to advertisers and other companies. It’s important to note that not every individual act of consumption necessarily defines one’s identity. Buying a banana, for example, might not mean anything to you but buying a coffee might (Heeeelllooooo Starbucks!).
In addition to our economic identities, audiences also have cultural identities…
Our cultural identity is based on our associations with different groups. Our social identity is a very complex concept that raises several questions, including:
Where do these categories come from and what do they mean?
How is our membership in a particular group determined?
What is the content (or meaning) of a specific category?
The essentialist view assumes that every category exists naturally, in and of itself. From this perspective, each category of identity is independent of every other one.
The anti-essentialist view takes a relational approach, arguing that categories of identity are culturally constructed. From this perspective, our identities are always in process and always incomplete, they’re unstable and temporary, always changing and evolving.
According to the anti-essentialist view, our categories of identity are the product of cultural codes. These codes are, in turn, based on signifiers which place us into categories. Signifiers help us to identify the ‘norm’ or ‘neutral’ categories, which help us identify what is abnormal or what is ‘other’.
What’s really important to remember about identity is that there are different categories of identity - be it political, social, cultural, or economic - and that our identity is always changing, always evolving. It’s not fixed and it’s not linear. If it was, not only would life be boring, but we would never grow, never evolve, never learn.
