Abstract
Consumer Culture and the Media is a beautifully written and concise account of consumer culture through the lens of the consumer magazine cover and the newsstand from which it engages with the consuming public. The author, Mehita Iqani, expertly combines cultural theories of the public, identity and power with a socio-semiotic discussion of the visual, verbal and material dimensions of the magazine cover. Select examples of magazine covers illustrate these ideas.
Iqani sets up a dialogue between consumers, consumption and commodities, and the framing theories of public, identity and power (drawing on classic cultural and feminist theorists such as Arendt, Couldry, Foucault, Habermas, and McRobbie, as well as on more contemporary contributions from scholars such as Chouliaraki and Gill among many others). Iqani argues that such a dialogue results in three dialectical tensions: materiality/hyperreality, subject/object, and manipulation/empowerment (p. 38). By entering into such a dialogue, Iqani is then able to establish the grounds upon which she is going to question her object of study: the consumer magazine cover and the newsstand where it is displayed. Key questions posed and answered in this book include: How do magazine covers operate within the double economy of constraint and freedom of choice? Does consumerism empower or manipulate consumers? How do magazine covers and newsstands negotiate between and/or contribute to aesthetic and social conceptions of subjects (practices of consumption) and objects (commodities) as well as the tensions between hyperreal and material manifestations of the consumerist public realm?
That Iqani is able to fruitfully explore these dialectics through the case study of the consumer magazine cover on the newsstand is testimony to her deep understanding of the theories underpinning this research. This is, of course, facilitated by the fact that consumer magazines are founded on a culture of selling goods and making a profit, thus making them an ideal case study.
Another dialogue established throughout this book is an interdisciplinary one. Iqani combines ethnography (the flâneur, and thick description) with multimodal discourse analysis, providing textual analysis of both words and images (drawing on Halliday and Kress and van Leeuwen) and of the materiality of the magazine cover, coming up with the term glossiness as the key mediator of hyperreal consumerism. However, as Fish (1989: 15) so plainly notes: being interdisciplinary is so very hard to do. And while Iqani is largely successful in this endeavour, there are elements of the book that cultural theorists and multimodal discourse analysts might in turn appreciate more or less.
As a multimodal discourse analyst, the section that I struggled with was the reporting of the ethnographic findings (Chapter 3). I found the qualitative method of ‘thick description’ – a detailed account from the researcher in the field (in this case, at the newsstand in the supermarket/corner shop/train station) making explicit the patterns of social and cultural relationships and putting them in context (Holloway, 1997) – the least convincing and theoretically relevant aspect of the book, especially since the consumers of magazines are explicitly omitted from this study. Directly following on as this chapter does from the dense and expertly articulated account of the theoretical underpinnings of the book, the shift to first person observation seems at odds with the tone and style of the book as a whole.
More specifically, the thick description of the newsstand takes readers on an enjoyable, at times poetic, at times humorous, tour of Iqani’s observations of the space and the behaviour of the public as they engage with it. However, this section does not subject these observations to the same level of semiotic scrutiny that the magazine cover receives in subsequent chapters. Had the same depth of socio-semiotic observations been afforded the newsstand as the magazine cover, then a much more coherent (with the rest of the book) and convincing account would have been achieved. In the remaining chapters, however, the socio-semiotic descriptions of the magazine cover (words, images and materiality) tie in very neatly with the discussions of consumer culture and the tensions and dialectics at stake for cultural theorists.
Throughout the analytical chapters and in the conclusion of the book, Iqani offers a surfeit of ideas for future research, which should fuel a number of potential PhD projects. It is a must read for researchers of consumer culture, the media and advertising, and for those interested in finding out what a conversation between socio-semiotics and cultural studies can look like. Iqani has shown in this volume that there is much to be gained from such a dialogue.