Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising

Voorkant
Guilford Press, 21 mei 1996 - 322 pagina's
Television has become so saturated with commercials that it is difficult at times to tell the different images apart, much less remember or care about them. But, on closer look, television commercials can tell us a great deal about the interplay of market forces, contemporary culture, and corporate politics. This book views contemporary ad culture as an ever-accelerating war of meaning. The authors show how corporate symbols or signs vie for attention-span and market share by appropriating and quickly abandoning diverse elements of culture to differentiate products that may be in themselves virtually indistinguishable. The resulting "sign wars" are both a cause and a consequence of a media culture that is cynical and jaded, but striving for authenticity.
Including more than 100 illustrations and numerous examples from recent campaigns, this book provides a critical review of the culture of advertising. It exposes the contradictions that stem from turning culture into a commodity, and illuminates the impact of television commercials on the way we see and understand the world around us.
 

Geselecteerde pagina's

Inhoudsopgave

Advertising in the Age of Accelerated Meaning
1
Constructing Sign Values
5
The Logic of Appropriation
8
Value Added
11
Floating Signifiers and the Image Bank
14
Spirals of Referentiality Speed and Reflexivity
15
Cultural Crisis and Contradiction
17
Sign Wars
20
The Sign Wars Version
135
Collective Amnesia?
137
Authenticity in the Age of the Poseur
139
Finding Yourself in a World of Commodity Relations
141
Authenticity and the Bourgeoisie
143
Commodifying Signs of the Organic
146
Auteurs in the Age of Flexible Accumulation
152
Nature as Authenticity
154

Sign Wars and Semiotics
24
Differentiation Imitation and the Circulation of Sign Values
27
Strategies for Sign Wars
31
The Antisign
46
Rereading Image Disputes
53
Advertising in the Age of Hyper signification
55
Realist Conventions
57
Hyperreal Encoding
60
Intertextualify
66
Reflexivity
72
Hyperactivity
75
The Contradictions of Sign Values
76
Yo Hailing the Alienated Spectator
81
Addressing the Savvy Spectator
85
Negative Appellation
89
Gender and Alienation in Sign Wars
93
Disguising the Alienated Mode of Address
97
Nothing Up Our Sleeve
98
Falsified Metacommunication and Resistance
100
The Competition in Shock Value
101
The Profane
103
Before Your Future Gets Here You Know What You Gotta Do
106
Grinning at the Annihilation of Everyday Life
108
The Flip Side of Jadedness Memory and a Sense of Place
113
Schmaltzy Gemeinschaft
115
Reestablishing Relations with Our Past
122
Blasts from Our Past
125
A Moment in the Hegemony of Memory
128
Nature as a Sign of Distinction
155
Otherness
158
Antispectacular Awareness
168
Authenticity as Representation
172
The Authenticity of Death
179
The Death of Authenticity?
182
Green Marketing and the Commodity Self
185
The Commodity Self and the Death of Nature
186
From Nature Signifiers to Green Marketing
189
Commodity Advertising
192
Legitimation Advertising
198
The Spectacle of the Environment
207
The Greening of Commodity Signs
211
The Corporate Politics of Sign Values
214
Hybrid Ads
218
Building Corporate Sign Values
222
Abbreviating Public Discourse
247
Corporate Ads and Public Debate
250
The Era of Chronic Legitimation Crisis?
252
Sneakerization and Hyperculture
254
Competing to Hail the Channel Surfer
259
A Commodity Community?
263
The Spectacle in the Fractured Marketplace
267
Notes
271
Bibliography
291
Index
306
Copyright

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Over de auteur (1996)

Robert L. Goldman, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR.

Stephen Papson, Ph.D, is Professor of Sociology at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.

Bibliografische gegevens