In our penultimate class we moved from branding to a lively and heated discussion of self-branding. Our last readings by Theresa Senft and Alison Hearn, out of everything in the course, are the ones that give us language to self-reflexively think about ourselves, our subject position and our relation to the world, particularly the brand world of consumer culture.
We started with Senft’s exercise “flesh, image, icon, brand” as a way to think about ourselves and our image as a semiotic object and also as a commodity. This was also to get us thinking about us, and Goffman’s (1967) concept of “face work” which Hearn brings up in her article. Erving Goffman wrote about face in conjunction with how people interact in daily life. “He claims that everyone is concerned, to some extent, with how others perceive them. We act socially, striving to maintain the identity we create for others to see. This identity, or public self-image, is what we project when we interact socially.”
Further, Amelia Jones (2006) asks: “How does the image relate to the self? How are imaging technologies linked to ideological conceptions of seeing and knowing that, in turn, define the subject in Euro-American culture?” As Katherine Hayles also argues, “technology not just mediates but produces subjectivities” (Jones, 2006, p. 44). In other words, how our these new image based social networks such as Instagram, Snapchat, tumblr, etc. linked to the ideological conception of seeing and, in turn, defining subjectivity?
Advertising and Consumer Culture 