Fluent Essays

Note: you will not see other students postings until you post your own.After completing the reading listed on this weeks checklist--The Signs of Shopping by Anne Norton (83) and The Science of Shopping by Malcolm Gladwell (88) both in Signs of Life--complete the following:To begin our course-long analysis of popular culture, we will begin with the world of marketing and advertising. We might be tempted to believe that because we are the ones choosing to buy certain products and services, that we are making autonomous (free) choices. This feeling, conscious or subconscious, might make us feel empowered - as if it is an act of independence and individuality. However, as you may already realize, and as the first two readings explain, those seemingly autonomous acts are often driven by carefully crafted marketing and advertising forces that can be read as semiotic signs of social and political significance.We will continue to develop our understanding of these forces as well as their significance over the next couple of weeks. For this discussion:Part IVisit a local store or supermarket, and study the spatial design. Which of the design strategies that Gladwell describes do you observe, and how do they seem to affect the customers behavior? How are some of these techniques similar to what Norton discusses in the section of her essay under the heading Shopping at Home? Use at least one quotation from each essay to support or illustrate. (250-300 words)Part IIUsing specific details (like particular stores, websites, techniques), answer the following question: Do you think surveillance of customers by retailers (brick-and-mortar and/or online) is beneficial or destructive to society as a whole? (250-300 words). Then, respond to at least two other students whose answer to this question is contrary to yours. A civil, academic way of doing that is by first acknowledging the potential validity of their viewpoint. f6d521e_ba1d_4085_b3f5_e8c92f6d005b.jpeg ae_aba6_427e_b949_9dfeacc4133a.jpeg a9be_63bb_4829_ac21_5a1aaf098c8b.jpeg _______microsoft_word_________2_.docx Unformatted Attachment Preview UNDERSTANDING SHOPPING: ANNE NORTON The Signs of Shopping Shopping malls are more than places to shop, just as mail-order catalogs are more than simple lists of goods. Both malls and catalogs are coded systems that not only encourage us to buy but, more profoundly, help us construct our very sense of identity, as in the J. Peterman catalog that “constructs the reader as a man of rugged outdoor interests, taste, and money.” In this selection from Republic of Signs (1993), Anne Norton, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzes the many ways in which malls and catalogs sell you what they want by telling you who you are. Norton’s other books include Alternative Americas (1986) and On the Muslim Question (2013). Shopping at the Mall The mall has been the subject of innumerable debates. Created out of the modernist impulse for planning and the centralization of public activity, the mall has become the distinguishing sign of suburban decentralization, springing up in unplanned profusion. Intended to restore something of the lost unity of city life to the suburbs, the mall has come to export styles and strategies to stores at the urban center. Deplored by modernists, it is regarded with affection only by their postmodern foes. Ruled more by their content than by their creators’ avowed intent, the once sleek futurist shells have taken on a certain aura of postmodern playfulness and popular glitz. The mall is a favorite subject for the laments of cultural conservatives and others critical of the culture of consumption. It is indisputably the cultural locus of commodity fetishism. It has been noticed, however, by others of a less condemnatory disposition that the mall has something of the mercado, or the agora, about it. It is both a place of meeting for the young and one of the rare places where young and old go together. People of different races and classes, different occupations, different levels of education meet there. As M. Pressdee and John Fiske note, however, though the mall appears to be a public place, it is not. Neither freedom of speech nor freedom of assembly is permitted there. Those who own and manage malls restrict what comes within their confines. Controversial displays, by stores or customers or the plethora of organizations and agencies that present themselves in the open spaces of the mall, are not permitted. These seemingly public spaces conceal a pervasive private authority. The mall exercises its thorough and discreet authority not only in the regulation of behavior but in the constitution of our visible, inaudible, public discourse. It is the source of those commodities through which we speak of our identities, our opinions, our desires. It is a focus for the discussion of style among peripheral consumers. Adolescents, particularly female adolescents, are inclined to spend a good deal of time at the mall. They spend, indeed, more time than money. They acquire not simple commodities (they may come home with many, few, or none) but a well-developed sense of the significance of those commodities. In prowling the mall they embed themselves in a lexicon of American culture. They find themselves walking through a dictionary. Stores hang a variety of identities on their racks and mannequins. Their window displays provide elaborate scenarios conveying not only what the garment is but what the garment means. A display in the window of Polo provides an embarrassment of semiotic riches. Everyone, from the architecture critic at the New York Times to kids in the hall of a Montana high school, knows what Ralph Lauren means. The polo mallet and the saddle, horses and dogs, the broad lawns of Newport, Kennebunkport, old photographs in silver frames, the evocation of age, of ancestry and Anglophilia, of indolence and the Ivy League, evoke the upper class. Indian blankets and buffalo plaids, cowboy hats and Western saddles, evoke a past distinct from England but nevertheless determinedly Anglo. The supposedly arcane and suspect arts of deconstruction are deployed easily, effortlessly, by the readers of these cultural texts. Walking from one window to another, observing one another, shoppers, especially the astute and observant adolescents, acquire a facility with the language of commodities. They learn not only words but a grammar. Shop windows employ elements of sarcasm and irony, strategies of inversion and allusion. They provide models of elegant, economical, florid, and prosaic expression. They teach composition. The practice of shopping is, however, more than instructive. It has long been the occasion for women to escape the confines of their homes and enjoy the companionship of other women. The construction of woman’s role as one of provision for the needs of the family legitimated her exit. It provided an occasion for women to spend long stretches of time in the company of their friends, without the presence of their husbands. They could exchange information and reflections, ask advice, and receive support. As their daughters grew, they would be brought increasingly within this circle, included in shopping trips and lunches with their mothers. These would form, reproduce, and restructure communities of taste. The construction of identity and the enjoyment of friendship outside the presence of men was thus effected through a practice that constructed women as consumers and subjected them to the conventions of the market-place. Insofar as they were dependent on their husbands for money, they were dependent on their husbands for the means to the construction of their identities. They could not represent themselves through commodities without the funds men provided, nor could they, without money, participate in the community of women that was realized in “going shopping.” Their identities were made contingent not only on the possession of property but on the recognition of dependence. Insofar as shopping obliges dependent women to recognize their dependence, it also opens up the possibility of subversion.14 The housewife who shops for pleasure takes time away from her husband, her family, and her house and claims it for herself. Constantly taught that social order and her private happiness depend on intercourse between men and women, she chooses the company of women instead. She engages with women in an activity marked as feminine, and she enjoys it. When she spends money, she exercises an authority over property that law and custom may deny her. If she has no resources independent of her husband, this may be the only authority over property she is able to exercise. When she buys things her husband does not approve — or does not know of — she further subverts an order that leaves control over property in her husband’s hands.15 Her choice of feminine company and a feminine pursuit may involve additional subversions. As Fiske and Pressdee recognize, shopping without buying and shopping for bargains have a subversive quality. This is revealed, in a form that gives it additional significance, when a saleswoman leans forward and tells a shopper, “Don’t buy that today, it will be on sale on Thursday.” Here solidarity of gender (and often of class) overcome, however partially and briefly, the imperatives of the economic order. Shoppers who look, as most shoppers do, for bargains, and salespeople who warn shoppers of impending sales, see choices between commodities as something other than the evidence and the exercise of freedom. They see covert direction and exploitation; they see the withholding of information and the manipulation of knowledge. They recognize that they are on enemy terrain and that their shopping can be, in Michel de Certeau’s16 term, a “guerrilla raid.” This recognition in practice of the presence of coercion in choice challenges the liberal conflation of choice and consent. Shopping at Home Shopping is an activity that has overcome its geographic limits. One need no longer go to the store to shop. Direct mail catalogues, with their twenty-four-hour phone numbers for ordering, permit people to shop where and when they please. An activity that once obliged one to go out into the public sphere, with its diverse array of semiotic messages, can now be done at home. An activity that once obliged one to be in company, if not in conversation, with one’s compatriots can now be conducted in solitude. The activity of catalogue shopping, and the pursuit of individuality, are not, however, wholly solitary. The catalogues invest their commodities with vivid historical and social references. The J. Peterman catalogue, for example, constructs the reader as a man of rugged outdoor interests, taste, and money.17 He wears “The Owner’s Hat” or “Hemingway’s Cap,” a leather flight jacket or the classic “Horseman’s Duster,” and various other garments identified with the military, athletes, and European imperialism. The copy for “The Owner’s Hat” naturalizes class distinctions and, covertly, racism: Some of us work on the plantation. Some of us own the plantation. Facts are facts. This hat is for those who own the plantation.18 Gender roles are strictly delineated. The copy for a skirt captioned “Women’s Legs” provides a striking instance of the construction of the gaze as male, of women as the object of the gaze: Just when you think you see something, a shape you think you recognize, it’s gone and then it begins to return and then it’s gone and of course you can’t take your eyes off it. Yes, the long slow motion of women’s legs. Whatever happened to those things at carnivals that blew air up into girls’ skirts and you could spend hours watching.19 “You,” of course, are male. There is also the lace blouse captioned “Mystery”: “lace says yes at the same time it says no.”20 Finally, there are notes of imperialist nostalgia: the Shepherd’s Hotel (Cairo) bathrobe and white pants for “the bush” and “the humid hell-holes of Bombay and Calcutta.”21 It may no longer be unforgivable to say that the British left a few good things behind in India and in Kenya, Singapore, Borneo, etc., not the least of which was their Englishness.22 As Paul Smith observes, in his reading of their catalogues, the Banana Republic has also made capital out of imperial nostalgia.23 The communities catalogues create are reinforced by shared mailing lists. The constructed identities are reified and elaborated in an array of semiotically related catalogues. One who orders a spade or a packet of seeds will be constructed as a gardener and receive a deluge of catalogues from plant and garden companies. The companies themselves may expand their commodities to appeal to different manifestations of the identities they respond to and construct. Smith and Hawken, a company that sells gardening supplies with an emphasis on aesthetics and environmental concern, puts out a catalogue in which a group of people diverse in age and in their ethnicity wear the marketed clothes while gardening, painting, or throwing pots. Williams-Sonoma presents its catalogue not as a catalogue of things for cooking but as “A Catalog for Cooks.” The catalogue speaks not to need but to the construction of identity. The Nature Company dedicates its spring 1990 catalogue “to trees,” endorses Earth Day, and continues to link itself to the Nature Conservancy through posters and a program in which you buy a tree for a forest restoration project. Here, a not-for-profit agency is itself commodified, adding to the value of the commodities offered in the catalogue.24 In this catalogue, consumption is not merely a means for the construction and representation of the self, it is also a means for political action. Several commodities are offered as “A Few Things You Can Do” to save the earth: a string shopping bag, a solar battery recharger, a home newspaper recycler. Socially conscious shopping is a liberal practice in every sense. It construes shopping as a form of election, in which one votes for good commodities or refuses one’s vote to candidates whose practices are ethically suspect. READING THE TEXT What does Norton mean when she claims that the suburban shopping mall appears to be a public place but in fact is not? What is Norton’s interpretation of Ralph Lauren’s Polo stores? How is shopping a subversive activity for women, according to Norton? How do mail-order catalogs create communities of shoppers, in Norton’s view? READING THE SIGNS Visit a local shopping mall, and study the window displays, focusing on stores intended for one group of consumers (teenagers, for example, or children). Then write an essay in which you analyze how the displays convey what the stores’ products “mean.” Bring a few product catalogs to class, and in small groups compare the kinds of consumer “constructed” by the cultural images and allusions in the catalogs. Do you note any patterns associated with gender, ethnicity, or age group? Report your group’s interpretations to the whole class. CONNECTING TEXTS Interview five women of different age groups about their motivations and activities when they shop in a mall. Use your results as evidence in an essay in which you support, refute, or complicate Norton’s assertion that shopping constitutes a subversive activity for women. To develop your ideas, consult Jia Tolentino’s “How ‘Empowerment’ Became Something for Women to Buy” (p. 180). Select a single mail-order catalog, and write a detailed semiotic interpretation of the identity it constructs for its market. Visit the Web site for a major chain store (for instance, urbanoutfitters.com or anthropologie.com), and study how the site “moves” the consumer through it. How does the site induce you to consume? UNDERSTANDING SHOPPING MALCOLM GLADWELL The Science of Shopping Ever wonder why the season’s hottest new styles at stores like the Gap are usually displayed on the right at least fifteen paces in from the front entrance? It’s because that’s where shoppers are most likely to see them as they enter the store, gear down from the walking pace of a mall corridor, and adjust to the shop’s spatial environment. Ever wonder how shop managers know this sort of thing? It’s because, as Malcolm Gladwell reports here, they hire consultants like Paco Underhill, a “retail anthropologist” and “urban geographer” whose studies (often aided by hidden cameras) of shopping behavior have become valuable guides to store managers looking for the best ways to move the goods. Does this feel just a little Orwellian? Read on. A staff writer for the New Yorker, in which this selection first appeared, Gladwell has also written The Tipping Point (2000) and David and Goliath (2013). Human beings walk the way they drive, which is to say that Americans tend to keep to the right when they stroll down shopping-mall concourses or city sidewalks. This is why in a well-designed airport travellers drifting toward their gate will always find the fast-food restaurants on their left and the gift shops on their right: people will readily cross a lane of pedestrian traffic to satisfy their hunger but rarely to make an impulse buy of a T-shirt or a magazine. This is also why Paco Underhill tells his retail clients to make sure that their window displays are canted, preferably to both sides but especially to the left, so that a potential shopper approaching the store on the inside of the sidewalk — the shopper, that is, with the least impeded view of the store window — can see the display from at least twenty-five feet away. Of course, a lot depends on how fast the potential shopper is walking. Paco, in his previous life, as an urban geographer in Manhattan, spent a great deal of time thinking about walking speeds as he listened in on the great debates of the nineteen-seventies over whether the traffic lights in midtown should be timed to facilitate the movement of cars or to facilitate the movement of pedestrians and so break up the big platoons that move down Manhattan sidewalks. He knows that the faster you walk the more your peripheral vision narrows, so you become unable to pick up visual cues as quickly as someone who is just ambling along. He knows, too, that people who walk fast take a surprising amount of time to slow down — just as it takes a good stretch of road to change gears with a stickshift automobile. On the basis of his research, Paco estimates the human downshift period to be anywhere from twelve to twenty-five feet, so if you own a store, he says, you never want to be next door to a bank: potential shoppers speed up when they walk past a bank (since there’s nothing to look at), and by the time they slow down they’ve walked right past your business. The downshift factor also means that when potential shoppers enter a store it’s going to take them from five to fifteen paces to adjust to the light and refocus and gear down from walking speed to shopping speed — particularly if they’ve just had to navigate a treacherous parking lot or hurry to make the light at Fifty-seventh and Fifth. Paco calls that area inside the door the Decompression Zone, and something he tells clients over and over again is never, ever put anything of value in that zone — not shopping baskets or tie racks or big promotional displays — because no one is going to see it. Paco believes that, as a rule of thumb, customer interaction with any product or promotional display in the Decompression Zone will increase at least thirty percent once it’s moved to the back edge of the zone, and even more if it’s placed to the right, because another of the fundamental rules of how human beings shop is that upon entering a store — whether it’s Nordstrom or K Mart, Tiffany or the Gap — the shopper invariably and reflexively turns to the right. Paco believes in the existence of the Invariant Right because he has actually verified it. He has put cameras in stores trained directly on the doorway, and if you go to his office, just above Union Square, where videocassettes and boxes of Super-eight film from all his work over the years are stacked in plastic Tupperware containers practically up to the ceiling, he can show you reel upon reel of grainy entryway video — customers striding in the door, downshifting, refocusing, and then, again and again, making that little half turn. Paco Underhill is a tall man in his mid-forties, partly bald, with a neatly trimmed beard and an engaging, almost goofy manner. He wears baggy khakis and shirts open at the collar, and generally looks like the academic he might have been if he hadn’t been captivated, twenty years ago, by the ideas of the urban anthropologist William Whyte. It was Whyte who pioneered the use of time-lapse photography as a tool of urban planning, putting cameras in parks and the plazas in front of office buildings in midtown Manhattan, in order to determine what distinguished a public space that worked from one that didn’t. As a Columbia undergraduate, in 1974, Paco heard a lecture on Whyte’s work and, he recalls, left the room “walking on air.” He immediately read everything Whyte had written. He emptied his bank account to buy cameras and film and make his own home movie, about a pedestrian mall in Poughkeepsie. He took his “little exercise” to Whyte’s advocacy group, the Project for Public Spaces, and was offered a job. Soon, however, it dawned on Paco that Whyte’s ideas could be taken a step further — that the same techniques he used to establish why a plaza worked or didn’t work could also be used to determine why a store worked or didn’t work. Thus was born the field of retail anthropology, and, not long afterward, Paco founded Envirosell, which in just over fifteen years has counselled some of the most familiar names in American retailing, from Levi Strauss to K ... Purchase answer to see full attachment