1.1 The Video: This Is A Label

"This Is A Label" - Companion video to my critical photo essay.

2.1 Introduction

Coke. Pepsi. Bill Gates. Angelina Jolie. Nelson Mandela. Names carry a significance that is comprised of generations of experiences, reputation and effort. No two share a precise path of evolution, each splintered and refracted by the experiences of the people living it. In the language of rhetoric, names help us define the first and most essential of our earliest discourse communities, our families. In the tradition of familial closeness, language continues to assign significance dependent on discourse communities differentiated by name. As markers of these discourse communities, brands, signs and labels help to define the boundaries of discourse communities by identifying members and non-members and serving as conduits for inter-group conflict. They allow for rivalries between companies to evolve into near interpersonal feuds and help generations of cool (an uncool) high school students decide who they can sit beside at lunch.

2.2 Brand Culture

Pictured above are two of the most vocal and powerful discourse communities in modern capitalism. Coke vs. Pepsi. The soda confrontation that defined a generation (or more). But more importantly, it manipulated the public’s opinion of not one but both companies by convincing their adoring fans that only one discourse community could come out on top. So, despite Coke having finally taken a substantial lead in the sugary soft-drink market, both companies brought in revenue in the billions, with additional profit coming from the numerous smaller companies and extensions each owns, such as FritoLay. But the effect of good-natured advertisements such as the ad on the right, put out by Pepsi Co. just in time for Halloween, is one of congenial mockery. Understanding exists, not only between Pepsi and Coke, but between the companies and their audience, that neither one is attacking their opponent company. Rather than a cavalcade of accusations and factoids about how horrible Coke is for your health, Pepsi fires shots on the very subculture of Coke, the people who believe with their very souls that Coke is genetically superior to Pepsi. They achieve a mirror of popular athletic discourse with this method, similar to the trash talking that occurs between sports fans (and infects Facebook in the weeks leading up to Cat/Griz). The "fans," as it were, rally to the defense of their product, Pepsi gets some press, Coke-fans on Reddit respond with a pithy ad of their own, and the world spins on.

But this result would not be conceivable without the polarizing effects of the all-powerful discourse community. Because, as the advertisements indicate, you are either pro-Pepsi or pro-Coke (unless you happen to be one of the godless heathens that claims they can't tell the difference, but those liars have no place in either discourse). By using their distinctive images as their primary polarizing weapon, Coke and Pepsi, like other famous - and infamous - brands, have used the formation of discourse communities to their advantage. This formation is the most superficial of all the discourse communities related to the psychology of labels, but it functions as an undeniable mainstay of American economy and society. Brands using discourse communities to foster a feeling of "sameness" between a large group of people use what Fish refers to as a "manipulation of] reality," attributed to rhetorical man. This manipulation, intended as a criticism of the inability of rhetoric to unveil truth, instead functions as a low-level type of societal glue, keeping an advertising audience with few certain commonalities together.

[Great Rivalries of Our Times. Burger King vs. McDonalds and Apple vs. Microsoft.]

2.3 It's A Sign

This is a sign. It denotes possession of a thing and branding by a larger organization. It is clear, concise and largely unremarkable (unless you like me, feel like going out of your way to remark on it.) The false ownership that discourse communities feel through brand preferences becomes a fully realized phenomenon in the signage of our day to day lives. People love to literally label. We have a machine called a label maker and we use it exactly as the name implies: put your name on your belongings so everyone knows they're yours.

These are also signs. Unlike the personal sign, these denote function and location and deal less with the possession of the labeled thing and more with the location, function and necessity of the labeled object or place.What do these signs have in common? All were photographed using and iPod. All live in the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse. And all of them denote possession, pertaining to a group or discourse community. According to Tania Murray Li, “anthropologists have long acknowledged the social nature of property: that it is not a relationship between people and things, but a relationship between people, embedded in a cultural and moral framework, a particular vision of community” (Lee, 501-502). Signs, as Li is quick to point out in the description, are easy to misconstrue. They are, at first glance, a form of label, sure. That identification is simple, plain and yet as inclusive as necessary. They explain. Who the thing belongs to, what the things does, where the thing is. Signs are an analogue communication web, passing information from writer to audience in an efficient and simplistic manner. Signs fulfil a highly necessary function in the formation of literal networks, bringing groups together in places for functions, all denoted by symbols on a page.

It is not until those symbols lose their physical form that they endanger clear communication.

2.4 Label Me

This is a label. It looks a little different than the examples above, but do not be deceived. This is the personal label.

The personal label is most similar to the signage of ownership, but it can be both self-assigned and utilized as a personal version of the brand. In this way, it combines the most effective strategies of the top two methods of labeling.

The personal label serves as the mating call of social friendships, drawing geeks, nerds, jocks, preps and fangirls together across huge social strata, such as large school or work settings.

Not all labels are self-assigned. When I first pitched this project to the Digital Media class, I could see the blossoming horror on my classmates' faces as they recalled terrible names from childhood classes. I worked to make the video about more than name calling and hair pulling, because the function of the personal label means so much more.

The personal label can be a connection into a societal network, ready and waiting. Fangirls, a somewhat derogatory name from women madly obsessed with a type of media, is also a word that has been joyfully reclaimed by those it appears to exist to slight. To identify as a fangirl is, in many ways, to accept the mantle and trappings of a label given to you by someone else; and in making it your own also reinvent it.

The personal label can be a passing identification, a self-assured title that denotes what you feel, think, or believe at a given time. It broadcasts your emotion and communicates with others who also temporarily occupy the same brief discourse. In this way, internet forums have achieved enormous success by catering to the whimsical bitching needs of the multitudes online.

Lastly, labels can be arbitrarily assigned to you based on signs you express to the world at large. Short hair? You're a lesbian. Well-dressed and polite? You're metrosexual at best, probably gay. Tattoos and piercings? No good stoner.

These are the labels that harm and constrain. They can help disenfranchised parties to form groups in defense, but these groups are not high-functioning, collaborative discourses. The resentment produced by this last construct of personal labels undoes any good the labels themselves can enact, almost before it happens.

2.5 Conclusion

People like judgement. It feed social situation and the gossip in all of us. And labels make gossip easy. Really, really easy. So easy, in fact, that people forget the function of labels as community. They forget the network that labels helped them build, the product it helped them sell, and the friends it helped them find. In an age where quotes are judged twice-over by their ability to condense into 140 characters or less, the complications of subterranean labels is not something the average human gossip machine wants to contemplate. So the discourse communities that we construct with the labels of our lives, the brands, the signs and the incessant name calling, culminate in an anticlimactic rush of information we feel compelled to simultaneously share and downplay the importance of.

Everyone is an individual. The trick is recognizing that everyone does not begin and end with you.

Why the rhetoric of business is cheapening the way we connect to one another (and what we can do about it)

Because I'm a tasteless scum-bucket, I really like to read mainstream magazines. Nothing classy, like lit journals or independent presses. No, I mean things like Cosmopolitan. In an attempt to make myself feel more like a 20-something professional, I inevitably turn to the business and money section and inevitably come across the word "networking." Now, whatever Cosmo means by networking, it is not what Anil Dash meant by networking. In fact, the only thing that is for sure is that whatever networking is, people are doing too little, too badly as far as "business professionals" are concerned. I think it was largely due to this constant lauding of networking that for so long I misunderstood what it was.

It was, in fact, what I call "being nice to people" and "making friends."

So I want to talk about buzzwords and (self-)marketing today. Specifically, the idea of networking as something we can possess and control and of the colossal failure of Google+'s YouTube takeover.

To make my point, I would like to combine a series of the videos we watched, particularly Anil Dash and Chris Anderson. Dash's idea of networking appeals immensely to me because, as a 20-something about to charge into the world-at-large, the idea that communication is changing in a way that invites - and demands- that I join the conversation is reassuring in ways brown-nosing a boss never will be. Dash's networking has less to do with sucking up than with confronting whatever makes you world less awesome. Want a faster web browser? Better vlogging platform? Freedom from foreign oppressors? Networking is raising your voice and letting people know you are there to be heard. Better still, Dash's networking is skill-based, largely without the threat of privilege superseding talent.

Add to this Anderson's idea of crowd-fueled evolution of business and society and you find yourself at the helm of a powerful current that is poised to redefine

 Seth Priebatsch's idea that "the social building is done," is also of some interest to me, because it implies a backwards motion for most of the internet who are so intrigued by Tweeting, Liking and Re-blogging that they are largely disinterested at this point by the idea of moving on from those platforms. So this idea of evolution from social theory to game theory neatly connects my ideas about the hollow word of new-age networking, the deeper significance of true networking and the failure of Google+.

Google+ is a fine network.It function exactly as its supposed to and is conveniently located in the Google mega-plex of Chrome. Yet it has objectively failed at its initial goal: convince Facebook users to consolidate all of their interpersonal whining needs into one easy package. Why? The answer comes from all of the above argument. Google is a little late to the party and they did not bring anything new. They did nothing innovative to offer to new users and brought nothing new to the social networking conversation. Then, to top it all off, after failing to take off of their own, they installed themselves into the YouTube comments to bribe users of another site into using their product as the only way to make themselves heard. This, in Dash's example, is the exact opposite of how you network. This is note reaching out and building connections, but rather re-hashing a tired idea in the hopes of continuing the building of an online empire.

The dialogue is changing, as our videos for today showed. The price for not keeping up, apparently, is scorn from those who are at the forefront and confusion form other still behind you.

Also, for your viewing pleasure, a video on the ways we connect (or don't) with people using social media.
http://elitedaily.com/news/world/this-video-will-have-you-completely-rethink-how-you-conduct-yourself-online-and-in-person-video/

Critical Photo Essay Premise and Excecution

*All photos are not mine. Pending posts will be my photography.

Things I want to talk about in my photo essay:

The hippocracy of signage:

The significance we apply to otherwise insignificant items or occurrences:

The significance we apply (literally and figuratively) to our own environments:

I want to see the ways we label and apply language to our lives, especially places unconcerned with language and label as (such as idea and areas we wish to label as "possessions").