Meeting with Sarah Banet-Weiser, 6 April 2010

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Meeting with Sarah Banet-Weiser, 6 April 2010.

• Readings were from larger book project about brand culture
  • "Political possibility and brand culture"
• Construction of citizen, media citizen
• Rather than "harnessing brands to culture"
  • History of branding ~ history of neoliberal capitalism
• Brand relationship to
  • Creativity
  • History
  • Spirituality
  • Politics
  • Self-identity
• Exploring brand culture(s)
  • At times pessimistic
    • Esp. wrt to self-branding and young girls
• Focusing on youth culture
  • Youth seems more "steeped" in brand culture
  • Not logistically possible to talk about multiple groups

Contents 1 When is it a brand? 2 WHY YOUTUBE? 3 Visibility 4 Double mobilization 5 Body as product 6 Quick thoughts 7 Jump offs

When is it a brand?

• Who decides, who determines?
• Discursive power of the brand?
  • Providing a powerful language, vocabulary for understanding
• How does the tech platform related to the brand?
  • By using the tag on YouTube, they become findable
    • Not just cultural legitimation
• YouTube platform enables sense-making according to brand

WHY YOUTUBE?

With each group ...

• Why YouTube and not videos.gurl.com?
• Why YouTube and not dancejam.com?
• Why YouTube and not lrrg.com?

What is special about YouTube?

• Merely about publicity?
• Exposure?
• What about findability?
• Self-actualization?
• Feedback
• Attention

Visibility

• Democracy, citizenship
• Visibility is connected to attention, voice
• Recognition
• Classes and groups being invisible
• Are children the most hubristic?
• Difference between visibility in the US v elsewhere?
  • Nepalese experience

Double mobilization

• Visibility in a political sense
• But visibility becomes also a market segment...
• Can a progressive politics survive incorporation?
  • e.g. Green entrepreneurship?
  • What is "progress" within the brand/neoliberal discourse?
  • "Strings attached": incorporation of eco-activism, greenwashing
• Powerful insider/outsider dynamics
  • Capitalization of progressive movements can be utterly destructive to a diverse movement
  • What is NOT incorporated?
  • Marginalized components are further buried, excluded, marginalized

Body as product

• Young female bodies acting on YT
• Caught amid an exchange?
• How do you understand the subjectivity of the young girl on YT?
  • Volumne of media targeting them on day-to-day?
  • Hypersexualization

Quick thoughts

• Brand discourse recodes history according to its logic
  • "always been doing branding but never knew the term"
• Is collective action (LRRG) apart from commercial activity?
• Cultural hierarchies in graffiti
  • Wooster collective brand relies on recognizable aesthetics, progressive politics
• Macro view of all-encompassing brand discourse
  • e.g. Creativity collapsed into entrepreneurship

Jump offs

• Authenticity: How to give consumers exactly what they want