Lecture 10 - What is research?

- Context is everything
- The process is more important than the outcome, when the outcome drives the process we will only ever go where we have already been. 

- Always document ideas
- Create a space where ideas could form

- Three approaches to research:

Stimulated Approach:
A conscious or subconscious search for inspiration from an external repertoire: in the surroundings, media, in discussion, libraries, etc.

Systematic Approach:
This is based on the systematic collection and modification of components, characteristics and means of expression.

Intuitive Approach:
This is the development of thought process, which is primarily based on internalised perceptions of knowledge, that is to say an internal repertoire.

Primary Research
Research that is developed and collected for a specific end use
A collection of data that does not yet exist.

Secondary Research
Published or recorded data that have already been collected for some purpose other than the current study.

Quantitive Research
Deals with facts, figures and measurements, it produces data that can be readily analysed.
Generates numerical data or data that can be converted to numbers
Measurable data

Qualitative Research
Explores and tries to understand people's beliefs, experiences, attitudes, behaviour and interactions. It generates non numerical data by the use of interviews, focus groups, documentary analysis and participant observation.

Lecture 9 - Censorship & Truth

Censorship & Truth

- Notions of censorship and truth
- The indexical qualities of photography and rendering truth
- Photographic manipulation and the documentation of truth
- Censorship in advertising
- Censorship in art and photography

- Pravada* 
- Newspaper used to censor and filter what was printed, presented to Russians and Easter Europeans

The Gulf War:
- Planned
- Covered up the real story
- Photojournalism that wasn't allowed to be published

Censor
- 'A person authorised to examine films, letters or publications, in order to ban or cut anything considered obscene or objectionable.
- 'To ban or cut potions of (a film, letter or publication)'

Morals
- Principles of behaviour in accordance to standards of right and wrong

Ethics
- A code of behaviour, especially of a particular group, profession or individual

The Miller Test (1973):

1. Whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.
2. Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct.
3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Lecture 8 - Globalisation and Sustainability

- Socialist: 
Transforming a local or regional phenomena into a global one. People of the world are unified into a single society and function together.

- Capitalist: 
The elimination of stat informed restrictions on exchanges across borders.

- What is globalisation?

- 'The process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale.'

- *American sociologist George Ritzer 'McDonaldisation' - research

- Jihad vs. McWorld. The two axial principles of our age—tribalism and globalism —clash at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy. - *read pdf

Problems of Globalisation:

- Sovereightny: Challenges to the idea of the nation-state
- Accountability: transnational forces & organisations - who controls them?
- Identity: Who are we? Nation, group, community?

If the 'global village' is run with a certain set of values then it would not be so much an integrated community as an assimilated one.

Key Thinkers:
- Schiller
- Chomsky

'US media power can be thought of as a new form of imperialism'

What is imperialism?

'a policy of extending a country's power and influence through colonization, use of military force, or other means.'

- Local cultures destroyed in this process
- New forms of cultural dependence shaped

Chomsky & Herman (1998)
Propaganda Model - 5 basic filters:

- Ownership
- Funding
- Sourcing
- Flak
- Ideology

- Global Climate Collation (GCC)
- The GCC was started by Burson Marsteller - largest public relations company to rubbish the ideas of climate scientists and 'scare stories'

*Al Gore, An inconvenient Truth

Greenwashing*
How are companies making their products 'look' green?

Ecologism- No pyramid
- No chain
- The Drinkable Book*







  

Lecture 7 - Ethics

Lecture 7 - Ethics: What is good? 

First things First Manifesto - Garland

Argues that visual communicators and creative in the 60’s were wasting their talents by taking jobs that contribute little to the world, such as trivial advertising of detergents and cigarettes. 

Ad busters republished first things first, they changed key bits and changed the manifesto from a call to arms to something much more politicised. 

Two presentations of ethics but both very different in style.

If you are in anyway participating with the production in such commercial images you are supporting and endorsing a society that revolves around slave labour and exploitation of the third world. You are changing the way citizen consumers are brainwashed. 

- The first manifesto, the ethical question is just about putting your talent to the right use.

- The second one suggests you need to put your talents to use to destroy capitalism and consumerism.

Culture Jamming- intervene in the techniques and apparatus of advertising. Finding ways to subvert the message of commercial organisations. 

A meme is a potent message that can change minds, alert behaviour and transform cultures. 

Victor Papanek - Design for the Real World 

Most things are not designed for the needs of the people, but for the needs of the manufacturer and to help them sell to the consumer. 

Designers only touch the tip of the iceberg, the design problems we address only touch the edge of the problems. 

Subjective Relativism 

• no universal moral norms of right and wrong
• All persons decide right and wrong for themselves

Cultural Relativism

• The ethical theory that was is right/wrong depends on the time/place

Divine Command Theory

• Good actions are aligned with the will of God
• Bad actions are contrary to the will of God
• The holy book helps make the decisions.

Kantianism (Deontological Ethics)

• Society should be organised by a set of agreed or shared moral rules.
• Everyone thinks through collaboratively but everyone shares an investment on.
• These rules govern our actions.
• Consider wider impact of actions on society
• Two categorial imperatives:

1. Act only from moral rules that you can at the same time universalise 

• If you act on a moral rule that would cause problems if everyone followed it then your actions are not moral.

2. Act so that you always treat both yourself and other people as ends in themselves, and never only as a means to an end.

• If you use people for your own benefit that is not moral. 

Utilitarianism or consequential Ethics - John Stuart Mill

• The end determines the means
• An action is ethical if it increases the total happiness of all parties involved, i.e. profit , pleasure, happiness, general quality of life.

Social Contract Theory

• We exist in mutual consensus, agreed rules.
• We sacrifice some of our liberty, what we can and cant do for the sake of the greater good. 
• We have a system of agreed rules, some that we agree with and some we don’t but thats is tough for the sake of a stable society. As part of a society you are invested in it.

Lecture 6 - Consumerism - Persuasion, Brand, Society, Culture

Consumerism

- Analyse the rise

- Discuss the links between consumerism and out unconscious desires.

Sigmund Freud

Edmund Bernays

Consumerism as social control

2002 Adam Curtis – Century of Self (film)

1999 Naomi Klein – No Logo

Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)

- New theory of human nature 

- Psycoanalysis

- Hidden Primitive sexual forces and animal instincts which need controlling.

(Ego, Id, the unconscious)

We only understand a very small part about our identity. 

Freud’s Model of Personality Structure**

Our awareness of ourselves is just the tip of the EGO

The unconscious is made of 3 parts: The ID, Ego and Superego

- The id is where base animalistic desires are located and repressed.

- Freud argued that these desires and instincts inform or drive everything we do.

- When you sleep all the unconscious desires start to come out within dreams. 

1930 – Civilisation and Discontent (theory)

- Human instincts are not compatible with the well being of community.

- We can’t act upon instinctual desires; we have a tendency to be violent. 

- We are repressed by society. 

- We do not get chance to act on these desires, we are constantly frustrated.

- Translates into anxiety and any other conditions in which we displace our feelings onto other things.

- Pleasure Principles – If you satiate one of these desires you momentarily feel happy for a brief period, you are docile and you don’t feel like you need to be violent or aggressive.

- WW1 – 1914-1918: An indication for Freud about his theory of humanity, this is how we should expect society to act, expect it to happen when people are suppressed, this is a release point on a global scale. 

Edward Bernays (Nephew)

- He channeled the ideas of Freud into a discipline, public relations now.

- Employed as a Propagandist in the War.

- Taking an understand of repressed desires and relating it to consumerism, if you can attach some feeling to a consumer product you could make people want, desire or ‘need’ them. 

- Took the understanding from Freud and applied it to the buying and selling of products. People will feel happy after purchasing. This creates a demand for consumer goods.

- Set up company advising business on how they could improve. 

- Public Relations is what he called this discipline.

- Cigarettes were his main point of call initially; cigarettes were viewed negatively regarding cultured young ladies, so he organised a big PR stunt on Easter Day in New York in 1929, debutants part of the parade. Bernay’s paid them all to smoke at a specific moment spontaneously. 

- He said they were suffragettes and were lighting up ‘torches of freedom.’

- Represented desirability and independence. 

- It then became very popular amongst young women because they believed it had connotations of freedom, independence and attractiveness. 

- He attached instinctual desires to products that are totally irrational. 

- Politicians and the government started to take notice. 

- Celebrity endorsements. Linking a celebrity to a product makes you think about being successful, wealthy, desirable. 

Prime ministers background is in public relations.

Fordism

• Production models
• Higher wages
• Spent on consumer goods
• It proliferates the world with things
• The model T Ford Cars increased in price but decrease in production time.
• Theres only a certain amount of things someone can buy, due to money or rationality

Manufacturers now have to distinguish between their product and another and makes theirs seem more desirable. 

A common technique is to try and give a product an individual identity. 

In 1909 Bernays was one of the first people to sell cars on the basis of masculine, sexual potency. 

He cemented the link between cars and male sexual presence. 

image of car with countryside and large house in the background 

The car becomes a secondary image and what is really being sold is the access to the upperclass life style. Unconscious hidden desire, they begin to promise they will suppress desires. 

A need to a desire culture is what we now live in.

The idea of self gets replaced with consumer self

The hidden persuaders by Vance Packard

There are 8 common techniques that companies use to create a rational desire for their products. 

• Selling emotional security
• Selling reassurance of worth
• Selling Ego Gratification
• Selling creative outlets
• Selling Love Objects
• Selling Sense of Power
• Selling a sense of roots
• Selling Immortality

1920

• A new elite is needed to manage the bewildered herd. 
• Walter Lippmann argues that a new elite is needed to manage the people to manufacture consent. 
• The political class has no idea how to manage its citizens.
• Educated elite to advise governments on how to control and manage citizens. 
• Lippmann, Bernays and others decided they should be the people doing research int what people want and what they desire. 
• The idea of consumerism is employed as a mechanism to control citizens. 
• If you can create a system that makes people think that their needs are being satiated, albeit irrationally, then people will become docile and happy, as though they have a stake in the world and they are successful.
• Creating money for businesses and making people happy. 

Communism could overthrow consumerism

Overproduction, stock market crash, capitalism

Capitalism is a system that depends on creating profit upon profit

Wall Street Crash - Great depression - mass unemployment

If big businesses are uncontrolled society can be destroyed. 

The ‘New Deal’ Roosevelt

• Regulate markets
• Put limits on profits
• 1933-36
• Increase taxation of big business to give to poorer people in society.
• Creating controlled industries such as farming where the government would have total control. 
• The government intervened and gave a fairer plan

Worlds Fair, over a mile long

• Bernay’s pioneered this
• Celebration about America and everything that makes it great and unique
• The amount of commodities that you can buy, constantly reinforced that you are a free citizen because you can buy an object if you want.
• The Futurama - look at building. 
• American democracy is freeing you
• Big business really knows whats good for the country rather than politicians. 
• Worlds fair is giant propaganda for businesses
• Democracity 

Conclusion

• Consumerism is an ideological project
• We believe that through consumption our desires can be met so that we are suppressed and our violent desires are not revealed.
• The Consumer Self
• The legacy of Bernays/PR can be felt in all aspects in the 21st century 
• The conflicts between alternative models of social organisation continue to this day.
• To what extent are our lives ‘free’ under the Western Consumerist System?

Lecture 5 - Cities & Film

Georg Simmel (German Sociologist)
- The Metropolis and Mental Life” focuses on elucidating the “modern aspects of contemporary life with reference to their inner meaning."
- Due to the intensification of external and internal sensual stimuli in the city as compared to a rural setting, the metropolis fosters a situation where one must buffer him or herself from a constantly changing environment. 

Dresden Exhibition
- The effect of the city on the individual. 
- (Herbert Bayer - Lonely Metropolitan) 1932

What is Urban Sociology?

Urban sociology is the sociological study of life and human interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a normative discipline of sociology seeking to study the structures, processes, changes and problems of an urban area and by doing so provide inputs for planning and policy making. 

Louis Sullivan:
- Creator of the modern skyscraper
- Guaranty Building

Modern Times 1936 - Charlie Chaplin

Stock market crash of 1929
Lead to great depression
Factories close and unemployment goes up

The Naked City - Barry Fitzgerald

LA Noire 2011, uses 32 surrounding cameras to capture actors facial expressions.

- Walter Benjamin
- Adopts the concept of the urban explorer as an analytical tool

Venice
- Labryinth
- Don't look now (1973) Nichols Roeg

- Postmodern City in photography Joel Meyerowitz Broadway and West 46th Street

What is flaneur?

- Surveillance City
- 9/11 prompted rise is security

Lecture 4 - Identity

IDENTITY

- Phrenology

- Physiognomy

- Positivist Criminology – suggests that criminal tendencies are inherited

- Physiognomy legitimizing racism

Historical Phases

-       Pre modernity identity

-       Modern identity

-       Post modern Identity

Pre Modern: personal identity is stable – defined by long standing roles

Farm worker, soldier, factory worker,

Modern identity: society offers a wider range of roles, able to ‘choose’ identity – anxiety

Charles Baudelarie – The Painter of Modern Life – ‘flaneur’ (gentlemen stroller)

Thorstein Veblen – Theory of the Leisure Class

Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life – Trickle down theory, emulation and distinction by fashion

Post Modern: Accept ‘fragmented’ self, identity is constructed.

‘Discourse Analysis’

identity is constructed out of the discourses culturally available to us.

Discourse – a set of recurring statements eg:

-       Age

-       Class

-       Gender

-       Nationality

-       Race/Ethnicity

-       Sexual orientation

Class

Bolton, Mass Observation/Humphrey Spender, Worktown project 1937

Martin Parr

Martin Parr, Ascot, 2003

Bauman, Identity - READ

Nationality

Martin Parr – Sedlescombe

Martin Parr – Think of Germany

Gender/Sexuality

Gillian Wearing, signs that say what you want them to say

Masquerade and the mask of femininity

Cindy Sherman, untitled film stills, 1977-80

Post modernity

Identity can be constructed through social experience

Erving Goffman The presentation of Self in Everyday Life LIBRARY

Zygmunt Bauman IDENTITY 2004