Green Consumerism

As a former vegan and occasional vegetarian whose tolerance of lactose is skeptical depending on the weekday, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in coops and natural food stores. I have to admit that I love being in a coop. Not shopping there, necessarily - just being. What’s being sold in stores like Whole Foods or the Boise Coop is atmosphere as much as product. It’s the mist covered produce, smartly designed product packaging and lack of primary colors, all kept stocked by hip looking employees who each seem to be buying time before their next backpacking trip across Southeast Asia or their band’s next tour. It somehow feels healthy, and responsible, just being there.

There is a smugness intermingled with the Australian wines, fairly-traded coffee and hand-dyed organic cotton saris made by former prostitutes in Calcutta – it requires a certain level of interest and cultivated understanding of the global market, with its specific offerings and nuanced economic ramifications, to fully appreciate and indulge in coop shopping. A seasoned shopper will know not to ask where the artichokes are (they’re out of season) and which bar of dark chocolate really is worth $6.79. They will navigate the Health and Wellness section with poise and purpose (homeopathic sleep aid, check; ear candles, check; probiotic supplement, check), banter with the butchers and gladly accept and comment on the apricot gelato samples.

The myth in this approach to consumerism is that it is all “green.” A parallel market has grown up to fill coops and natural food stores with products that aren’t found in conventional grocery stores. Conscientious consumers don’t want to be confronted with brightly packaged Ziplock boxes or unsophisticated, plain white cutting boards, so companies with unrecognizable names are providing the same products with a different aesthetic and the vague promise of sustainability.

These green products have been tacked on to the local food movement, so that next to your locally grown potatoes is vegetable peeler made from recycled plastic. Down the aisle there are plastic sandwich bags and plastic wrap made by Natural Value, as well as brown paper towels, pea-green disposal utensils and substantial, homemade- paper looking plates. Amidst all of the responsibly grown, produced and shipped items the inconsistency of “natural’ disposable plastic sandwich bag loses its punch.

The focus on ethic foods is another element to the myth. Somehow buying green and eating ethnic foods have been associated with one other. The coop is the only place in town where you’ll find 52 different types of Asian hot sauce, or a whole shelf of bottled curries, or three different kinds of instant miso soup. The energy used to distribute these items makes them distinctly ungreen, yet they are purchased with the same feeling of well-being as the kale grown down the street.

The idea of a green consumerism is a myth. To be truly green would be to stop participating in the demand for and production of useless crap, and the wasteful and illogical distribution of food across the world. But...that's too hard. And the myth feels so nice.

Hand Sanitizer Makes Me Sick (version 1.01)

“Keep in mind that the nearest bacteria may be behind you.” – Purell advertisement

The War on Terrorism may have caused much more widespread disgust, but The War on Germs, perpetrated by Purell and its compatriots, takes the same fear mongering to an even more shameless place. The following is a brief tour of the world as seen through a film of ethanol, thickening agents, and artificial scent:

On the surface, Purell relies on fear mongering, highlighting the uncontrollable, chaotic nature of our daily existence and proffering their products as one way to take some control back. Recent magazine advertisements shout in bold, capitalized black text on a stark white background: “BACTERIA FOUND IN THESE PAGES INCLUDED IN NEWSSTAND PRICE,” inviting readers to “Think of all the people who flipped through this magazine and put it back on the rack. Fathers on diaper duty. Mothers with runny noses. Cooks who handled raw meat all day. They’re strangers to you but their germs just got pretty friendly with your hands.” This message paints a world that is not only chaotic, however. It also is full of antisocial people who do not value cleanliness. People who don’t care that their actions will lead to a violation of your person. On this level, Purell and company also paint a world that glorifies isolation; where even indirect contact with other members of a community equals contamination rather than any sort of beneficial exchange or synergy.

In fact, the contamination that Purell warns against is much worse than simple infection or illness. Rather, without Purell, the filth and chaos of the world will become an inextricable element of your very being. As put by a recent ad campaign, “You are what you touch.” You will not only be weakened and sickened by outside forces, you will become them. You will merge with toilets and trash cans, and you will be chaos incarnate:

Although hand sanitizer is mostly touted as a protection from illness, there is a second, deeper layer of symbolism at work in its promotion as well. Although at best only capable of killing bacteria and not removing any physical grime, it is also portrayed as a cleaning product. In fact, a product that is superior to previous, lower tech methods.

This connection to cleansing is also heavily associated with the feminine. This is easily demonstrated by a glance at the scents currently available: Spring Bloom, Ocean Mist, Crisp Apple, Cucumber Melon, and Spring Splash; all names that pick up on some of the most common labels of other feminine hygiene products. Names that draw on elements of nature that are joined to stereotypical Western femininity throughout the ages: flowers; spring; the ocean and water in general; and the overflowing bounty of Ceres herself represented through fresh fruits and vegetables. In addition, Purell offers product variations that not only boast these fresh and dainty scents, but also borrow from other elements of feminine hygiene and upkeep in the form of Moisture Therapy, and Purell with Aloe. With Purell, women will not only be clean, but have soft skin to boot.

Markers of femininity extend to advertising campaigns as well. Here, it is the woman’s job to protect those she loves, namely children, from a “dirty world”.

In short, Purell is a woman’s defense against a disgusting world that’s out of control.

Oh, and it’s not a Purell ad, but in closing, you should keep some around just in case you run into a wolfman or mummy as well. Those guys are notoriously germy...

The Las Vegas Post

I’m writing this upon my return from Las Vegas, but as I reflect on the experience through the lens of semiotics, I’m faced with a pronounced difficulty. In this course, we’re concerned mostly with denaturalizing signs—with reading and deconstructing the texts, ideologies, and myths embedded in our surrounding world. But having been to Vegas twice, I’m surprised by the extent to which the city denaturalizes itself. There isn’t so much as a thin veneer of honesty overlaid upon it—the strip revels in and announces its artificiality—people travel there less to be, and more to escape their everyday being. Yet even as I announce these facts, I find them surprisingly untroubling. At the very least, Vegas represents itself as it is—pure veneer, utterly constructed.

My experience in Vegas started on Fremont street, where I stayed at the Vegas Club. Fremont street—also known as old downtown—is in many ways set in opposition to the more famous strip. Whereas the latter’s development is on an inhuman scale (any one of the large casinos is about the size of a NYC block), one can traverse from one end of Fremont to the other in about thirty minutes—and pass around a dozen or so casinos along the way. In contrast to the celebration of wealth in new Vegas, on Freemont street neon signs unapologetically entice passerbys with cheap buffets and booze. Posters announce casinos “loose slots” and dirt cheap blackjack tables. Fremont is a relatively more accessible Vegas experience than its more famous cousin.

Despite the charm of Fremont street, one can nonetheless arrive on the more fabled strip by traversing a few miles down Las Vegas Boulevard with its surprising array of wedding chapels, pawn shops, and bail-bond outfits. Yet once one arrives, the strip itself is a little banal. At all hours of the day, a strange mix of characters walks up and down the street carting overpriced liquor. Various nightclubs charge exorbitant fees and play the same top forty music that’s everywhere else. Beneath the glittered facades of the Bellagio and Venetian, homeless people sell water and Mexicans advertise for escort services. It’s all wholesome family fun.

Aside from somewhat crass materialism, there are other interesting elements common both to Fremont Street and the strip. Sex is one of the more prominent of these elements. Dead center on Fremont, you have the unfortunately named “Glitter Gulch” strip club. And at all hours, barely dressed women dance for crowds of middle-aged men and their slightly disgruntled wives. Similarly, the strip is exceedingly proud of its nightlife and unabashedly advertises itself as a good place to hook up. Aside from sex, and unsurprisingly, booze also features prominently in Vegas. This is likely because alcohol facilitates a casual disregard both for STD’s and for losing one’s shirt.

One might wonder why Vegas is a vacation destination at all—couples and families go there. But alongside the cities admittedly awesome scuzziness, there’s a peculiar beauty to the nature of its myth. Though one can rip on venues like Caesars for their faux marble and chimerical displays of wealth, it’s remarkable that these venues exist at all—in the middle of an empty desert waste. Vegas is a city that built its fortunes, yet it simply did not have a lot of raw material to work with. Vegas constructed itself upon its myth—the city is artificial, yet it announces this fact—it revels in at the same time that it believes its mythologizing. Though Vegas is steeped in sex, booze, and artificial wealth, it at least doesn’t pretend that things are otherwise. There’s a chutzpah to the city which I admire.

Vegas is a somewhat difficult city to write about, much less deconstruct, simply because the place is so excruciatingly obvious. The place lacks subtlety. I nonetheless write about Vegas because it raises a question that’s of at least some interest to the study of semiotics and to myself. I’m untroubled by, or even love, Vegas and its materialism, strange sexuality, and escape from reality. But I love Vegas despite these elements—which I sometimes find objectionable elsewhere—simply because it announces them so cleanly. I appreciate the fact that Vegas, by being so extreme, make visible those tropes which underlay so much of our culture. The negativity that surrounds us simply loses its power once it becomes visible. In this way, Vegas is simultaneously able to embrace cartoonish materialism and also to offer an escape from it.

There’s a strange double-movement to Vegas. By being so obvious, the city lies suspended between myth and myth’s dissolution.

Multimodality Article

Hello all,

I was poking around on the library site and came across this article that appeared in Computers and Composition. It has a section at the end that suggests pedagogy we can take from multimodal social communication and bring it into the composition classroom. It highly references Kress, as well as has a kick-butt bibliography. I've read Shipka before but didn't realize that it was related to this...

You'll undoubtedly have to log into Broncoweb in order to see it...



Linda

A New Paradigm of Authorship Prezi

Rhetorical Analysis & Parody

Colbert identifies what and how he is going to parody. Both, especially the original Pawlenty ads, deserve their own rewatching and analysis. It's cinematic Bruckheimerism and a partiotic, political "high-budget trailer"; it's multimodal.

Semiotics Points to Ideology

From Semiotics: A Critical Science, I understood among other things that Semiotics is an informal method for revealing the ideological premises of signs. I'm referring specifically to the bottom of page 78: "We might argue that semiotics is that 'science of ideologies' suggested in revolutionary Russia. . . ." I'm also working, pretty loosely, with this from page 79: "The semiotics concerning us here uses linguistic, mathematical and logical models and joins them to the signifying practices it approaches. This junction is as theoretical as it is scientific, and therefore constitutes a profoundly ideological fact which demystifies the exactitude and 'purity' of the discourse of the so-called 'human' sciences. It [the junction of linguistic, mathematical and logical models + signifying practices] subverts the exact premises of the scientific process. . . ."

So, first, watch this video:




In order to get to the ideological premises of this video, I'll analyze the signifying practices (is this the same thing as a sign? as a series of signs? at what point, or can it be codified to this extent, does a series of signs constitute a new sign? is that determined by the reader?) using a model of analysis whose provenance remains unclear to me. Is it mathematical, linguistic, or logical? To me, the method of analysis seems like informal logic, or perhaps a social semiotics à la Kress. Here goes.

The opening scene suggests a reasonably serious Masterpiece Theater type set-up, with a familiar character from literature in a familiar setting.

The video subverts the terms usually reserved to mock and torment gay men (too dramatic, too effeminate, too bossy) and places them in a new context in which these are valued qualities. In so doing, the author points to the instability of the original meanings of these signs (in this case, the quality of voice, the gestures, and the clothes) by subverting their conventional meanings with new meanings. In this process, the authors exploit the excess, the waste that remains after conventional meanings have been established; there are always invisible meanings (in this case, positive representations of stereotypical conceptions of gay men) hovering around the established meanings. Semiotics, then, recuperates those invisible meanings by subverting the conventional meanings and in so doing destabilizes the conventional meaning.

Randy Rainbow, then, is performing a semiotic analysis of a cultural commonplace, while I am performing a semiotic analysis of his product.