Page 95 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 82

4. MEDIA IMAGES

One is surrounded by images in a shopping centre. What is more, the shopper moves
through a visual environment that consistently reinforces a sense of being looked at,
by cameras, by shopkeepers and service personnel, by other shoppers, and where one
repeatedly meets one’s own image in the many mirrors on the walls and ceilings of
this space. Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in the 1970s of the effects of adver-
1
tising on the visual performances we enact in social space. The sense of being under
surveillance has certainly not diminished since then. The awareness that one can at
any moment ‘be taken’ by a camera or by another’s glance is a growing aspect of the
everyday experience in the contemporary media environment. We live in the midst
of an unending stream of images, and whether or not one agrees with Debord that
this creates ‘an excess of display’, concealing the truth of the society that produces it,
it is hard to argue against the postulate that consumption and vision are mutually
2
constructing practices in the ongoing legacy of late modernity. A key question for
this study has been how this expanded visual field is reflected in the ways people use
images in their own lives. This, in turn raises questions regarding the forms of reflex-
ivity that arise in these visual practices. Pictures never operate in isolation, but are
interwoven in complex networks of meaning with other media and sensory experi-
ence.
The consumption of media images is a many layered activity. There are, first, the
images ‘in’ the media, on television, in advertising, in film, in magazines. This is the
usual way of thinking of media imagery. Pictures in the media are the most
commonly discussed and analysed media images. These are also the images that are
frequently at the centre of debates about the effects of media on consumers: adver-
tising’s effects on young children, the effects of media violence on youth behaviour,
the effect of fashion advertising on young women’s self-image, or the availability of
pornography on the Internet. There is widespread concern over the meanings and
messages conveyed by the visual content of (mass) media. While not denying the
importance of such questions, the focus here is rather on images ‘of’ the media and
their uses.
Contemporary society is permeated by images of media. The media’s visual pres-
ence is as much a part of contemporary culture as the air we breathe. Existing media
statistics do not include any counting of the number of images seen on an average
day, or the length of daily time spent on seeing images in the form of photos, posters
or painted images in the streets or at home, and it would indeed be methodologically
virtually impossible to measure the presence of images in society and everyday life, or
assess the relative importance of images compared to sounds or words. The visibility