Page 109 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

98 • Sport, Media and Society

magazines call out to us and ask us to consider ourselves within their terms. When
we do, we become subject to their meanings, our identities being formed as part of
this interaction with the text of the magazine.
Mills (1992) drew on an analysis of pop songs and the way radio DJs talk to their
listeners to construct a model of direct and indirect address that is useful for making
sense of the way the reader is positioned by a magazine. When a love song is played
on the radio, the listener can adopt a range of different positions in response. If the
song is sung by a man invoking the name of a woman as his love object, a hetero-
sexual man might identify with the speaker in the interaction. A heterosexual woman
listening might identify with the supposed addressee of the song. Alternatively, the
listener might think he or she is overhearing an interaction between two people, of
which the listener has no part (in this case, gender, sexuality or a recent bad experi-
ence in love might have an impact on the position adopted). Mills (1992) argued that
this positioning is not stable and can shift. Mills demonstrated this by referring to the
way radio DJs address their audience. The listener is not implicated in the address
the same way all of the time: sometimes the DJ can use ‘you’ to mean the entire au-
dience, sometimes an individual listener. In the meantime, the talk remains available
to the rest of the audience. This model of speaker–addressee–overhearer can be used
to analyse what makes a potential purchaser step out of the position of overhearer
into that of addressee.

Positioning the Subject in Sport and Fitness Magazines

The magazine offers us a subject position to occupy. Since identity is not fi xed, or
unitary (Hall 1992), individuals are engaged in a quest for completion. Magazines
offer us a way of understanding ourselves that appears to offer this more fi nished

sense of self. Our choice of magazine, therefore, reflects our sense of who we are and
who we might like to be. A golf magazine may use codes to speak to potential read-
ers in ways that say ‘you are a white middle aged man who works hard during the
week, but that is not all you are and it is not as important as your real passion—golf.’
It is possible that a potential purchaser is looking for a magazine as a distraction from
work, as he imagines his golfing holiday that is still a long way off. The information

contained within also encourages us to learn more about the area of interest and take
action towards moving towards a future self. The way the magazine addresses us
makes us feel part of a larger community of individuals with shared interests. The
magazine presents a version of identity that the potential purchaser would prefer to
have. In this sense, the magazine cover is presenting the reader with an idealised self
(McCracken 1993).
The work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan can help explain this process of
identity formation. Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) was a French psychoanalyst whose
work has been used to explain the complex relationship we have with images. Lacan’s