Page 116 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Sport and Magazines • 105

the consumer. The editor assumes readers’ knowledge of laddish radio DJs and pre-
miership footballers, giving markers that he is talking to youngish, single men: ‘If,
like 10.5m others you tune into Radio 1 (7 million listen to Chris Moyles alone!).’
Heterosexuality (and lack of experience) is also assumed—an article on football
links to one about women: ‘what makes him [footballer Thierry Henry] tick . . . fi nd
out what makes her tick, with a magical mystery tour inside the female brain.’
Ultra Fit’s editorial interestingly assumes a shared horror of female bodybuild-

ers amongst its readership of ‘ “normal” female fitness weight trainers’. While gym
membership is taken for granted among the readers of Ultra Fit, Health & Fitness
magazine’s editor assumes that the magazine’s readership is more interested in a fi t
lifestyle than a commitment to training. Her use of contemporary idiomatic phrases
mimics the readers’ speech style to enforce the seeming naturalness of her persona
and its relationship to the expected community of readers: ‘When it comes to work-
outs, I’m more of an outdoor girl than a gym bunny.’

The Contents

Magazines are characterised by their variety of contents—a range of features, inter-
views, regular items, advertisements, guides to products and self-help. The way items
are constructed indicates how the magazine conceives of the interests of its readers.
Inside Zest, for example, is a page devoted to explaining ‘6 reasons Zest loves Septem-
ber!’ The text is boxed in the centre of the page in a seamless paragraph. Key phrases
summing up the six reasons are highlighted in larger font in aqua blue and leaf green,
picking out the colours in some of the images that surround the text, particularly the
blue of a swimming pool and the green of a tropical shower. The soft colours and
images of shower products and smiling women swimming and showering construct a
feminine subject position. Within the arrangement of words and images on the page is
a highlighted key phrase, ‘The Rugby World Cup kicks off this month’, an image of a
magenta and blue short-sleeved rugby top, a rugby ball and rugby players in a scrum.
The inclusion of these references to rugby alerts us to the inscription of positionality
within the contents of magazines. In considering the address of the article to the read-
ers, it is not enough simply to take account of which words and images are used, but
the way they position the reader. While the item suggests that the reader should be
interested in the rugby, the text positions her as a heterosexual female, whose interest
is secondary to that of her male partner’s (‘but don’t let your man watch alone!’). The
magazine incorporates rugby into the wider discourse of consumer fi tness by suggest-
ing that ‘watching your team on screen can boost heart rate to workout levels’ (allud-
ing to an unreferenced study of football supporters). Finally, the magazine gives the
Web address of the sportswear retailer Canterbury, so the reader can ‘look the part in
a gorgeously girlie Canterbury rugby shirt’. As a result, the reader’s interest in rugby
is framed in terms of appearance-orientated, heterosexualised femininity.