December 31, 1997

Sign Wars Turn Culture into a Commodity

PORTLAND, Ore.--Turn on your television. Drive through the city. Open up your mail.

We are bombarded by the Nike swoosh...the McDonald's arches...the Coke insignia and thousands of other commodity signs all screaming louder and louder and faster and faster for our fractured attention.

Robert Goldman, media critic and professor of sociology and anthropology at Lewis & Clark College, and Stephen Papson, professor of sociology at St. Lawrence University, refer to this intensified advertising competition as Sign Wars. And that's the subject and title of their new book published by Guilford Press. The book tells readers that images, like words, can be read, understood, and judged true or false.

Sign Wars has two central concepts. The first is that consumer goods are parity items.

There is little left to distinguish one product from that of its competitor, according to Goldman. So advertisers have to find subtle ways to distinguish themselves through signs, images, personalities, music, and so on.

In the world of parity goods, if the sign doesn't stand out, neither will the product. Battles in the cola wars, the phone wars, credit card wars and so on, have become less about the products themselves than about their signifying imagery.

--Sign Wars

"The second point we make is that the more we engage in sign wars the faster culture has to move," Goldman says.

In other words, culture itself is being driven by economic competition and has become treated ever more as merely a commodity, he explains. Ads even appropriate the cultural symbols such as body piercing and body tatoos of the sub-groups that oppose mainstream consumption values.

As sign value competitions intensify, advertisers invent new strategies and push into fresh cultural territory, looking for "uncut" and "untouched" signs. Under such circumstances no meaning is sacred, because the realm of culture has been turned into a giant mine. Advertisers routinely raid cultural formations for raw materials they need to construct new, more valuable signs. And then, just as quickly as they appear, signs are abandoned to make way for their replacements. To keep advertising's commodity-sign machine purring requires constantly scouring the landscape for new signifying materials. Indeed, advertising now chews up signs from other discourses so rapidly that it is beginning to cannibalize its own system.--Sign Wars

"On the one hand, because of the sign wars, the public has become jaded and cynical of everything from advertising to politics," Goldman says. "On the other hand, the public wants authenticity."

The book is full of examples of the ways advertisers are responding to the crisis.

"A lot of ads speak to us as if we're alienated spectators," Goldman says. "They hail us 'I know you won't believe this' and then they reframe the message with a more jaded, cynical view of the world."

For example, Milli Vanilli appeared in a Care*Free Sugarless Gum commercial after the group was stripped of its Grammy Award for lip-synching the words. The ad cashed in on their tarnished image.

"Nostalgia ads are another response to the same crisis. 'Wouldn't it be neat and wonderful if we could go back to the 50s with mother and Kool-Aid?' the ads ask."

"That's an understandable response to a social and cultural world that feels as if were out of control," Goldman says.

"Advertising is in crisis of clutter," he says. "Advertisers are becoming more and more desperate to get and to keep our attention. But because everything comes to us through the lens of the specacle, everthing must be refracted through the codes of the media."

Goldman hopes the book prompts "a small measure of reflection about how media codes shape the things we see and about what happens when culture is treated strictly as a commodity."

###

Contact:

Jean Kempe-Ware
Director of Public Relations
(503) 768-7963
[email protected]

Robert L. Goldman
Professor of Sociology
(503) 768-7662
[email protected]