Week 4 - Mapping 'Taste' Preferences / Analysing Images

AECP = Australian Everyday Culture Project

Lecture 7 (audio)

Theme: The Issue of Taste

Education and income shape esthetics people have and the choices they make (TV / Radio)

“Chose which magazine takes your fancy”

A female student chose Woman’s Weekly because there is no sex in there (!)

Are taste and choice mundane everyday things?

Why study taste?

Choosing a magazine is pretty mundane – the future of the world is not depending on them

Marketing agencies are pretty much interested in the same social dependencies, the patterns that emerge from people’s choices

 Taste is what we like and what we dislike – both are similarly important

You learn a lot about people from their aesthetical preferences

Wallpaper magazine in general is regarded as a wanky magazine that is read by wannabe rich people.

Through our taste we classify ourselves and other people. It is not just an individual thing.  Groups share these preferences. They are also known as taste cultures. We usually talk about people that never meet but share the same taste.

A lot of pop-culture is mass mediated.

Tastes are demand preferences. Your utility functions – how much pleasures can you draw from your choice of consummation.

However, class ethnicity and age are also to consider.

There is a link between class and taste. But there are people that say that class is not so important nowadays anymore.

We do find distinct lifestyles – eating, drinking housing and leisure.

Taste is a way of drawing a boundary around a group. You’re either in or out (in-crowd).

Class is also about the resources that you have at your disposal (wealth, income, education, knowledge, appreciation).

·         Introduction to: Pierre Bourdieu

He says that class and taste are very strongly linked.

Taste in fact represents our habitués: The milieu, in which we grew up (family and school), where we learn how to stand in a social gathering, from a very early age.

Taste is never innocent; it is where I try to legitimate myself, performing a symbolic violence to others. Groups have certain perceptions of opposite groups. My lifestyle is good taste the other one’s isn’t. It is a game of competition.

Talking about resources he talks about forms of capital: Wealth and income are the reflection of our economic capital. Does it allow us to participate in certain activities expected from us. Other cultural capital is for you require a university – knowledge, appreciation, where you can show off that you know what post modernism is.

Bourdieu’s research is based on French society which still has a high level of snobbery.

Australia has a pretty flat hierarchy – some of the wealthiest people have the lowest tastes. Egalitarian society. Class doesn’t explain everything. In some cases gender and age are much more important than income.

However for the consumption of music cultural capital (Bourdieu) still plays a major role in Australia.

The Australian every day culture survey is about trends in groups, not anything about individuals.

Perhaps even Australia doesn’t have Snobs and Yobs anymore. Instead we have the omnivour and the univour. In terms of music anything that is out there against very specialized individuals. Is there no longe an elite? Interestingly omnivours and univours are not evenly spread across society. The overwhelming majority of Australians under 60 are omnivours in terms of music.

Lecture 8 (audio)

Guest Lecture (Assoc Prof John Lechte)

Methodological issues

Image: Narrative, representation, Icon

Takes up a magazine and asks audience if they want to meet the person. Is this a person literately speaking? It’s not; it’s an image – a photograph. 

People are trying to be literately about a person in an image.

What do I do when I take out photographs from a holiday – I think back about the situation captured in the particular picture. An example for an icon is when e.g. a man in a photograph looks like the man in reality. It is the icon of the man. This is an iconic representation – an apparent similarity is imminent.

According to Pearce (1839 – 1914) there is a Tripartheid: Icon, Index, Symbol

An index is a thing that is affected by the thing it identifies, e.g. a shadow (indexing the sun) or a windmill (indexing wind).

A symbol has an arbitrary relation to the item it symbolizes – a conventional relationship.

He was a producer of different signs (semiotics) – it’s difficult to keep track on the versatility of signs created by him.

If we don’t know the story behind an image we try to create something, try to make sense of it and give it a story.

Images represent something for someone.

Hot day, cold glass of beer – images do tell a story: This is the version of the image as a form of mediation.

What is image as epiphany – it has an impact on the viewer, even altering the psyche of the observer. Between 6 – 18 month children all of a sudden realize their image in the mirror. They tend to understand that the image is actually them. They recognize themselves.

There may be similar situations in our adult life when we have similar experiences. Images of Horror, Violence. A deep emotional experience.

Why don’t they have men on the front of women’s magazines, while there are always women are men’s magazines?

Images can be understood as immediacy. Like telling a story, images can have an impact on people’s lives.

What precisely is an image? Answer: Philosophical question which cannot be answered appropriately. There are too many applications for the use of the word Image.

Three ways of interpreting an image:

A medium a reflection of something, not the thing itself, but it can look similar. A representation.

1 stage: describe the image just as what it is and what can be seen in the image.

He refers to a number of magazine covers of Spectrum from the beginning of August onwards. Students describe what they can see.

2 stage: Connotation

What does the image content connote? The students group discusses the eye that is displayed in the first image of the Spectrum magazine. What does the eye as in ‘eye mean? What does it stand for? Could stand for ‘I’, for vision…

You don’t just see, you make assumptions.

3 stage:

Who is speaking when we are interpreting? Is it really ourselves or are we influenced by someone or something? Do we have enough evidence to make consumptions about e.g. the covers of Spectrum or Good Weekend?

Answers to Exercises of Week 4

JOURNAL EXERCISE

Record your answers in your journal for future reference.

Question 1: In table B3 which is the 'independent' and 'dependent' variable (NB: The independent variable is the one that is causing or explaining variations in the other variable)

The independent variable in the first table is whether participants attended a tertiary educational institution.
The independent variable in the second table is the household income.

The dependent variable is a number of radio stations.

Question 2: Identify what could be regarded as 'high-brow' or 'low-brow' forms of consumption in tables B3 and B8. Are there any stations or programs where it is unclear as to whether it is a 'high-brow' or 'low-brow' form of culture? 

I understand low-brow to be popular culture versus high-brow being high culture. As the word popular expresses, this is about mass appeal. Applying this mindset to the first table of B3, I would simply express that high brow is the highest ranking radio station amongst respondents with a tertiary education, while low-brow is the highest ranking radio station amongst respondents without a tertiary education. Interestingly both respondent categories seem to have the same preferences with commercial FM. At the same time ethnic and community radio are both far more popular with low-brow respondents, while classical music and the Triple J program are heard much more frequently by a high-brow audience.

The second table makes no sense at all to me. I don’t understand what the income of a household tells me about the status of the audience of any particular radio station. If I have three kids and my wife has to care for them, I am the only person to have an income. I might earn well under 60K in a job that requires me to have a tertiary education. But what if my wife answers the questionnaire, not having any income at all? Is she low-brow? Or is she high-brow? Another example would be a well paid crane driver in an Australian harbour. These workers do not need any tertiary qualification, but are top earners at the same time due to the demand the job puts on them (stress, precision working etc.).

The exact same analysis applies to tables B8.   

Question 3: In table B3 what seems to be the stronger determinant of a stated preference in particular for 'high-brow' radio stations - income or education? What about 'low-brow' preferences? Are there any other variables that you think could be influencing the percentages (eg living location, age)?  How would this effect interpretation of the data?

I cannot determine any high-brow radio stations. Although preferences are clearly visible, they don’t indicate anything that would justify for the allocation of any particular radio station to one of both groups. In my personal opinion, household income or education are not necessarily the major factors to tell high-brow from low-brow.

First of all I would have analysed the programs of each single radio stations. Then I would have tried to find similarities between radio stations as well as factors that help distinguish them from each other. After that, rather than asking survey participants about their favourite radio station, I would have asked them, why they prefer any radio station. What is it that attracts the respondent about this particular station? Further, it is not the household or the income that listens to radio, these are individuals. Each individual has a different taste. It might have been more meaningful to survey individual consumers of radio and TV and then to find similarities between these individuals to research listening/watching patterns.   

Question 4: On the basis of these tables and your knowledge of Australian culture do you think we have a clear demarcation between 'high-brow' and 'low-brow- tastes in Australia? What might you use as evidence in mounting your case?

Whether you call it high-brow or low-brow, popular culture or high culture, in my view the borders are blurred. So far I have not found any defining data that clearly distinguishes between both. Australia is a unique amalgamation of different cultures, the major influences coming from Western and Asian culture. To retrieve meaningful data it might be necessary to find out about the cultural heritage of survey participants in the aim to better understand listening and watching patterns.  Although popular radio and TV stations clearly cater for the Anglo Saxon taste (lots of British and US-American TV programs, lots of British and US-American pop music), they do not necessarily reflect the taste of the Asian population that definitely not belongs to western world culture.