In my thesis I hope to explain how fashion today is a medium itself. It is mediated anyway, used for mediatization (a very rough example would be big slogans on T-shirts and all the well-known T-Shirt communication-campaigns, aka "We love you Kate" etc.) and fashioning all the system, as I see it.
Just today found myself wondering, what is the very core question that I'm haunting after. And I discovered it is the question of manipulation - are people manipulated or are people manipulating the system, and by system I don't only mean the system of fashion. Yes, that is the thing always somewhere back in my head. I have for so long now been speaking about my adoration to Michel de Certeau's work and his idea of everyday cunningness, that people are not manipulative and use their own tactics to rebel against the provided solutions. It's quite a positivist idea, it seems to me, and I have started to doubt in it, but not given up believing in people. Still, when listening to almost all my interviewees, I have catched the manipulated-ideas, as I call them. The one-dimensional message they have approved by media and society without really thinking why or where it comes from and what does it do. There is a lot of literature about one-way communication, for instance the Henri Marcuse's 'one dimensional man' from Frankfurt Scool, Jürgen Habermas' ideal situation of speech and many more. In a wide sense it's the critique of contemporary capitalism.
And right now I feel every now and then I reach to the capitalist critique myself, and I do, which still doesn't mean I'd prefer something else. No, I'm not even that capable to discuss which political system should rule the world, but during these days it seems that where's there's the ruling idea, there's the critique to it. And maybe that is good, because it keeps the power under control. We have seen what happens when power goes uncontrolled.
In my work, theoretically I start with Henri Lefebvre's triad of space. He describes the layers of spatial practices that divide space into several levels and concepts of using the space as such. There are representations of space (mediatized space: streets with media and mediums), spacial practices (e.g. people's behaviour, the real action going on in all the physical space(s)), representational space (media, mediums; e.g. movies, meaning that media carries on certain images and descriptions of the "real" space, it is the space that is created by and through media, as we see it when being surrounded by media images and texts). Representaions of space and representaional space for me are a bit overlapping - or I have misunderstood their content and I'm afraid I might use them wrong, so with these two terms I have to work a bit further.
So these three spheres or layers of space create a social space that is not there, but constructed by humans. Moreover, time is a social construction.
Moving on I describe the mediaspace, defined by various communication-geography scholars, whereas I have chosen Nick Couldry's and Anna McCarthy's (2004) definition of mediaspace. They see mediaspace similar to social space, I would say a sub-unit of it, also in a triad consisting of mediations of space (that is presence of media in everyday life, physical mediums), mediatizations of space (that is wireless access and usage of it, screens in malls, streets, shops..., advertisements, billboards everywhere in the urban space), and mediatized sense of space (that is TV shows, movies, series, texts, images etc.). As we see both triads have something to do with each other. Actually the idea of them is quite alike - when to cover the triangles with each other, we can see together representations of space and mediations of space, spacial practices and mediatizations of space, and representaional space together with mediatized sense of space. This is also the way, one of our lectures put it in JMK.
From there on I somehow discovered the term scape. I was long time confused with that because I thought Lefebvre and Couldry & McCarty all speak about scapes, but I was wrong. Probably I heard the term scape, when Terhi Rantanen talked about her study about media and globalization and the follow up work of Arjun Appadurai and his five scapes. Rantanen added two and got a very inspirational new method to study media's role within globalization among international people. Appadurai talked about ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape and idioscape and Rantanen adds up languagescape and timescape. So now I guess this is where I got the scape idea. And now I can even remember Terhi Rantanen's suggestion that if someone discovers a new scape, could contact her:) Never thought I would do that, but here I am with my "Fashionscape".
I'm afraid I might sound a bit sectional, or how should I say... jumping from one term to another hoping this clears the water to other people what I mean by "Fashionscape".
Fashionscape in consequence is the landscape of fashion - the set of ideas, images, texts, behaviour, interpretation, action, effects... a space filled with fashion knowledge. It is like there actually is a cityscape, TV-scape (firs I saw Andy Warhol using it and really appreciated him for that giving me a certain security that I go in the right direction) and another thing I in the future would like to discover, the brandscape. Fashionscape embraces the influence of media, the concept of clothing, theories and practice of fashion and consumer culture.
In the end I would like to provide more stabile definition to the term, but this is a good start I hope.
And the question about manipulation I mentioned above - I remembered a friend's saying:
I guess this is maybe one of the best answers to my general question at all, but gives me a good inspiration to do my master thesis. Let's see how people think!
Just today found myself wondering, what is the very core question that I'm haunting after. And I discovered it is the question of manipulation - are people manipulated or are people manipulating the system, and by system I don't only mean the system of fashion. Yes, that is the thing always somewhere back in my head. I have for so long now been speaking about my adoration to Michel de Certeau's work and his idea of everyday cunningness, that people are not manipulative and use their own tactics to rebel against the provided solutions. It's quite a positivist idea, it seems to me, and I have started to doubt in it, but not given up believing in people. Still, when listening to almost all my interviewees, I have catched the manipulated-ideas, as I call them. The one-dimensional message they have approved by media and society without really thinking why or where it comes from and what does it do. There is a lot of literature about one-way communication, for instance the Henri Marcuse's 'one dimensional man' from Frankfurt Scool, Jürgen Habermas' ideal situation of speech and many more. In a wide sense it's the critique of contemporary capitalism.
And right now I feel every now and then I reach to the capitalist critique myself, and I do, which still doesn't mean I'd prefer something else. No, I'm not even that capable to discuss which political system should rule the world, but during these days it seems that where's there's the ruling idea, there's the critique to it. And maybe that is good, because it keeps the power under control. We have seen what happens when power goes uncontrolled.
In my work, theoretically I start with Henri Lefebvre's triad of space. He describes the layers of spatial practices that divide space into several levels and concepts of using the space as such. There are representations of space (mediatized space: streets with media and mediums), spacial practices (e.g. people's behaviour, the real action going on in all the physical space(s)), representational space (media, mediums; e.g. movies, meaning that media carries on certain images and descriptions of the "real" space, it is the space that is created by and through media, as we see it when being surrounded by media images and texts). Representaions of space and representaional space for me are a bit overlapping - or I have misunderstood their content and I'm afraid I might use them wrong, so with these two terms I have to work a bit further.
So these three spheres or layers of space create a social space that is not there, but constructed by humans. Moreover, time is a social construction.
Moving on I describe the mediaspace, defined by various communication-geography scholars, whereas I have chosen Nick Couldry's and Anna McCarthy's (2004) definition of mediaspace. They see mediaspace similar to social space, I would say a sub-unit of it, also in a triad consisting of mediations of space (that is presence of media in everyday life, physical mediums), mediatizations of space (that is wireless access and usage of it, screens in malls, streets, shops..., advertisements, billboards everywhere in the urban space), and mediatized sense of space (that is TV shows, movies, series, texts, images etc.). As we see both triads have something to do with each other. Actually the idea of them is quite alike - when to cover the triangles with each other, we can see together representations of space and mediations of space, spacial practices and mediatizations of space, and representaional space together with mediatized sense of space. This is also the way, one of our lectures put it in JMK.
From there on I somehow discovered the term scape. I was long time confused with that because I thought Lefebvre and Couldry & McCarty all speak about scapes, but I was wrong. Probably I heard the term scape, when Terhi Rantanen talked about her study about media and globalization and the follow up work of Arjun Appadurai and his five scapes. Rantanen added two and got a very inspirational new method to study media's role within globalization among international people. Appadurai talked about ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape and idioscape and Rantanen adds up languagescape and timescape. So now I guess this is where I got the scape idea. And now I can even remember Terhi Rantanen's suggestion that if someone discovers a new scape, could contact her:) Never thought I would do that, but here I am with my "Fashionscape".
I'm afraid I might sound a bit sectional, or how should I say... jumping from one term to another hoping this clears the water to other people what I mean by "Fashionscape".
Fashionscape in consequence is the landscape of fashion - the set of ideas, images, texts, behaviour, interpretation, action, effects... a space filled with fashion knowledge. It is like there actually is a cityscape, TV-scape (firs I saw Andy Warhol using it and really appreciated him for that giving me a certain security that I go in the right direction) and another thing I in the future would like to discover, the brandscape. Fashionscape embraces the influence of media, the concept of clothing, theories and practice of fashion and consumer culture.
In the end I would like to provide more stabile definition to the term, but this is a good start I hope.
And the question about manipulation I mentioned above - I remembered a friend's saying:
You can fool some people sometimes, but not all the people all the time.
I guess this is maybe one of the best answers to my general question at all, but gives me a good inspiration to do my master thesis. Let's see how people think!
