'Consumers exploit advertising', quipped Jib Fowles. In what ways do consumers make use of advertising imagery for their own purposes?

Guidance

For general guidance see the guidelines for writing essays and reports.

What Key Features Do I Look For? Familiarity with relevant texts Evidence - the stronger the better Argument - coherent and balanced Theoretical discussion - relation to relevant theories Understanding of relevant concepts Reflexivity - reflections on methodology Examples - insightfully analysed Style - readability and effective presentation

Please remember to avoid footnotes and to include an alphabetical list of 'References' which have been cited in the text (not a Bibliography of anything you have read for the essay). This list should include author's names, date, book titles (in italics), place of publication and publisher. Within the text always cite author's surname, date and page number. Double-space your text and number your pages. For more detailed notes on writing essays in this department, click here. For examples of essays by UWA students click here.

Advice for this particular assignment: The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described a process called bricolage whereby we make use of things that are ready-to-hand and rearrange them in ways which suit our purposes and which (whether we know it or not) say something about ourselves. Popular visual and musical imagery are widely employed by adolescents in the construction of their own identities. What evidence can you find for this? One of the theorists who champions the active role of the reader/viewer/listener in popular culture is John Fiske, some of whose books you may find it helpful to draw upon here. Note also that this is an assignment for which the inclusion of relevant pictorial illustrations is likely to be an advantage.

Some suggested reading

• Brown, J, C R Dykers, J R Steele & A B White (1994): 'Teenage Room Culture: Where Media and Identities Intersect', Communication Research 21(6): 813-27
  
• Chandler, Daniel (1998): 'Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web' [WWW document] URL http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/short/webident.html
  
• Condry, John (1989) The Psychology of Television. New Jersey: Erlbaum
• Cook, Guy (1992) The Discourse of Advertising. London: Routledge
• Douglas, Mary & Baron Isherwood (1979) The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London: Routledge
• Dyer, Gillian (1982) Advertising as Communication. London: Methuen
• Fowles, Jib (1996) Advertising and Popular Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
• Goldman, Robert (1992) Reading Ads Socially. London: Routledge
• Goldman, Robert & Stephen Papson (1996) Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising. New York: Guilford Press
• Grodin, Debra & Thomas R Lindlof (Eds.) (1996) Constructing the Self in a Mediated World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
• Hebdige, Dick (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen
  
• Hebdige, Dick (1988) Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London: Routledge
  
• Hecker, Sidney & David W. Stewart (Eds) (1988) Nonverbal Communication in Advertising. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books/D C Heath
• Holbrook, Morris B. & Elizabeth C. Hirschman (1993) The Semiotics of Consumption: Interpreting Symbolic Consumer Behavior in Popular Culture and Works of Art. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
• Jenkins, Henry (1992) Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge
  
• Leiss, William, Stephen Kline & Sut Jhally (2005) Social Communication in Advertising. London: Routledge
• Lewis, David & Darren Bridger (2000) The Soul of the New Consumer: Authenticity: What we Buy and Why in the New Economy. London: Nicholas Brealey
• McCracken, Grant (1990) Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
• Messaris, Paul (1997) Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
• Moog, Carol (1990) Are They Selling Her Lips?" Advertising and Identity. New York: William Morrow
• O'Shaughnessy, John & Nicholas Jackson O'Shaughnessy (2004) Persuasion in Advertising. London: Routledge
• Salinger, Adrienne (1995) In My Home: Teenagers in their Bedrooms. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books
• Scott, Linda M & Rajeev Batra (Eds) (2003) Persuasive Imagery: A Consumer Response Perspective. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum
• Solomon, Michael R. (2004) Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having and Being (6th edn.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education International
• Stern, Barbara B. (Ed) (1998) Representing Consumers: Voices, Views and Visions. London: Routledge
• Sutherland, Max (1993) Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer: What Works, What Doesn't and Why. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin
• Twitchell, James B. (1996) Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press
• Underhill, Paco (1999) Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. New York: Simon & Schuster
• Weiss, Michael J. (2000) The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy and What It All Means About Who We Are. Boston, MA: Little, Brown
• Willis, Paul (1990) Common Culture. Buckingham: Open University Press
  
• Woodward, Kathryn (ed.) (1997) Identity and Difference. London: Sage.
• Zaltman, Gerald (2003) How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press