The Megaphone Effect!

Taste and Audience in Fashion Blogging

McQuarrie (2013)
GROUP 11! Dyasanti Vidya S.! Miku Sasaki! Darja Mossolainen! Verna Kaipainen!

The online sphere has made it possible for ordinary consumers to reach a mass audience, to

grab hold of the megaphone.

In the context of fashion blogging: the megaphone effect occurs when ordinary consumers post to the web about consumptioncreating user-generated contentand acquire a mass audience for these posts.

THE WEB HAS CREATED A NEW CONSUMER PHENOMENON

The Web allows ongoing communication by ordinary consumers to a mass audience of strangers. Fashion bloggers achieve an by means of publicly consuming: choosing, evaluating, as well as engaging with clothing and posting accounts of this consumption that garner a large audience of strangers.

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DEMOTIC TURN TURNER (2010)

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The demotic turn is defined as an increase in opportunities for ordinary people to appear in the media. Normally only media professionals and powerful institutional would appear on gain a mass audience. The megaphone phenomenon in terms of demotic turn: in certain consumption spheres, ordinary consumers without institutional positions are able to grab the megaphone for themselves.

CULTURAL CAPITAL BOURDIEU (1999)

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The idea of endowment: only individuals surrounded by objects of high culture from birth were likely to succeed in making the kind of aesthetic judgments required to be accepted into high social position. The problem: This would imply that a woman who did not grow up surrounded by high fashionwho did not grow up wealthy, with access to haute couture, runway shows, designer brand clothing, and occasions to wear it would lack the proper habitus to succeed as a fashion blogger. The concept of field-specific capital.

Field-specific capital?
As an endowment, cultural capital explains reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977); a social position is maintained and newcomers are denied. Bourdieus thinking became less focused on social position within society as a whole and more concerned with how individuals maintained or advanced their position within specific fields; capital can be invested and further accumulated. The resource of cultural capital in the fashion field is: taste judgment power (Gronow 1997). Taste has levels. Fashion bloggers can be seen as individuals who start with some capacity for taste (low levels) and proceed to accumulate it (high levels) through repeated exercise and display.

FROM TASTE TO CAPITAL: 2 MEANINGS OF TASTE

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Consumers learn to calibrate their tastes to join with others who share the same taste regime (Arsel and Bean 2013)
Taste as distinction-between draws boundaries, creates groups, fosters solidarity, and acts to cluster like-minded individuals.

Taste is judgment power and aesthetic discriminationtaste as a standard for discriminating the admirable from the pedestrian (Gronow 1997)
Taste as distinction-over asserts preferment, claims status for one above others, sustains hierarchy, and can raise select individuals to positions of prominence.

How does one usually act in front of an AUDIENCE?

Goffmans (1959) work argued that participants in social encounters could be parsed into actors and audience (actors strive to put on and convey a certain persona rather than revealing their identity; audiences accept these personas to be true). No social actor is ever authentic. A fashion blogger gains the capacity to own a persona she can rehearse and rewrite until she gets it right.

Blog sampling (10 Blogs)

! Amateur consumer bloggers only ! Womens blogs ! Written in English

Blog analysis
! An analysis of the verbal and visual texts visible in these blogs (Fairclough 2003; Gleeson 2011), with an emphasis taste ! Examine their performance overtime by comparing current posts and early posts ! The focus is on the taste judgments made by bloggers, with a secondary focus on audience response to these judgments ! What did the bloggers choose to discuss and not discuss? What kinds of words and phrases were used and avoided? What was the content and style of the pictures displayed?

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METHODOLOGY

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INITIAL POSITION
All 10 bloggers began blogging as ordinary consumers outside of the fashion system. At the time of the launch of their blogs, these 10 individuals did not appear any different from other ordinary consumers. FROM PERSONAL JOURNEY TO TASTE DISPLAY Early posts give the impression of a consumer using the blog as an online journal for personal disclosure, but soon begin to transition toward public displays of taste. Such displays (opinions/commentary/critics) can be recognized as taste leadership because they attract, hold, and grow large audience.

FROM COMMUNITY TO AUDIENCE

Initially, the blog proceeds as if a virtual community was going to be constructed, with the blogger acting simply as one participant among others. But as her audience grows larger, the bloggers behavior changesshe stops interacting with her followers. They become engaged in the concept of distinction-over.

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BLOGGER TRAJECTORY I

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FROM CURATING TO MODELING

In the beginning, bloggers (in the sample) borrowed fashion pictures for free to show taste (i.e. Polyvore) due to budget constraints. As time goes on, theyre expected to be tastemakerssomeone who can actively execute her own style rather than passively combining others stylesthan mere curators, so they progressed from combining others pictures to taking pictures of themselves.
FROM SNAPSHOTS TO PROFESSIONAL IMAGES

In the beginning, the photos posted by bloggers appear similar to snapshots. Eventually, the bloggers proceed to take more professional-looking photographs of themselves as models. This growing professionalism of pictures comes from better training, equipment, as well as high-fashion poses.

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BLOGGER TRAJECTORY II

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BLOGGER OUTCOMES

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Economic rewards: gifts of branded fashion clothing, paid ad placements+sponsorship, modeling contracts, publication of writing. Social rewards: social position improves as they receive invitations to exclusive parties, runway shows, designer open houses, charity appearances, mentions in the media.

Practices of misrecognition
Feigning Similarity: Bloggers feign similarity with their followers by referring to mundane and ordinary aspects of their lives that downplay the glamour and rarity. Self-Deprecation: Self-deprecation and self-ridicule serves to make the blogger appear less distant as well as to downplay accomplishments.

AUDIENCE MAINTENANCE"! #!
Misrecognition and authenticity
Authenticity: opposition to the mainstream (Thornton 1996). Holt (1998) defines a quest for authenticity as avoidance of market-constructed meanings, along with resistance to mass culture.

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SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

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Diana Rikasari: An Indonesian Fashion Blogger

(http://dianarikasari.blogspot.com)

A blogger turned entrepreneur.

Case in Japan: "Reader Model

An amateur model who's been selected to model for fashion magazinessome of the most popular models are of this category.

How your products/ services are described in blog and comments is hard to control consistency of the brand can be questioned further by the audience through this channel of influence.

How does this paper relate to IMC?

A bloggers audience is more likely to take her recommendations into account when making purchasing decisions. Sponsorship: Many bloggers receive lots of gifts from companies that they choose carefully to put in their blog.