Music in advertising and consumer identity: The search for Heideggerian authenticity

This study discusses netnographic findings involving 472 YouTube postings categorized to identify themes regarding consumers’ experience of music in advertisements. Key themes relate to musical taste, musical indexicality, musical repetition and musical authenticity. Postings reveal how music conveys individual taste and is linked to personal memories and Heidegger’s coincidental time where moments of authenticity may be triggered in a melee of emotions, memories and projections. Identity protection is enabled as consumers frequently resist advertisers’ attempts to use musical repetition to impose normative identity. Critiques of repetition in the music produce Heideggerian anxiety leading to critically reflective resistance. Similarly, where advertising devalues the authenticity of iconic pieces of music, consumers often resist such authenticity transgressions as a threat to their own identity. The Heideggerian search for meaning in life emphasizes the significance of philosophically driven ideological authenticity in consumers’ responses to music in advertisements

Current situation in providing medical care for burn injuries in Ukraine: public opinion

The results of assessment of specialized medical assistance to burn victims are presented in the article, they being based not on standard statistical figures from burn units and centers but on anonymous online survey of 486 respondents (60.5% of them - the residents of Vinnytsya region). The aim of this questionnaire-based survey was to study the level of awareness of Ukrainian population regarding the principles of providing first aid for burn injuries, as well as the availability, quality and shortcomings of current burn care in medical institutions based on the assessment of discharged patients. For this purpose, a 37-item questionnaire was developed, being divided into some blocks: general information about respondents, pre-medical aid, first medical aid, qualified medical aid and specialized medical care. According to the questionnaire, 76.9% of respondents rated the quality of medical care 5 scores by 5-score system, 17.9% - 4 scores, 5.2% - 3 scores, being indicative of rather high level of burn care, even in conditions of limited material, technical and financial resources, as well as rapid decrease of confidence in doctors in general. Online survey conducted in every region of Ukraine seems to be reasonable to make adequate assessment of study problem in the country in general

(Il)Legitimisation of the role of the nation state: Understanding of and reactions to Internet censorship in Turkey

This study aims to explore Turkish citizen-consumers' understanding of and reactions to censorship of websites in Turkey by using in-depth interviews and online ethnography. In an environment where sites such as YouTube and others are increasingly being banned, the citizen-consumers' macro-level understanding is that such censorship is part of a wider ideological plan and their micro-level understanding is that their relationship with the wider global network is reduced, in the sense that they have trouble accessing full information on products, services and experiences. The study revealed that citizen-consumers engage in two types of resistance strategies against such domination by the state: using irony as passive resistance, and using the very same technology used by the state to resist its domination

“He's Still the Winner in My Mind”: Maintaining the Collective Identity in Sport through Social Creativity and Group Affirmation

Social Creativity and Group Affirmation are two strategies by which individuals that identify with a sporting activity, team, group or individual may protect that sense of identification in light of negative events. This paper explores the use of such strategies through examining reactions to doping allegations surrounding Lance Armstrong to explain how members of two brand communities (one based on the brand of Armstrong as cyclist and the other on the brand of Armstrong as cancer survivor) maintain a sense of allegiance. Through undertaking a netnographic approach, six strategies were identified by members of these communities, three of which could be identified as Social Creativity Strategies (Lance Armstrong as “superhuman”, the notion of cycling as a ‘level playing field’, Armstrong as scapegoat) and three as Group Affirmation (Armstrong as a continuing inspiration, the Armstrong legacy, and denial). The two brand communities demonstrated differing patterns of maintenance, with those within the cycling community focusing more upon Social Creativity strategies, whereas those members of the Armstrong as cancer survivor brand tended to focus upon Group Affirmation strategies

Digital play and the actualisation of the consumer imagination

In this article, the authors consider emerging consumer practices in digital virtual spaces. Building on constructions of consumer behavior as both a sense-making activity and a resource for the construction of daydreams, as well as anthropological readings of performance, the authors speculate that many performances during digital play are products of consumer fantasy. The authors develop an interpretation of the relationship between the real and the virtual that is better equipped to understand the movement between consumer daydreams and those practices actualized in the material and now also in digital virtual reality. The authors argue that digital virtual performances present opportunities for liminoid transformations through inversions, speculations, and playfulness acted out in aesthetic dramas. To illustrate, the authors consider specific examples of the theatrical productions available to consumers in digital spaces, highlighting the consumer imagination that feeds them, the performances they produce, and the potential for transformation in consumer-players

"It is what it is": masculinity, homosexuality, and inclusive discourse in mixed martial arts

In this paper we make use of inclusive masculinity theory to explore online media representations of male homosexuality and masculinity within the increasingly popular combat sport of mixed martial arts MMA). Adopting a case-study approach, we discuss narratives constructed around one aspirational male MMA fighter, Dakota Cochrane, whose history of having participated in gay pornography became a major talking point on a number of MMA 'fanzine'/'community' websites during early 2012. While these narratives attempted to discursively 'rescue' Cochrane's supposedly threatened masculinity, highlighting both his 'true' heterosexuality and his prodigious fighting abilities, they also simultaneously celebrated the acceptance of homosexual men within the sport which Cochrane's case implied. Thus, we suggest that these media representations of homosexuality and masculinity within MMA are indicative of declining cultural homophobia and homohysteria, and an inclusive vision of masculinity, as previously described by proponents of inclusive masculinity theory

Prime beef cuts : culinary images for thinking 'men'

The paper contributes to scholarship theorising the sociality of the brand in terms of subject positions it makes possible through drawing upon the generative context of circulating discourses, in this case of masculinity, cuisine and celebrity. Specifically, it discusses masculinity as a socially constructed gender practice (Bristor and Fischer, 1993), examining materialisations of such practice in the form of visualisations of social relations as resources for 'thinking gender' or 'doing gender'. The transformative potential of the visualisations is illuminated by exploring the narrative content choreographed within a series of photographic images positioning the market appeal of a celebrity chef through the medium of a contemporary lifestyle cookery book. We consider how images of men 'doing masculinity'are not only channelled into reproducing existing gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality in the service of commercial ends, but also into disrupting such enduring stereotyping through subtle reframing. We acknowledge that masculinity is already inscribed within conventionalised representations of culinary culture. In this case we consider how traces of masculinity are exploited and reinscribed through contemporary images that generate resources for rethinking masculine roles and identities, especially when viewed through the lens of stereotypically feminised pursuits such as shopping, food preparation, cooking, and the communal intimacy of food sharing. We identify unsettling tensions within the compositions, arguing that they relate to discursive spaces between the gendered positions written into the images and the popular imagination they feed off. Set against landscapes of culinary culture, we argue that the images invoke a brand of naively roughish "laddishness" or "blokishness", rendering it in domesticated form not only as benign and containable, but fashionable, pliable and, importantly, desirable. We conclude that although the images draw on stereotypical premeditated notions of a feral, boisterous and untamed heterosexual masculinity, they also set in motion gender-blending narratives