My final project for Intro to Civic Media is about storytelling in the capitalist marketplace. I am focusing on the production and reception of stories of origin printed on commercial product packages: brief narratives produced by copy writers and packaging designers working toward an institutional goal to sell products. These texts interest me both as information sources that can be fact-checked and as literary productions that reflect in their language and form the structures and values of the marketplace. For Intro to Civic Media, I’m working on two elements of the project: a website for collecting and publishing marketplace stories of origin and a written study of two examples.
I started work on the website earlier this month and am testing it now. Goals for the website are:
- create a crowd-sourced collection of stories from diverse products
- create a forum for critical engagement with these texts and the systems that produce them
- reveal patterns in form and language by bringing them together as a collection (with an eye to the structuralist danger of “collapsing all difference”)
- create a platform for additional research programs (ex. fact-checking stories, comparing stories to other published accounts of company history) and for creative use/adaptation of the collected texts
The heart of the website is a form anyone can use to submit a transcribed story of origin. The form fields determine what information is logged as well as communicating to visitors the character of the site — the intentions of the people who created it. In this stage, I’m still revising the form as I read new submissions, get feedback on the site and adjust my ideas about what we can learn from these texts. Right now the form includes required fields for basic information (Product name, Story of origin, Where did you see it?), dropdown list options for product types and for narrative voice (1st person, 3rd person), and optional questions about the manufacturer and distributor under the heading Fine print. When a submission by a non-registered user is complete, it appears in the WordPress admin interface as a draft & the site admin gets email notification. The admin (me, for now) may add more information before posting or reject the submission if it falls too far outside the scope of the project.
So far there are 22 stories posted on the site. Three of them are written as letters. Most of the products are food or beverages; two are hygiene products; one is a notebook. Characters include ‘buddies’, grandfathers, one grandmother (“Mimi”), three Dr.s (all male), one doctor’s wife and any number of families.
The site doesn’t yet have support for languages other than English, although there is no restriction on submitting info in other languages. This needs to be addressed one way or another. Another challenge for the future will be creating frameworks for collecting and displaying additional research and other uses of the stories, such as parodies, edited versions, illustrations, etc. Sasha asked me last week where the potential for change is in this project — while this isn’t a project with clear-cut policy change as its immediate goal, I think the potential for change is in this opportunity to use this collected data as a basis for teaching, for research and for cultural production, which can in turn inform policy. My goal is that this project can play a part in the kind of attitude change described by James Carey in last week’s reading: an “effect on ordinary ideas: coordinates of thought, natural attitude, practical consciousness, or, less grandly, common sense.” Part of pursuing this goal will be to tie this site into a network of projects in the sphere of consumerism, market studies, information literacy and language and literature, such as Sourcemap, Media Cloud and Stanford Lit Lab.
Feedback is welcome, comment on the site or email me: rosselli at mit …
The written study is in an earlier phase than the website. I plan to use Dr. Bronner’s soap as one of the case studies and may use Nantucket Nectar in order to explore the disjunction between the company’s current ownership (Dr. Pepper Snapple Group) and the story of origin that appears on their labels (“…One cold winter night they began mixing juice in a blender. The following summer they sold it off their boat. People loved it! They decided to call it Nantucket Nectar”). The case studies will encompass fact-checking, research on production (who wrote the story? who designed the package? in what context?) and reception (who reads the story? where? why?). I am thinking a lot about methods for reception studies; the general outlines of my plan include making a survey for consumers and figuring out a way to solicit responses (via the website, via the grocery store, insert it into the coupon newsletters that show up in mailboxes?) and talking to salespeople who interact with customers.
The written study is also an opportunity for a review of literature, and, more generally, of relevant disciplines and research areas. Topics I want to look into include legislation governing product labels, histories and present-day structures and practices of marketing and branding departments and other present-day examples of texts without authors. I hope to also touch on reasons for and implications of collecting as a practice and compare this collection to related collections such as the Child Ballads or Vladimir Propp’s morphology of folktales.