New Yorker Cartoon Flap is COM 320 in Action

There’s been much ado about the recent New Yorker cover featuring an inflammatory depiction of presidential nominee Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. For brevity I’ll refer to the Wikipedia description of the illustration (on the off-chance you haven’t already seen it twenty times on the TV news):

“The magazine's July 21, 2008 cover sparked criticism with its depiction of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama dressed in traditional Muslim garb and his wife, Michelle, in military-style camouflage and carrying a machine-gun, standing in the Oval Office with a portrait of Osama Bin Laden hanging on the wall. An American flag burns in the fireplace in the background.”

New Yorker Editor David Remnik explained the intent behind the cartoon in this interview:

"The intent of the cover is to satirize the vicious and racist attacks and rumors and misconceptions about the Obamas that have been floating around in the blogosphere and are reflected in public opinion polls. […] What we set out to do was to throw all these images together, which are all over the top and to shine a kind of harsh light on them, to satirize them. That’s part of what we do."

The way this story has played out illustrates how rich, fluid and textured our methods of communication are. Trying to convey that reality is the goal of a course I've taught at GVSU; "COM 320: Vision and Culture."

One of the principles of communications philosophy that parsimoniously describes the conflict is that of "discourse communities," which are defined by Kostelnick and Hassett (in "Visual Language, Discourse Communities and the Inherently Social Nature of Conventions," 2003) as groups of users of particular codes who maintain a 'collective enterprise' in the use and understanding of those codes. Plato observed that written language "rolls around" (IE that it is flexible and is modified as it passes from user to user). Kostelnick and Hassett argue that visual language is even more fluid than written language due to the greater variety of context it can draw upon to create meaning. Therein lies the rub.

The readership of the New Yorker is a discourse community. To that discourse community (established as readers absorb the content of the magazine, thereby familiarizing themselves with various concepts like the 'right-wing media'), certain concepts and how they are represented visually become coherent and intelligible. When the symbols are interpreted by members of the discourse community, there is no problem.

When the symbols are cast out into the mainstream they can be freely interpreted by people of other discourse communities without the benefit of a translator from the New Yorker to provide the context that conveys the original meaning. The irony is that the mainstream media, in chastising the New Yorker for creating an esoteric satirical image that could be misunderstood by the masses, flung the image out to a vastly larger segment of the masses.

As Kostelnick and Hassett describe: "like a white-water river surging over the rocks, [visual language's] relentless and seemingly chaotic presence demands our attention, while at the same time conceals its underlying foundation."

Starbucks More Like Ahab?

In pursuit of ever-higher profits (apparently its white whale), Starbucks has made a couple sizable gaffes in recent years that threaten its brand identity as a high-quality, socially-conscious purveyor of coffee.

The first was to stop paying attention to customer service (a common problem for companies that rise too quickly too fast). So serious was the decline, that Starbucks closed all of its locations for three and a half hours on February 26, 2008 to retrain employees in customer service. The company also (perhaps unwisely) turned it into a media event which was much-lampooned in the media.

The second was to engage in union-busting; firing a worker here in Grand Rapids and another in Spain - actions that recently generated a world-wide protest. For a company that has taken various other actions in pursuit of a commitment to fair labor practices, environmental sustainability, and purchasing its product from fair trade producers (though it only amounts to around six percent of the total coffee Starbucks purchases) - this move could be especially damaging as it stands directly counter to the company's purported brand identity (and thusly, the views of the audience they've courted while building the brand).

Though it's hard to parse out what is stimulated by the suffering economy, there are already potential signs of potential consequences for Starbucks' actions; they've been losing market share to McDonald's line of specialty coffees, and the company just announced that it will close 600 locations in response to falling demand.

It will be interesting to see what measures the company takes to rebound. Now that the fast food world is in the specialty coffee market, one would think that Starbucks would want to concentrate even more on the core identify of its brand (IE a high quality experience and social responsibility) to differentiate itself given that it cannot compete on price and availability with chains like McDonald's.