Thursday, April 12, 2001
5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Bartos Theater
MIT
Media Lab
20 Ames Street
Digital environments enable
practices that promise to transform corporate/consumer relations.
These practices undermine the traditional power of companies to control
their images and manage their imagery. At the same time these new
practices create conditions permitting consumers to challenge the
commodity fetishism on which the corporate persona as an asset relies.
The World Wide Web gives members of the digitally connected public
new capacities to evade their positions as mere consumers of corporate
imagery, providing technological means and social and cultural conditions
for consumers to transform the commodity signs of mass culture into
popular culture and to create a popular legal culture in the process.
As the struggles to control the meaning of corporate trademarks indicates,
a system of proprietary control, dominant under modern conditions
of mass marketing, is being transformed into something more dynamic
and ethically complicated, a digital public sphere in which consumers
are not passive and corporations are forced to be newly accountable.
Speakers
Rosemary Coombe
, York University
Andrew Herman, Drake University
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