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-------------------------------- Amazon.com Christine Nadir - 2000 In the nineteenth century, the sudden increase in English mass literacy was accompanied by an anxiety about the effect of books on the common reader. "No longer were books and periodicals written for the comfortable few; more and more, as the century progressed, it was the ill-educated mass audience with pennies in its pocket that called the tune to which writers and editors danced" (Altick 5). Until then, literature or fiction was limited to the realm of high culture, which within modernism, Andreas Huyssen posits, "constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture" (vii). As mass culture exerted its power over the field of cultural production, the "anxiety of contamination" took the form of the fear of the effects of cultural products upon the masses. Patrick Brantlinger explains how the cultural change affected constructions of the reading public: Like other sorts of cultural transformation, changes within the literary field seem often to evoke anxieties that are displaced or misrecognized... New techniques for the mass production and distribution of literature, whether viewed as progress or the reverse, were often personified, attributed to readerly demand or the corrupt 'taste' of the 'reading public.' (12) After all, common readers were not trained to "receive" the texts but would instead consume them in the manner done with everyday commodities. They could not possibly read fiction with the sophistication of the economically-privileged and the highly-educated. In the context of nineteenth-century changes in reading practices, the discourse of the "anxiety of contamination" manifested itself in the construction of the reading public as an uncontrollable crowd of indiscriminate, decadent pleasure-seekers who did not know the difference between "good" and "bad" books. The "rhetoric of toxicity," a term employed by Brantlinger, included the blaming of the producers of reading material--especially the publishers and booksellers that make books available to the public. The "poisonous book" of the 1800s was considered "likely to do moral damage to readers and, indeed, to national culture" (Brantlinger 1). The distributors were accused of selfishly sacrificing the moral health of the nation in the interest of profit. The production of literature and fiction motivated by profit violated the rules of the field of cultural production which defined literature and art as produced autonomously from mass industrial production. Literary works produced for mass distribution to promote sales were considered to be the result not of autonomous creativity but of the struggle to eagerly meet readers' "uncritical demand for easy vicarious indulgence" (Watt 290; quoted by Brantlinger 25). This portrayal of the literary industry suggests that its participants sacrificed art in order to collect the spending money of the masses. In light of this history, it is interesting that, in 2000, Amazon.com, a bookstore with reportedly the world's largest selection of books sold to an anonymous and vast reading public--10 million people, to be exact, is lauded as themodel internet business and as an example for world wide web entrepreneurs everywhere. (All information about Amazon comes directly from the company's website unless otherwsise indicated.) The founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has been called an economic genius, especially since, as a financial analyst, he had no prior experience with the book trade industry (Westland 557). The internet is not an easy place to begin a business, and many companies hope that their perseverance will bring them profits in the future. Yet, in 1999, less than four years after its launching, Amazon was worth $6 billion. Although Amazon claims to have not yet profited, as it invests all its income in its growth, the company is worth "more than the combined value of Barnes and Noble, and Borders, its biggest book store competitors online and off" (Saunders 3; my italics). How is it that an online bookstore that sells both high cultural "literature" and low brow "fiction" and caters to such a large audience can escape social criticism? How has Amazon secured its financial future in cyberspace when so many companies are struggling to survive? Surely, postmodernism has seen a historical trans-formation in the nineteenth-century conception of the reading public, as Amazon has created a relationship with readers that enables its immense financial success and widespread consumer loyalty. In order to understand the Amazon phenomenon, it is necessary to locate it in the context of the changing relationship between cultural products and everyday commodities within postmodernism, and especially the practice of liberatory consumerism. Postmodernism's relationship to mass culture is quite distinct from the modernist "anxiety of contamination," and "[a]s the word 'postmodernism' already indicates," Huyssen explains, "what is at stake is a constant, even obsessive negotiation with the terms of the modern itself" (x). As postmodernism brought issues such as feminism to the forefront of societal concerns, the result was the deconstruction of the binary of high culture as male literary and artistic culture and low culture as feminine and unrefined: "the visible and public presence of women artists in high art, as well as the emergence of new kinds of women performers and producers in mass culture... make the old gendering device obsolete" (Huyssen 62). Mass culture is no longer the ominous, effeminate other threatening to dismantle high standards of culture dominated by literate men. It is increasingly recognized as a possible site of new and creative art and thought. The dismantling of the modernist divide between high and mass culture has brought with it increased similarities between high and low consumerism. Everyday commodities are put to uses traditionally limited to cultural products. Popular culture theorists like John Fiske assert that resources or objects produced by "the dominant" are attractive "by making themselves inviting terrains for [the struggle for meanings]; the people are unlikely to choose any commodity that serves only the economic and ideological interests of the dominant" (5). Once the objects are put into circulation, the producers no longer have any control over the ways in which they are put to use. Meanings, he explains, "can never be identified in a text, for texts are activated, or made meaningful, only in social relations and in intertextual relations" (3). Fiske views consumption as "control over communal meanings of oneself and social relations, it offers a means of controlling to some extent the context of everyday life" (25). In other words, there is always an element of commodity and cultural production which lies outside of the control of the owners of the means of production, enabling consumers to feel empowered by the multiple aesthetic decisions they make as they purchase commodities. The mass proliferation of commodities and the oversaturation of free-floating signifiers has transformed consumptionof mass-produced objects into the reception of cultural products whose meaning lies outside of economics. The production of the semiotic value of commodities is a freely-circulating process which enables the transcendence of use value. Rather than just fulfilling physical needs, Mike Featherstone argues that the contemporary consumer seeks "emotional exploration, aesthetic experience, and the aestheticization of life" (45): ...the consumer society becomes essentially cultural as social life becomes deregulated and social relationships become more variable and less structured by stable norms. The overproduction of signs and reproduction of images and simulations leads to a loss of stable meaning, and an aestheticization of reality in which the masses become fascinated by the endless flow of bizarre juxtapositions which takes the viewer beyond stable sense. (15) Postmodern consumerism is presented as means to express one's identity and to aestheticize life available to everyone, no matter socio-economic status. This the context in which Amazon was founded and to which it owes a percentage of its success. Available any place or time, Amazon's website brings literary culture into the home of anyone who has access to a computer. The common reader is empowered by the accessibility of information on presents, music, books, popular culture, literature, and other cultural products and commodities, as she actively does her own research. Rather than relying on a salesperson to assist you with your purchase, Amazon supplies easily accessible sales ranks, star ratings, and publishers' comments, and a multiplicity of reviews. Without having to weave through crowded aisles of titles and authors, Amazon provides multiple resources to make participation in literary culture a pleasure and to distance consumption from the moment of monetary exchange. Situated historically as it is within postmodernism and its consumption practices, Amazon has the double task of promoting not only the accessibility of its commodities but their aesthetic value as cultural products. Within modernism, this would be contradictory process, yet today it is in the financial interest of companies to encourage a double usage of commodities as useful everyday and at the same time to promote their symbolic value and ability to enhance the quality of life. To enhance the aesthetic value of cultural products, society necessitates what Pierre Bourdieu calls "cultural intermediaries." Symbolic goods do not have aesthetic value until they are identified by persons or institutions asÊembodying cultural capital, i.e. "cultural intermediaries," such as galleries, curators, museums, publishers, and critics. "[W]orks of art exist as symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, that is, socially instituted as works of art and received by spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as such" (37). The process in which cultural intermediaries attach value to the work of art is the "symbolic production of the work, i.e. the production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work" (37). Amazon engages in this process as it applies labels to art works like literature, nonfiction, self-help, philosophy, among others, hence affirming their valuable contribution to the genre in which they are categorized. Although Bourdieu is speaking of the production of artistic and literary works, this discourse is employed by postmodern consumption to speak of everyday consumable objects within postmodernism. Today, useful objects constructed as most disinterested in profit have a greater value that, once recognized, can turn a larger profit than more ostensibly commercial goods are able. As Fiske's earlier argument related, "people are unlikely to choose any commodity that serves only the economic and ideological interests of the dominant" (5). Disinterestedness enables the consumer to put the product to work for them in creative ways, believing that the object's worth is not limited to its exchange value. Bourdieu labels the paradoxical way that disinterestedness, once recognized, "always in the long run, guarantees 'economic' profits" (75) as "the economic world reversed": [T]he economy of practices is based, as in a generalized game of 'loser wins', on a systematic inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary economics: that of business (it excludes the pursuit of profit and does not guarantee any sort of correspondence between investments and monetary gains), that of power (it condemns honours and temporal greatness), and even that of institutionalized cultural authority (the absence of any academic training or consecration may be considered a virtue). (39) Works that are less successful economically can be trusted to be more genuinely artistic than works that have been consumed in large amounts. Or in the case of Amazon, the distributor who seems less interested in profit than in readerly interactions is able to purport to be a cultural authority and ensure more profits, confirming that artistic or literary works are not included on its website for their potential as lucrative commodities. As a book seller, Amazon is the intermediary between the artist and the consumer. The Amazon-sanctioned readers' book reviews and recommendations function to stand by the authors as evidence of their skills and artistry. By regulating the relationships between producers and readers, the literary work is protected from the commodity status of mass-produced objects. In addition, consumers of high cultural products (art and literature) do not want to be passive consumers. The consumer of high culture receives cultural products and does not consume them as the masses do with industry-produced commodities. As the products Amazon markets are both useful and aesthetic, their consumption must be constructed as high cultural "reception" with the moment of exchange subsumed to the aesthetic experience. The experience of literary culture in cyberspace is reminiscent of the economic "autonomy" of museums and galleries, with the consumer or receiver making aesthetic decisions with the economic function residing in the margins. As a cultural intermediary, Amazon produces belief in literary works and in the ability of its readers to appropriately consume them. On the other hand, to make their goods accessible, Amazon provides its customers with a very intimate relationship to the cultural production of literary works. Consumption through internet has a special ability to achieve "the apparent contradictory interests of sustaining the prestige and cultural capital of these enclaves, while at the same time popularizing and making them more accessible to wider audiences" (Featherstone 19). Rebecca Saunders, author of Business the Amazon.com Way, views "customer-centricity," a haling of the reader, as the center of Amazon's customer loyalty. The quote is rather extensive, yet it reveals the way in which Amazon has created an environment of high culture reception, or "productive consumption," through its consumer-driven website: So far, visitors to Amazon have been given the chance to help finish a chapter of a book by author John Updike, or help Sue Grafton name her next book... If you had a secret desire to write your own comic strip, you could help write the first Doonesbury comic strip created online... In the Amazon.com Kids section, youngsters were given the opportunity to complete one of two poems from celebrated children's poet Jack Prelutsky in the "Be a Poet" contest. Amazon.com set aside room on its site for Francis Ford Coppola's literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, where the works of today's best short-story writers are presented. And in Amazon's "Street Lawyer" contest a lucky visitor to the site won $25,000 or tuition for one year at a law school, and all John Grisham fans won an advanced peek at the first chapter of his new novel, The Street Lawyer. All of this makes for Amazon's loyal following. (Saunders 117-118) With this type of interaction available, the seeker of high culture is able to produce as she consumes, creating an experience not limited to the exchange of money; rather, she is taking part in the production of art and culture--writing with an author, reading a cutting edge literary magazine. Amazon enables its readers to make educated decisions and seemingly participate in this production through extensive reviews, ratings, and personalized interactions. The consumer is given the power traditionally restricted to individuals and institutions which embody cultural capital. Not only are visitors encouraged to "be the first to review [a] book," they are even invited to rate the reviews in order to asses their quality. This creates an accessible environment of cultural production and critical thinking, constructing a type of empowered, educated, and critical reader/customer. The moment of monetary exchange on Amazon is periphery to the customers' visit. Once you have made a decision to buy, your payment and shipping information is confirmed within seconds, with a few clicks of the mouse. Like the sphere of high culture, which prides itself on its independence from the economy in places such as galleries and museums, Amazon allows readers to discuss and evaluate cultural products. Similarly, the exchange of money is marginalized. In fact many of the resources on Amazon cost nothing: "One of Amazon's most important services is to provide information about books free of charge in the form of reviews, customer feedback, and discussion (Westland 564). Many internet companies today acknowledge that they are not experiencing immediate profits but are holding out for the long haul. In this regard, Amazon is unique. Its immense success has put pressure on bookstore chains to create online identities for fear of losing customers to Amazon competition. (Barnes and Noble has recently entered cyberspace for this reason.) Unlike companies on land, Amazon is not restricted by geography or time. Customers and visitors from all over the world converge in one location to purchase and/or browse any time or day or night. In cyberspace, anonymity and physical distance is an asset for interaction and conversation, and individuals are empowered to chat and provide recommendations that might not be possible in person. Internet activity and its ability to create a productive consumer of symbolic goods allows Amazon to beat land bookstores competitors and online businesses selling goods which don't encourage productive activity on the part of the consumer. As its "consumer-centricity" attests, the Amazon does not construct its readers as members of an uncontrollable, pleasure-seeking "mob" but as intelligent and empowered receiver of cultural products whose needs and desires can be fulfilled with precision through the right interactive online strategies. Any lack of knowledge or inability to "receive" art can be reversed or ameliorated by the Amazon's excessive information and resources. "Amazon.com provides information for those who can't remember a book or video title or are looking for a sound but don't know exactly what they want" (Saunders 113). Every individual as a reader and a producer, and there is no fear of a reading public which consumes without self-reflection. Amazon provides so many consumption tools that it is practically impossible to make an uneducated choice. There is something for everyone on its site. Perhaps the nineteenth-century discourse has shifted from withholding books from incompetent readers to the capitalist strategy of providing them with so much information they cannot possibly make a mistake. Not only has Amazon broken from this history, it allows the consumer to be a secondary cultural intermediary and to produce the literary works in the sense of creating belief in their symbolic value. Yet there is one way in which Amazon's construction of its readers has not changed since the nineteenth-century. In the cold and anonymous environment of the internet interface, Amazon uses this technology to construct individualized readers. As one approaches the site, there is immediately a range of personalized services available. Members are greeted by name and presented with book recommendations based on prior purchases. "Visitors to Amazon.com can sign up for personal notification services to stay up-to-date on books for their favorite authors, or receive reviews of exceptional books... in categories that interest them" (Saunders 112). From email updates of new releases to the formation of reading communities and chat groups based on purchasing history, Amazon has expanded the shopping experience from browsing to catering to individual consumers with specific needs who know what they want. One analyst explains, "Most of [Amazon's resources] comes from its customers, who write reviews on books for Amazon. The site is heavily linked, with its own internal search engine to suggest other books by the same author, related titles, and so forth. These services contribute to Amazon.com's customer loyalty" (Westland 564). On this website, the customers/readers are in charge, and economics stages a disappearing act. Amazon's "customer-centricity" is remarkably similar to the rhetoric of address posited by Garrett Stewart in his study of nineteenth-century British fiction. In Dear Reader, Stewart found that authors, using the singular "reader" instead of the plural form of the word and other tactics, betrayed their conception of their relationship to their readers as an intimate and personalized one. The ideological goal of this approach is to promote the notion of a collaboration between readers and writers, the idea that they work together to create a democratic experience of the text. However, Stewart unpacks this myth and concludes that "collaborative readers--either scripting their half of the book or honoring their share of the interpretive bargain--are themselves made, written, constructed by the text in its own likeness, in other words figured in: both imaged and so accounted for" (395). The "dear reader" strategy is a tool to increase the reader's investment in and participation with the literary work, yet the text has already written limits of this interaction. Given the similarities between Amazon and the fiction addressed in Dear Reader, Stewart's conclusion that the personalized rhetoric of address had the motive of controlling reader response raises doubt about the sincerity of Amazon's haling of the consumer/reader as a cultural producer, or simply a productive, enlightened reader. Bezos, Amazon CEO, admits that he chose the internet for his business venture for its ability to "reshape companies, create communities, [and] eliminate geography" (Westland 3; emphasis added). To what degree do Amazon readers create their own communities, or does Amazon's "interactivity" create the experiences instead? The online marketing industry, of which Amazon is a part, is actually aware of the way in which interactivity can be manipulated to create an illusion of productive consumers. Jim Sterne, an expert in this field, advises internet businesses that the illusion of interactivity is the key to success, as it provides the "perception of value": On the internet... the central mechanism to improve the impression of value is interaction. Interaction means convincing users they are getting information instead of it being given to them. It means users feel they are actively pulling instead of being passively pushed at. To do this, you need to make them work for it. Delivering all the information they want just when they want it diminishes its value. There is a fine balance between effort and reward that will make a major difference in the perceived value of your Web site. Make it too easy, and the impression is given that it's not that important. Make it too hard, and the impression given is that it's not worth the effort.(Sterne 114; emphasis added) Sterne advocates the inclusion of the active deception of customers in a successful business plan. Rather than ostensibly providing information, the online shopper must feel that she is performing her own research and is in control of her findings. Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein argue that all digital technology is "working on the basis of the illusion of enhanced interactivity" (7). The work that is involved in this process increases the symbolic value of the product in the same way that the "work" of a cultural intermediary creates aesthetic value. At this time in history, as Fiske asserted above, consumers are constructed as actually producing the meanings of the objects they consume. However, Sterne's discourse problematizes the conflation of consumption and production by exposing that the owners of the means of production actively conceive of their customers as illusory producers. This has even more importance for the selling of cultural products. It is important for the customer to believe that she is having an experience outside of the moment of commodity exchange. Sterne agrees and encourages companies to create the feeling that "A Web site isn't something people read, it's something they do" (113). (He defines reading as passive consumption.) If Amazon could make a similar comment on its own strategies, it would consist of the following: "Our Web site isn't a place people come to buy; it's a place where they come to read and take part in cultural production." Sterne also encourages internet companies to extract information from consumers through internet interactivity. "On-line, interactive communication with your customers and prospects allows more direct feedback than ever. Each phase of product development, positioning, and promotion can include the most intelligent, experienced, and expert resource on earth--your customers. They become part of your team" (Sterne 53; emphasis added). For Amazon, interactivity is a tool to gain demographics from their visitors about consumer groups and to make them for the company. Readers and every move they make online are a resource for the company to chart the values of different consumer groups and in turn make purchasing recommendations and "individualize" others' experiences. The empowerment of the consumer through interactivity a means to create a database of information. While the consumer communicates online, it is within the limits set forth by Amazon, limits which are restricted to the acquisition of lucrative information. Like the "trope of the invoked 'dear reader'" in Stewart's study, Amazon "fabricates an entirely one-sided conversation; however dear or gently predisposed, the reader can never talk back" (13). Interaction is limited to the rules and restrictions set forth by the creator of the text. Like the nineteenth-century fiction's desire to influence reader response, Amazon hopes to manipulate consumer decisions and loyalty, to unknowingly "make them part of its team." The invisibility of this reality is a necessity since, as Bourdieu reminds us, "[t]hese practices... can only work by pretending not to be doing what they are doing" (74). In his theories on symbolic production and the role of intermediaries, Bourdieu also acknowledges that the process includes "combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and recognizing the work of art as such..." (37; my italics). Not only do cultural mediators "recognize" the cultural capital in symbolic goods, they must also enable the consumers to recognize their aesthetic value as well. Without this, there is no guarantee that the receivers of the products will comply with their decisions. Amazon must "guide buyers'... choices by their writings or advice... and by their verdicts, which, though offered as purely aesthetic, entail significant economic effects..." (Bourdieu 78). Yet the consumers also embody their own varying amounts of cultural capital. In his critique of contemporary conceptions of aesthetic value, John Guillory's example of the uproar over Robert Mapplethorpe's 1990 supposedly pornographic photography exhibition in Cincinnati illustrates the way in which a work of art's value is not viewed uniformly by all individuals as a result of the unequal distribution of cultural capital. He reports that one juror at the Cincinnati trial stated, "These people are in a different class. Evidently they get some type of satisfaction look at it [art]. I don't understand art work. That stuff never interested me" (280). Guillory explains, "when aesthetic artifacts are certified as 'works of art,' they become the bearers of cultural capital, and as such are unequally distributed..." (281). Within capitalist society which does not equally distribute any form of capital, it is not enough for Amazon, as a cultural intermediary, to "instill" cultural capital in its products; rather, they must enable their consumers to recognize aesthetic value as well, or Amazon must cater its individualized sites to these different consumers. Unbeknownst to readers, it is their responsibility to supply the different values of various consumer groups. Every interaction, from reviews to ratings to writing the last chapter of an author's book, is the use of tools Amazon hopes will validate different valuing communities and make consumption patterns traceable. Through the personalization of its website and recommendations based on made possible by other readers' purchasing history, Amazon caters to the diversity of its audience. Rather than purporting a universal aesthetic value, it modifies itself for each reader. This data supplied by readers through "interaction" is used by Amazon to make the website experience as inclusive as possible. The proliferation of information and services on Amazon functions to not only produce literature, in the sense to which Bourdieu speaks, but also produce the notion of "productive" readers, as opposed to the nineteenth-century rhetoric of toxicity of the contaminated readers. Yet Amazon returns to the 1800s' ideology of hailing the reader when it utilizes the internet to involve the reader in the illusory production of the symbolic goods. This process is refigured as a means to liberate the reader from the moment of exchange in the field of cultural production. Ultimately, however, Amazon retains its rights as the cultural intermediary between readers and literature and uses the readers' belief in interactivity as a guise to collect surplus capital. The reader/consumer is a necessary component of this exchange but only in the sense that it is the object of a very careful delegation of control and extraction of information through the myth of interactivity. In conclusion, I would like to close my argument with a statement by Garrett Stewart, replacing the nineteenth-century conscripted reader with the "productive" consumer/reader of Amazon.com : "the conscribed reader [is] both the fixture of novel reading and its figment, a symbiotic shadow, a gothic adjunct, truly the ghost in the machine" (398). Works Cited Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1957. Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture & Postmodernism. London: SAGE Publications, 1991. Fiske, John. Reading the Popular. London: Routledge, 1989. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." in Dialectics of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1997. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Kroker, Arthur, and Michael A. Weinstein. Data Trash: the theory of the virtual class. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. Saunders, Rebecca. Business the Amazon.com Way: Secrets of the World's Most Astonishing Web Business. Dover, NH: Capstone, 1999. Sterne, Jim. World Wide Web Marketing: Integrating the Internet into Your Marketing Strategy. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1995. Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. Westland, J. Christopher, and Theodore H.K. Clark. Global Electronic Commerce: Theory and Case Studies.Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. |