This article was downloaded by: [The University Of Melbourne Libraries] On: 09 April 2014, At: 12:13 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Visual Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvst20 Crafted assemblage: young women’s ‘lifestyle’ blogs, consumerism and citizenship in Singapore Jolynna Sinanan, Connor Graham & Kua Zhong Jie Published online: 07 Apr 2014. To cite this article: Jolynna Sinanan, Connor Graham & Kua Zhong Jie (2014) Crafted assemblage: young women’s ‘lifestyle’ blogs, consumerism and citizenship in Singapore, Visual Studies, 29:2, 201-213, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2014.887273 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.887273 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
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This article was downloaded by: [The University Of Melbourne Libraries]On: 09 April 2014, At: 12:13Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: MortimerHouse, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Visual StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvst20
Crafted assemblage: young women’s ‘lifestyle’ blogs,consumerism and citizenship in SingaporeJolynna Sinanan, Connor Graham & Kua Zhong JiePublished online: 07 Apr 2014.
To cite this article: Jolynna Sinanan, Connor Graham & Kua Zhong Jie (2014) Crafted assemblage: youngwomen’s ‘lifestyle’ blogs, consumerism and citizenship in Singapore, Visual Studies, 29:2, 201-213, DOI:10.1080/1472586X.2014.887273
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.887273
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose ofthe Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be reliedupon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shallnot be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and otherliabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Crafted assemblage: young women’s ‘lifestyle’ blogs,consumerism and citizenship in Singapore
JOLYNNA SINANAN, CONNOR GRAHAM and KUA ZHONG JIE
Blogs categorised in the genres of fashion and lifestyle areoften overlooked in discussions of blogging, politics andcitizenship. This article examines lifestyle blogs with richmedia content, authored by young Singaporean women.It argues through a content analysis and an analysis ofthe blogs’ aesthetic as assemblage that there is asignificant relationship between women’s consumerism inSingapore and expressions of citizenship. These blogs havea crafted aesthetic that is both parochial (e.g. throughtheir appeal to regional popular culture) and global (e.g.through their focus on particular globally circulatedconsumer products). As material-supporting inquiry, theyalso provide a means of examining these young women’sviews on privacy and consumption, as well as theiraspirations. The article concludes by suggesting that toeffectively capitalise on such blogs as a means ofunderstanding social life and ‘everyday politics’, we needto appreciate them not only as being culturally embeddedbut also as having a particular cultural aesthetic that iscreated by how bloggers craft and assemble their identitiesand narratives online.
When examining the blogs of young Singaporeanwomen, certain similarities become clear. Moststriking is the sense of a common aesthetic present inthe blogs and how this common aesthetic emerges onboth the level of self-presentation and the mundane:the everyday detail of consumption and self-beautification. This emphasis on consumption andself-beautification within blogs authored bySingaporean women is the starting point of ourinquiry. While past work on blogs has focused ondeveloping a typology of blogs (Herring et al. 2004;Krishnamurthy 2002) based on content and notions ofgenre and narrative, we begin our inquiry byconsidering blogs as ethnographic resources andeveryday art objects, with a focus on the particularaesthetic of who and what they depict and theirparticular visual form and compositionality.
Saito draws on the ritual of the Japanese tea ceremony toillustrate her argument that aesthetics is not separatedfrom the routines of everyday life, but is instead deeplyembedded in them, describing it as ‘an art form whichconsists of the most mundane and practical activity thatwe all engage in everyday – drinking tea and eating asnack’ (Saito 2008, 34). With respect to blogging, thissense of the aesthetic is also mundane, yet, it is alsotelling concerning the everyday preoccupations andaspirations of the young, specifically young women, inSingapore. Similar to the Japanese tea ceremony, weargue what is absent from these blogs is as important aswhat is present.
What we can make of these blogs as visual and culturalresources, given their complimentary yet contrasting,incomplete, fragmentary and mundane nature, ispursued through a visual analysis of carefully selectedblogs and some discussion of Singapore andSingaporean society. First, we contextualise the blogs weexamined as fashion or lifestyle blogs within the widerdiscussion of blogs authored by young women asexamples of ‘everyday politics’. We emphasise how blogsare an ‘assemblage’; that is, carefully selected aspects areput on display by bloggers, yet what is not on display isoften as informative as what is included. We then have abrief discussion of the context of contemporarySingapore and how consumerism and shopping culturerepresent modes of constructing a public self. Third, wepresent a content analysis of recent posts by Singaporeanbloggers ‘Xiaxue’, ‘QiuQiu’ and ‘Dawn Yang’ to illustratethat it is precisely what they show, and the frequencywith which certain images appear (e.g. productdescriptions, food, clothing, travel destinations) thatreflects everyday preoccupations and concerns of youngfemale consumers.
Through this examination, what emerges is an insightinto the intersection between blogs, female consumerism
Jolynna Sinanan is a postdoctoral fellow in anthropology at University College London. Her current research is with the Global Social Media Impact Study,funded by the European Research Council. She has recently co-authored the forthcoming book ‘Webcam’ with Professor Daniel Miller, which is the first in-depthstudy on the various uses of webcams, drawing on fieldwork in Trinidad and the United Kingdom.Connor Graham is a director and fellow at Tembusu College at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also a research fellow in the Science,Technology and Society Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute at NUS. His research centres on living and dying in the age of the Internet.Kua Zhong Jie is an undergraduate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where she is pursuing an honoursdegree in psychology. She is also an alumnus of Tembusu College at NUS. She has worked on several research projects centred on visual culture.
and expressions of citizenship, where aspiring to alifestyle characterised by wealth, thrifty and informedconsumption and leisure is encouraged. As examples ofauto-ethnography, for these young women, the verycreation of their identity is enabled by how they workwithin and beyond the constraints of their blogs andtheir blog platforms.
BLOGS AS ASSEMBLAGE
Far from being ‘text online’ today, blogs are a collectionof different media (e.g. text, images, videos and voicerecordings) through which a personality is crafted andcommunicated. Beyond diary keeping, blogging is apeculiar form of personal document, a ‘digital narrative’that unfolds (Graham, Rouncefield, and Satchell 2010).In the recent scholarship on blogs, some authors payparticular attention to the presentation of self aspersonalised and self-referential (Papacharissi 2007) anddraw on Goffman’s explanation of performance and thefront and back stage to examine the visual constructionof the public self (Bortree 2005; Marwick and boyd 2011;Paechter 2013). Paechter argues that the affordances ofblogs allows individuals to take from what would beconsidered ‘back stage’ events and bring them into thespaces of front stage performance (2013, 14). Marwickand boyd argue that celebrities do this most effectivelyon Twitter, where they give the appearance of allowing‘back stage’ access to followers to create a sense ofintimacy between participant and follower (2011, 139).Other studies employ Giddens’ theorisation of identityin late modernity as a reflexive project of the self toexplore how bloggers negotiate the boundary betweenpublic and private in the narratives they construct ofthemselves (Livingstone 2008; McCullagh 2008). Inthese studies, blogs are examined as presenting anarrative, and bloggers are considered performers. Weargue that, through an examination of their form, theparticular blogs we analysed are assembled: whatbloggers choose to show to a mass audience, as well aswhat they choose not to, is significant.
This approach furthers conclusions from a study ofblogging in conjunction with attempts to quit smoking.This study concluded:
It seems clear from the blogs – and also fromany cursory study of the history of cigaretteadvertising or anti-smoking campaigns – thatcertain sensuous qualities of cigarettes, theirshape, texture and smell, are aestheticallyimportant or significant. Perhaps one impact ofthe blog on the bloggers themselves is to revealwhat is obvious but otherwise unnoticed, whatis effectively hidden in plain sight: that, for
example, a pile of cigarette butts in an ashtraylooks unpleasant. (Graham, Rouncefield, andSatchell 2009, 278)
Informants in this study were making certain thingsvisible to themselves through blogging, and the articleposits the notion of ‘personal translucence’ to describethis, along with three associated therapeutic aspects:visibility of change, awareness of actions andlongitudinal accountability. Through this process ofmaking things visible through blogs and blogging, theinformants were connecting to and coming to termswith themselves.
In the discussion of the three blogs that follow, weexamine the intersection between blogs as assemblage,consumption in Singapore and expressions ofcitizenship. A search for ‘bloggers in Singapore’immediately leads to a surprising raft of blogs. The blogswe analyse here, while visually distinct and reflecting theonline diary genre of blogs, have some consistentelements. They focus on consumption by displaying aseries of products assembled using a series of advertisinggenres (e.g. product demonstration), they project animage of wealth and leisure, and notably, they arecreated by young women. The remarkably consistentappearance of these factors has led us to argue that theseblogs have a distinct aesthetic. We are particularlyinterested in the ‘craft’ that these blogs represent becausethey are carefully produced using high-quality digitalphotographs, backgrounds, multiple columns, imagesand occasional embedded video.
Certain genres of blogs (fashion, lifestyle, online diaries,DIY [do-it-yourself]) are often neglected in studies ofthe relationship between blogs and citizenship, ascitizenship and blogging are mostly conceptualised inthe forms of journalism, political and news commentaryand activism (Bell 2007; Bruns 2006). Yet, authors suchas Lövheim (2011), Harris (2008) and Chittenden (2010)call for the need to examine girls’ and women’s blogswithin the context of uses of public spaces and thenature of public expression (Harris 2008, 489). Lövheimemphasises how popular blogs by young Swedishwomen show how they negotiate individualised andcommercialised ideals of femininity, such as autonomy,self-development and career, and normalised ideals offemininity, such as moderation, care and empathy(2011). Similar to Graham, Rouncefield, and Satchell’sstudy of smokers’ realising another ‘self’ throughblogging, Chittenden suggests that how teenage girls‘conceptualise their online visual representation mayoffer a resource for how they come to realise their offlineidentity’ (2010, 505). Drawing on Warner’s (2002)notion of counter-publics, Harris argues that young
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women ‘write themselves into being’ online, becausethey have little access to public expression and so onlineparticipation is based on a desire to engage publically(2008, 489). She further argues that the project ofmaking a publically visible self within ‘the newdiscourses of femininity for young women that linksuccess to image, style and visible work on oneself’ is aform of contemporary citizenship (2008, 490).
In framing blogging as a form of public participationand citizenship, we refute the criticisms that blogs areself-involved, self-serving and trivial (Myers 2010;Papacharissi, 2007) because what bloggers choose toshow to an audience, as well as what they choose not to,is significant, particularly in the blogs we analysed in thecontexts of consumption and citizenship in Singapore.These young women’s blogs are certainly an example of‘putting the self “on view”’ (Graham, Rouncefield, andSatchell 2009, 268), but we argue, in contrast to Graham,Rouncefield, and Satchell (2009) study of smokers, this isless in a self-reflexive fashion but more so that the publicin Singapore may view and share their everydayconsumption. The bloggers also reap specific benefits,both tangible in the form of income and less tangible inthe form of acquired celebrity. We selected blogs byyoung Singaporean women as examples of blogging asparticipation and engaging in public space because theyalso constitute an ‘everyday politics’ (Harris 2008, 493).We suggest that the blogs we examined are illustrative ofLewis and Martin (2010) and Allison’s (2000) notions ofcitizenship, where the authors espouse and presentaspiration to a particular lifestyle. In making thisargument, we suggest that the aesthetic of these blogs isas telling as the content in marking them out as a meansof public of engagement in the context of the Singaporethe city-state.
SINGAPORE
Singapore has one of the wealthiest populations in theworld per capita, the country being ranked as having oneof the highest savings rates and purchasing power parity(Coclanis 2009a; Huff 1994).1 Young Singaporeans arehigh spenders relatively, on food, clothes, electronics andentertainment, yet as Coclanis observes, spendingpatterns vary considerably, depending on income groupand age. This is borne out by a close examination of theHousehold Expenditure Survey published by theSingapore Government for 2007–2008. In this survey,young Singaporeans ranked highly among allSingaporean spenders in terms of percentage of incomespent on certain categories. Specifically, under 25s and25–29s spent a higher percentage of their totalexpenditure on food serving services (e.g. hawker
centres, food courts, canteens and food kiosks) (17.1%and 16.4% compared with 13.5%), communication(6.9% and 5.8% compared with 4.8%), clothing andfootwear (4.2% and 4.3% compared with 3.3%), personalcare (3.5% and 3.1% compared with 2.5%) and alcoholicbeverages and tobacco (1.8% and 1.2% compared with1.1%) than any other age bracket. Thus, it seems thereare quite distinct spending habits among the young inSingapore.
Coclanis (2009b, 463) also notes that for some, especiallyyounger, Singaporeans’ spending on particular items isshaped by economic circumstances, specifically because‘two big ticket items, homes and cars, are largely off thetable as it were’. He suggests that there is less of aconcern with expenditure on homes and cars among theyoung, due to the price of homes in an unregulated realestate market and heavy taxes on car ownership. Hecontinues to explain the impact of this on some youngSingaporeans’ consumer behaviour:
with these two costly consumption itemslargely unattainable, many young Singaporeanscan afford fancy cell phones, text withimpunity, buy expensive threads, flip for twolattes a day at one or another of Singapore’subiquitous Starbucks franchises, afford highcover charges and expensive drinks at trendyclubs, and still save a good bit of money. (463)
With the knowledge that cell phone services arerelatively inexpensive and the possibility of thecompulsory superannuation scheme assisting with homeownership such spending patterns seem even moreexplicable.2
In addition to establishing trends in spending amongstyoung adults, mall and shopping culture is highly visiblein Singapore. The most frequented and popularshopping streets, such as Orchard Road and BugisStreet along with the several multi-levelled shoppingcomplexes, are also public leisure spaces. Shieldsdescribes the mall as ‘social community and surrogatecity square’; they are spaces for leisure, consumption andinteraction and communication (1994, 5). Shopping andconsumption for adornment in particular is extendingthe body in space, where ‘expression and groupsolidarity become not merely the means to a lifestyle, butthe enactment of a lifestyle’ (Shields 1994, 15). Chuaargues that consumerism in Singapore is not the ‘simpleappropriation of utilities’ but ‘consumption of signs andimages’ (Chua 2003, 21). Chua’s emphasis onconsumerism as a social phenomenon reiterates the viewthat shopping is also the acquisition of identity, where
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the self is actualised through consumption (Ferguson1994, 27; Shields 1994, 15).
La Ferle and Chan (2008, 202) found the presence ofmaterialistic values among 190 young Singaporeans andbetween the ages of 13 and 18.3 Yet they also found thisage group was not particularly driven by materialism.What these scholars note with regard to celebrities ismuch more important for the study described here:
celebrities are idolized by young people becausecelebrities are considered more attractive thanordinary individuals. They are carefullypackaged by the media through makeup,photo-editing, glamorous clothing, flatteringlighting and cosmetic surgery. Celebrities areextremely wealthy, and demonstrate theirwealth through expensive possessions such asjewelry, and properties. (Chan and Zhang2007, 140)
Celebrity and glamour cultures are distinctly modernphenomena. Gundle describes glamour as ‘contained inthe promise of a mobile and commercial society; anyonecan be transformed into a better, more attractive andwealthier version of themselves’ (2008, 7). In hisexamination of the history of glamour, Gundle alsoargues that glamorous people belonged to the world ofrepresentation. Here, we dovetail towards our analysis ofblogs, where the three female bloggers we chose all makea living from their blogs. Through rich media contentand crafting their blogs as an assemblage with aparticular aesthetic, they are at once realising their owncelebrity, as well as keeping celebrity a work in process,through informing, entertaining and advertising.
Lewis (2011) suggests that Singapore is a perspicacioussetting to examine visual media and culture because the‘unique combination of liberalized economic values,alongside elements of cultural traditionalism andauthoritarian statehood, make it a particularlyinteresting site to examine questions of global media-cultural flows’ (2011, 22). Lewis herself explores lifestyletelevision shows within the context of Singapore’s mediaecology and their relationship to wider global trends inlifestyle television. She argues that, given Singapore’srecent economic and social history, a transformed typeof citizenship has emerged, with the shift from‘collective’ and ‘Asian’ values that gave growth to thenational economy to a more neoliberal, individualisticand entrepreneurial sentiment. She argues that thenegotiation that this has required has been played out inrealms such as popular lifestyle media (Lewis 2011;Lewis and Martin 2010).
In the context of such claims, we examine a selection ofblogs that at once evoke habits and aspirations that aregrounded in and originate from beyond national bordersand a very local sense of identity in the city-state andregional hub. We make these initial observations not togive an adjudicatory or binary view of consumer cultureas practice but to set the initial context for a visualreading of the blogs.
BLOGGING SINGAPOREAN CONSUMPTION
In what follows, we will analyse three blogs categorisedas ‘Singaporean’: the bloggers identified themselves asSingaporean, the bloggers were identified bySingaporeans as Singaporean and bloggers frequentlyreferred to Singapore (e.g. through places, products andso on). All the bloggers projected a distinct image andlive in Singapore. As already noted, by focusing on‘Singaporean’ blogs, we aim to explore the way youngSingaporean women craft their blogs in relation to thewider context of contemporary Singapore.
We initially identified nine blogs for analysis. Fromthese, we then selected the three bloggers who had beenblogging the longest, had the highest traffic and who hadbecome commercially successful from their blogs asexamples of ‘micro-celebrities’ (Marwick and boyd2011).4 These bloggers were ‘Xiaxue’ (http://xiaxue.blogspot.sg) or Wendy Cheng Yan Yan, ‘Dawn Yang’(http://www.dawnyang.com) and ‘QiuQiu’ (http://bongqiuqiu.blogspot.sg) or Hong Qiu Ting. Neither‘Dawn Yang’ nor ‘QiuQiu’ revealed on their blogs if theydeployed pseudonyms, but ‘QiuQiu’ reveals her namethrough Twitter. As two of this article’s authors reside inSingapore and the other is a regular visitor, informaldiscussions between the authors and youngSingaporeans revealed that the three blogs we chose toanalyse were amongst the best known. We also selectedthe blogs that had rich media content, had a distinctdesign, for example, through the deployment ofbackground, images and the integration of other services(e.g. Facebook). Several of the blogs altered their overallaesthetic or the ‘look and feel’ during the period we wereanalysing them.
‘Xiaxue’, ‘Dawn Yang’ and ‘QiuQiu’ have been bloggingbetween 4 and 9 years and varied in the amount ofbiographical information they revealed about themselveson their blogs. ‘Xiaxue’ described how she started herblog in December 2003 and was 28 years old at the timeof the analysis. She was the most established blogger ofthose analysed. She describes how she blogs ‘full-time fora living and have been doing so since 2005’, noting how‘Blogging is also why I am sorta famous’.5 ‘Dawn Yang’
(aka ClapBangKiss) started her blog in July 2004 anddescribes herself as ‘Blogger extraordinaire. Model andEvents host. Closet Nerd/Geek’. ‘QiuQiu’ started herblog in October 2008 and describes herself as ‘A verytypical lady who LOVES to eat, sleep, shop and laugh’.Of the three bloggers ‘Xiaxue’ is the most open about theincome she receives through blogging. On her blog, shenotes how a blog advertorial costs ‘$3,500 and up’.
When we approached these blogs, we paid attention totheir visual form, overall aesthetic and visual content. Inparticular, we focused on the visual structure of the blogs,the genre and the photographs deployed, referring to thesurrounding text in the process. Central to our approachwas describing what the photographs depicted, how theywere situated in the blog and what style and genre theyappealed to. In the interests of determining this, weiteratively generated a series of categories that describedthe blogs’ content and regularly compared the blogs toother visual materials in terms of compositionality, genrein particular. We deployed the categories to help establishthe approximate frequency of different kinds of visualcontent through a simple, coarse count of photographs:each photograph was categorised under a maximum ofthree (sub)categories. This was less to absolutely quantifywhat was depicted in the blogs’ photographs than to get ageneral feel for the emphasis of each of the blogs in termsof the content. The visual styles identified as resonatingacross all the blogs also allowed us make final judgementsabout particular blogs’ distinct visual style. The analysisfocused on 3 months of postings: between October andDecember 2012 (inclusive).
Although there are often constraints imposed by servicesthat host blogs (e.g. Google) and blogging software (e.g.Wordpress) that largely dictate their form, there isevidence enough to support that each of these blogs is,quite deliberately, crafted. ‘Xiaxue’ and ‘QiuQiu’deployed Blogger (www.blogger.com) to host their blogs
while ‘Dawn Yang’ registered her own domain name(www.dawnyang.com). ‘Xiaxue’ and ‘QiuQiu’ deployedthe country identifier for Singapore in their URI while‘Dawn Yang’ did not. Stylesheets are extensivelydeployed on the blogs of ‘Xiaxue’ and ‘QiuQiu’. ‘DawnYang’s’ blog deploys metadata that marks her site out asbelonging to her. ‘QiuQiu’s’ blog refers to a blogtemplate available from another website. Although thegeneral structure these blogs deploy is quite a standardone that, in some cases, is automatically providedthrough a service or blogging software, the threebloggers have clearly appropriated any structureprovided. As described below, they have achieved theirown aesthetic through the use of carefully crafted,photoshopped blog banner images and additionalimages in the sidebar of their blogs.
All three blogs had a similar visual structure and style,deploying a multi-column blog format, a large headercontaining a photograph of the blogger with their namein close proximity in highly stylised text (Figure 1). Eachblogger deployed at least a head and shouldersphotograph of themselves in this header, establishing anarrow personal distance between the blogger and theviewer. Faces were clearly visible in these photographsand heads slightly tilted, connecting their blog to theirphysical body and identity while marking out thephotographs as posed. In all of the blogs except for ‘DawnYang’s’, this was a single snapshot style photograph withthe blogger’s gaze directed towards the viewer.
All three blogs also contained a series of panels arrangedvertically in one of the blog columns. Notably, thesepanels housed advertisements, marking out these blogsas being commercial in nature. In the advertisement, thebloggers were connected to the products beingadvertised in at least one instance through beingdepicted in close physical proximity: ‘Xiaxue’ is wearingHoneyColour light brown contact lenses; ‘Dawn Yang’ is
FIGURE 1. The header section of the three blogs analysed: http://xiaxue.blogspot.sg; http://www.dawnyang.com; http://bongqiuqiu.blogspot.sg [Accessed 30January 2013].
holding a glass of Life Compact slimming tea; ‘QiuQiu’is depicted in a text advertisement for the ‘BudgetBarbie’ clicknetwork.tv online video network show. Allthree also had panels embedded in their blogsconnecting to social network services: three connected toFacebook and three to Twitter. Thus, these blogs are butone aspect of the young women’s online identity. Allthree had a navigation bar that supported the viewing ofpast posts. Two out of the three blogs used distinctive,graphical backgrounds in soft colours. All three blogsused two columns to structure content. This illustratesthat there is an identifiable common compositionalityacross these blogs. Yet each blog is also in itselfdistinctive.
‘QiuQiu’s’ blog was the most media intensive, having212 images and 4 videos embedded in the main columnof the blog for the 3 months analysed. ‘Dawn Yang’ was
the second most media intensive with 140 images and 5videos. ‘Xiaxue’s’ blog had 111 images and 4 videos. Forall bloggers, the most images were embedded in themonth of November: 90, 63 and 49 for ‘QiuQiu’, ‘DawnYang’ and ‘Xiaxue’, respectively. This density of imageryon these blogs is noteworthy and in contrast to otheranalyses of blogs, suggesting once again the presence of adistinct aesthetic. A recent analysis of 409 Chinese and98 German blogs found that only 4% of Chinese blogsand no German blogs were judged to ‘graphic-oriented’(Mandl 2009). We developed six broad categories todescribe these images: corporeality, placeness,commercialisation, consumption, dialogue and mediamashup. Corporeality refers to images that drawattention to body of the blogger or of others. Placenessrefers to images that communicate a sense of being in aparticular place. Commercialisation refers to imageswhose main purpose appears to be to generate income.
Blogger XX DY QQ
(sub-)category N % N % N %
Corporeality 71 26.2 87 23.4 148 25.4
Bodyself 19 7.0 25 6.7 33 5.7
Face self 23 8.5 9 2.4 54 9.3
Body group 1 0.4 19 5.1 24 4.1
Face group 3 1.1 0 0 13 2.2
Body other 8 3.0 34 9.1 22 3.8
Face other 17 6.3 0 0 2 0.3
Placeness 4 1.5 61 16.4 89 15.3
Place local 4 1.5 41 11 22 3.8
Place foreign 0 0 20 5.4 67 11.5
Commercialisation 91 33.6 73 19.6 133 22.9
Company brand 22 8.1 26 7 57 9.8
Product promotion 69 25.5 47 12.6 76 13.1
Consumption 92 33.6 134 36 198 34
Media mashup 9 3.3 15 4 10 1.7
Dialogue 7 2.6 2 0.5 4 0.7
TOTAL CATEGORIES 274 372 582
TOTAL IMAGES 111 140 212
TABLE 1. Table showing the frequency of image (sub-)categories(N) and the percentage of image (sub-)categories as a proportionof the total number of (sub-)categories (%) across the three blogsanalysed: ‘Xiaxue’ (XX), ‘Dawn Yang’ (DY) and ‘QiuQiu’ (QQ).
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Consumption refers to images depicting particularconsumer products. Dialogue refers to images that insome way addressed the people consuming the blogand/or the blogger. Media mashup refers to images thatcomprised or referred to other electronic and printmedia.
Table 1 summarises the content analysis (see fullanalysis in Appendix). The categories are not simply a‘count’ of images but aim to address five main questions:(1) What is the purpose of the image? (2) Who isinvolved in the image? (3) Where is being depicted inthe image? (4) What objects are being depicted in theimage? (5) What actions and events are being depictedin the image? In the table, body self and face self refer toimages whose main subject was judged to be the bodyand (part of the) face of the blogger, respectively. Bodygroup and face group refer to images in which the bodyand face of the blogger, respectively, were depicted withother people. Body other and face other refer to imagesin which the body and face of a person other than theblogger were judged to be the main subject. Place localand place foreign refer to photographs in which thecharacterisation of a particular place is important. Placelocal could include restaurants and shopping centresvisited in Singapore while place foreign could includeplaces visited on holiday or on a sponsored trip. Somephotographs were clearly commercial in nature, eitherexhibiting particular company brands or promotingparticular products. Certain photographs clearly depictedconsumption of celebrities, cosmetics, clothing oraccessories, events, food and/or drinks, media and/or
technology, toys and/or games, jewellery or animals.Other images mashed up media in some way throughembedding and/or referring to specific media such ascharts, email, Facebook, music, other site or printmaterial. Finally, some images were directed at creatinga dialogue with the blog(ger)’s audience in some waythrough describing personal criticism, articulating aresponse or describing a viewpoint.
The high frequency of the corporeality category for allthree blogs indicates that bodies are put on display in theblog photographs: both the bloggers’ own and those ofothers. This is noteworthy given that Herring et al.(2004), albeit before the era of mass digital photography,found that bloggers are not often graphically representedon their blogs. In their analysis of a random sample of203 blogs from 2003 they found that ‘only 17.5% displaygraphical representations of the author (includingphotographs) on the first page, and only 10.9% link tosuch representations elsewhere’ (Herring et al. 2004,5–6). In contrast, many of the images in each of thethree blogs analysed here contain the blogger herself:on her own or in a group. Of the images that have beencoded body self, face self and face group many are headand shoulders shots with the blogger looking directly atthe camera. This creates a sense of close personaldistance (Hall 1996) to form a kind of ‘pseudo-social’connection. Thus these blogs not only communicate astrong sense of the identity that is closely tied to thebloggers’ physical appearance – their faces and bodies inparticular – but they also seem to attempt to forge abond with the viewer. This is further achieved by them
FIGURE 2. ‘Dawn Yang’s’ appearance in an embedded image. Source: http://clapbangkiss.xanga.com/770239182/item/;image taken from http://issuu.com/purplesage/docs/december_winter_desserts. [Accessed 21 August 2013]
displaying photographs of themselves with friends andcelebrities in social situations, coded body group and facegroup: displaying these images is a form of deliberateself-disclosure that may help the viewer to feel they arepart of their ingroup.
The images of the bloggers themselves are often attachedto a brand or product, as indicated by the highfrequency of commercialisation category across all blogs;there is a strong connection between their consumptionand their embodiment. This couples their identity to theact of using and displaying clothes and accessories andcosmetics across all three blogs. For all three bloggersclothing and accessories feature quite prominently. For‘Dawn Yang’ and ‘QiuQiu’ this consumption categoryincludes events and celebrities. For ‘Xiaxue’ and ‘QiuQiu’this category predominantly describes the consumptionof cosmetics: this is the sub-category of consumptionwith the most photographs for each of these bloggers, 38and 76, respectively. For ‘Xiaxue’ consumption alsorefers to toys and games and for ‘QiuQiu’, consumptionrefers to toys and games as well as events.
Spending patterns of most Singaporeans somewhatmirror the frequency of these categories. Transport andcommunication, food and ‘recreation and others’6
account for 20.6%, 21.6% and 20.1% of Singaporeanspending, respectively, and only 3.3 % of mostSingaporeans’ spending is accounted for by ‘clothing andfootwear’ (Republic of Singapore, Ministry of Trade andIndustry, Department of Statistics HES 2007/08).However, as already noted expenditure on‘communication’, ‘clothing and footwear’, ‘food servingservices’, ‘personal care’ and ‘personal effects’ amongyoung Singaporeans is higher than that of all other agebrackets. This is, at least tentatively, borne out by ouranalysis of the blogs. Clothing and footwear, personalcare (e.g. beauty products), food serving services andcommunication – through mobile phones and screenshots of other services, namely Facebook, Twitter andemail – are all well represented.
However, absences from photographs are as notable aspresences. The category of spending accounting for thelargest single category of expenditure, housing (22.4%),is absent from our analysis, as are vehicles, the purchaseand operation of which account for 11.9% ofSingaporeans spending on average, but only 5.8% ofunder-29-year-old Singaporeans’ spending. Yet, in mostof the photographs there is no sense of home or carownership. This point reiterates the observations madeearlier that for young Singaporeans, homes and cars aremore difficult to acquire due to high taxes (Coclanis2009a). The background for many of the body self andface self images is ambiguous: it could be a bedroom or
living area or somewhere else entirely. Thusconsumption is not situated in the domestic space as acollective act; the context is not displayed, creating aform of commercial space that emerges through the blogitself.
One of the few exceptions to this is an embedded imageon ‘Dawn Yang’s’ blog alluding to her feature in a localonline gourmet magazine where she teaches readers howto bake her ‘favorite ultimate sinful dessert –Millionaire’s Shortbread’ (Figure 2). She is clearlysituated in the home, and the overall form of the imagefrom the way she positions her body to her facialexpression resembles popular images of the woman inthe home projected in 1950s North Americanadvertisements, appealing to specific gender roles.Notably, her choice of clothing is also a subtle productplacement as she is wearing her own brand of clothingfrom ‘Lexi Lyla’. Notably too, these images are of aperfected, if alluring, self. The polluting influences ofalcohol and tobacco, an area of expenditure whereyoung Singaporeans spend more than other age-groups,are entirely absent from the images.
For two of the bloggers, ‘Dawn Yang’ and ‘QiuQiu’,consumption is tied to a particular placeness, both inSingapore and in the region. ‘Dawn Yang’ blogs aboutattending a Halloween party, a 1980s music festival anda charity music recording session in Singapore as well asabout holidaying at a named luxury hotel in Bali.‘QiuQiu’ blogs about a fashion show at a new Japaneseclothes store and records her trip to Japan with ‘Xiaxue’and two other well-known Singaporean bloggers(‘Cheesie’ and ‘Audrey’ at http://cheeserland.com andhttp://fourfeetnine.com, respectively) booked through anamed Internet travel service, in exhaustive detail. Thiscontributes to a sense of these two bloggers being ‘close’to the reader socially; through their blogging about theseevents they reveal details about their friendship andbroader social networks.
Across all three blogs the compositionality of the blogsthemselves and the images is distinct. There is, in many ofthe photographs promoting beauty products, somerepetition, but in each of these photographs the pose ofthe blogger is distinct, almost like a film reel with framesmissing. The juxtaposition of the bloggers and theproducts also produces a quite distinct, commercialaesthetic. Across all three blogs the compositionality ofthe blogs themselves and the images is distinct. Theinfluence of Japan was visible in the blogs of ‘Xiaxue’ and‘QiuQiu’: famous Japanese are depicted and Japaneseproducts (e.g. false eyelashes and shampoo) regularlypromoted. ‘Xiaxue’ appeals to the gyaru image of largeeyes, dyed hair, coloured contact lenses, fake eye lashes
and decorated nails.7 ‘QiuQiu’ communicates more of akawaii or ‘cute’ image, often wearing soft, pastel coloursand performing the peace sign in 18 separatephotographs. The overall aesthetic of ‘Dawn Yang’s’ blogis more akin to ‘euro chic’ (DeJean 2007): white-, cream-and black-coloured clothes and low-cut dresses andbodices. There is a ‘fashion shoot’ aesthetic evident inboth ‘Dawn Yang’s’ and ‘QiuQiu’s’ blogs: half to full bodyphotographs, tilted heads, gazes directed at the viewer,glamorous clothes, distinctive setting in the backgroundwith text in large, serif font superimposed. Across allthese looks is a certain alluring femininity, a cleardeparture from the kind of sexualised images reported inthe MySpace pages of 2423 randomly sampledadolescents in 2006 (Patchin and Hinduja 2010).8
DISCUSSION
The overall impression across the blogs is they share adistinctive, if ‘mashed up’, and cosmopolitan-influencedaesthetic with high visual impact. This is not onlybecause of the highly varied colours and intense mediausage, but also because the blogs are deliberatelyassembled in how they describe their author’s lives.There is also a strong sense that this is a particularprojection of the author’s life – fleshed out but fake –
with a particular entrepreneurial motivation that couplestheir identity and their consumption closely. These blogsare a creative expression of consumption that politicallyengages with a particular lifestyle that speaks tocontemporary aspirations in Singapore. They portray aseries of young women engaged in enterprise, embodiedon their blogs and in their everyday lives. The bloggersare embodied in a very particular way: through theirconnection to material goods and consumption and, tosome extent, their friendship networks. They are alsoprofoundly instructional (Lewis and Martin 2010): theyare showing Singaporeans how and what to consumeand for what purpose, given Singapore’s recentlyacquired status as a highly developed nation. Full orhalf-body shots of clothing often show no more thanone visibly luxury branded item. Each item (e.g. handbagor sunglasses) acts as a statement piece, rather thandisplaying affluence or extravagance through numerousluxury brands worn simultaneously. Through the imagesconveyed under commercialisation and consumption,explicitly, audiences are directed towards products thatare more value for money, effective or simply ‘better’.Implicitly, as the bloggers fashion themselves as ‘micro-celebrities’, they embody better-informed consumerswho make good consumer choices as well as affluence,thus inspiring similar values in their audiences. It isprecisely this genre of blogging about everyday life
within a particular aesthetic that makes these blogs bothnotable as resources and influential as phenomena.
By focusing on the crafted, assembled nature of thepresentation within the blogs we looked at, we drawattention to their composition and so the overall visualas a whole. Saito’s discussions of cultural and everydayaesthetics is particularly useful in understanding this, asshe draws attention to not only the everyday, mundaneand ordinary but also how the everyday is ritualised andmade ‘special’ in what would otherwise be routineexperience. Saito gives the Japanese tea ceremony as anexample of aestheticising as well as ritualising aneveryday practice. There are no clear boundariesbetween the ceremony as ‘art’ and as practice, it needsan audience, it is transient and it is practical in that itresponds to a daily need of drinking tea (2010, 20). Shedescribes that the Japanese tea ceremony has artistic andaesthetic value, yet it defies the conventions of ‘Western’paradigmatic art; in itself, the ceremony celebratesimpermanence (2010, 21).
Similarly, Allison examines obento boxes and thepreparation that mothers put into them, making themartistically designed, precisely arranged and cute (2000).She suggests that no food is ‘just’ food in Japan, a keyelement is appearance, it is stylised and immense effortis made to make it visually attractive. While Allisonargues that obentos are representative of gendered stateideology, what she also highlights is how individuals,here mothers, interact with a daily practice such aslunch-making for their child is infused with cultural andstate values of good citizenship. The more time, effortand creativity the mother puts into the box, creating anaesthetic of transforming food into something that isbeyond its nutritional value, the better an example she isof good mothering and female citizenship.
In these examples, we see how eating and drinking, foodand beverages are part of everyday activity and socialand aestheticised ritual. Similarly, the way these youngwomen inhabit their blogs has a distinctive aestheticdimension. They reveal a perfected world of materialthings in which they are deeply embedded and a series ofaesthetic judgements about their everyday surroundings.This has import for, as Saito argues:
while appearing innocuous andinconsequential, everyday aesthetic judgmentsand preferences we make on a daily basis dohave surprisingly serious implications . . .everyday aesthetics is diverse and dynamic, asmore often than not it leads to some specificactions: cleaning, purchasing, repairing,discarding, and so on. (2010, 35)
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In this case, these judgements support not only aparticular kind of lifestyle and consumption but also astatement about gender roles, affluence and what it is tobe successful and famous.
Equally, a focus on the aesthetic quality (e.g. theircompositionality) of these blogs is deeply informativeconcerning their hybridised nature: in Lewis and Martin(2010, 333) terms ‘a mixture of local, global and regionalinfluences’. The display of these everyday rituals andjudgements also both ‘indigenise’ the products andproject a certain cosmopolitanism that is transnational(Chua 2003, 5). This is complex and is not a simplematter of a single nation’s influence on Singaporeanconsumer culture as Chua (2003) points out. There is asense that these blogs are performing an identity that isbeing negotiated. On one hand they display Japanese,American and European products, and on the other,none of these products are out of reach of youngSingaporeans. Similarly, for Lewis and Martin, realitytelevision programs in Singapore and Taiwan do notrepresent ‘an unfettered embrace of westernconsumerism’ but instead reconcile ‘the old’ and ‘thenew’ as a kind of ‘negotiation of . . . cultural values, oftransnational and local concerns that suggest that caremust be taken with assuming that the term “lifestyle” isstable or easily translatable in some universal senseacross cultural and national borders’ (2010, 334). Thus,and as the content analysis illustrates, although theappeal to lifestyle is clear, the kind of lifestyle beingappealed to is distinct and achievable for the middleclass: consuming particular things such as beautyproducts, clothes, regional holiday destinations and evenother people of a certain status.
There is also something of the sense of self-madecelebrity about how these bloggers present themselves,and thus a set of aspirations about living a certain lifethrough consumption and an endless, insatiable need, tobuy in order to be. Douglas and Isherwood (1979) andBourdieu (1984) have most notably emphasised howshopping is part of social meanings, where the self isactualised through consumption. Similar to theinfluential celebrity culture in China, these blogs, andthe photographs in particular, are ‘produced’ (e.g.through photoshopping) and exhibit certain aspirationsto consume and make that consumption visible (La Ferleand Chan 2008). They are also an example of whatBruns and Jacobs term ‘produsers’, a hybrid of producerand user (2006, 6–7). These blogs also appeal to a publicthat enjoys the spectacle of consumption, as they placeon display young women who are quite uninhibited andliberated in how they display aspects of their person,their lives and their consuming behaviour. There is a
clear focus on material culture and obvious productplacement in the blogs. Yet, on the other hand, what isabsent from these craftings?
An overt portrayal of the blogger situated in a familyand at home is almost entirely absent (although ‘Xiaxue’describes herself as married), as are the intense flexibilityand juggling of ‘tiny fragments of time’ that constituteautomobility (Urry 2000, 191–192). In her recent bookAfter Kinship, Carsten emphasises how modern kinshipis made and not given and how people invest atremendous amount of creative and emotional energyinto lived relationships (2010). The absence of family orfamily life in the blogs we discussed could also highlighthow young women politicise themselves by drawingattention to what they ‘make’ and ‘create’ of themselves,of their own accord.
Alcohol and cigarettes are also absent, a key category inthe expenditure of young Singaporeans as is the routine ofwork and family stresses. Yet friendship networks, andeven squabbles between bloggers and followers, on theother hand, are highly visible. There is a sense here thatthese blogs are, even in cross-referencing and feuding,convivial spaces that are both indigenous andcosmopolitan and are functioning in a similar way to howCoclanis (2009a, 462) describes malls in Singapore: ‘TheSingaporean mall likely serves some of the functions ofmalls in the West, that is, as gathering places, socialspaces, and even as somewhat debased Habermasianpublic spheres’. However, the bloggers have a particularidentity and status in such a space, marking them outfrom ‘third places’ (Oldenberg 1989). Like traders in themall, they are also displaying a certain entrepreneurialspirit that moves beyond mere consumption throughdeploying an identity that is both distinct and vague.They display and connect with a discourse of Singaporeanentrepreneurship through appeals to self-improvement,careful management (e.g. of appearance) and deliberate,careful investment. Although work seems conspicuouslyabsent from these spaces of leisure and consumption,perhaps it is subtly visible in how ‘lifestyle’ is capturedand displayed within a constructed aesthetic.
CONCLUSION
In discussing lifestyle media and its generic conventions,Lewis and Martin argue that the pattern that emergesreveals a concern with how individuals ‘reflexively shapeand optimise their personal lifestyles’ through regionalspecificities in content and form (2010, 320). Similar toour study, the conventions and aesthetics of manylifestyle television shows in particular are recognisablefrom a range of international influences (Lewis 2011),
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which are reflective of the global influences within thecosmopolitanism of Singapore’s consumer culture.Lewis’ studies of lifestyle media are very helpful to ourstudy of blogs, yet where we depart is that the aestheticsand conventions of blogs are crafted by the authorsthemselves and not by programme networks. This offersa different insight to the interaction between globality,consumer culture and citizenship on an individual level.The bloggers are, through a crafted aesthetic, providinginstruction concerning how to engage in consumption incontemporary Singapore.
Popular culture today is riddled with images of‘harmonious, well-proportioned forms that are pleasing tothe eye . . . endless images of well-muscled Adonises andspectacular sunsets’ (Felski 2004, 36). Felski suggests thesepresences satiate people’s desire to consume the beautifulin the everyday. This, she argues, is not the kind ofintellectualised or ‘grim’ beauty that scholars of art havespent much time pursuing (2004, 36). Yet, as Saitosuggests, whether we pay attention to it or not, there areseveral aesthetic issues that we deal with in everydaythings, some of which have serious implications morally,socially, politically or environmentally, and she describeseveryday aesthetic issues as ‘being hidden in plain sight’(2010, 2). Saito defines ‘the aesthetic’ as something that is‘either highly specialized and isolated from our dailyconcerns namely “art”, or else something trivial andfrivolous, not essential to our lives, such as beautificationand decoration’ (2010, 12). By engaging with aesthetics,we reflect on the potential of the ordinary as well as ourreaction to its everyday mode (Saito 2010). Further, artdiffers from everyday objects in that they are appreciatedprimarily for their aesthetic significance, yet, in everydayexperiences, objects can have or can be given aestheticsignificance beyond or in addition to their functional use.In the examples of the blogs of Singaporean women weanalysed, it is the style and look of the blog in conjunctionwith what is displayed that has the functional value. It ishow the blogs espouses a certain kind of lifestyle to aspireto, predominantly through a certain cultural aesthetic thatis identifiably Singaporean in its compositionality andcontent.
NOTES
[1] Singapore was ranked by the Central Intelligence Agencyas having the fifth highest gross domestic product percapita in the world in 2011.
[2] In 2013 a basic Singtel Postpaid plan cost at approximatelyUS$0.13 (with the exchange rate at 1 September 2010) perminute for voice calls. This compares favourably withother costs in developed countries such as Japan, Canada,
the United States and the United Kingdom as noted in2010 (Li and Ninan-Moses 2010).
[3] This is defined by La Ferle and Chan (2008, 202) as ‘thedegree to which a person believes that the acquisition andpossession of material objects are important to achievehappiness in life, as well as an indicator of his or hersuccess in life’.
[4] Other well-known bloggers in Singapore are ‘Cheesie’(http://cheeserland.com) and ‘Sheylara’ (http://sheylara.com) or Shen Qiaoyun who relocated to Bournemouth inthe United Kingdom in 2011.
[5] See http://xiaxue.blogspot.sg/p/faqs.html.[6] Coclanis (2009a, 10) defines this as ‘a wide range of
products and services like domestic services [particularlymaids], recreation and entertainment, personal care andholiday tours’. Here we define this in terms of threecategories from the Singapore Household ExpenditureSurvey: ‘Recreation and Culture’, ‘Miscellaneous Goodsand Services’ and ‘Educational Services’. ‘MiscellaneousGoods and Services’ includes personal care, personaleffects and various social and financial services.
[7] See http://ilovegyaru.tumblr.com/.[8] However, it is not clear that Asia or Singapore were well
represented in this sample. The authors note that ‘[w]hileover 60 countries were represented, the vast majority werefrom the USA (over 70%) or other English-speakingcountries (UK: 4%; Australia: 1.4%; Canada: 1.3%)’(Patchin and Hinduja 2010, 203).
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