Throughout 1999 and 2000, the Internet and e-commerce rapidly
became a priority concern for the business media, together with other associated
constituencies such as employment agencies, management consultants, business
schools, venture capitalists, and the world’s major stock exchanges. Under the
umbrella term of ‘New Economy’ we witnessed the semiotic production of a distributed,
heterogeneous, linked, socio-technical assemblage that conceived of the (economic)
world in a very specific way. What was perhaps especially contemporary and unique
about this phenomenon was its short life span, the extent to which mainstream
institutions were so rapidly and willingly implicated, and the paucity of real
economic or material referents in which to ground and locate the ‘e-revolution’.
As one commentator suggested, the idea of the New Economy was in large part
not about economies or technologies at all, but about ways of thinking about
economies (Frank, 2001). We choose to read New Economy narratives as myths.
These myths were of a near future, a future that could almost be seen and grasped.
In this paper we document and describe these New Economy myths through a broad
semiotic analysis of advertisements published in the Financial Times (UK edition)
over the period March 2000 to December 2000. All the advertisements are made
available via hyperlinks (at www.ephemeraweb.org/journal), thus allowing the
reader to engage with this text in creative ways; which may involve ignoring
our analysis.
The turn of the millennium witnessed an intense foretelling
of strange new futures based around the advent and widespread use of
computer-based communication (Hine, 2000). Prominent personalities from the
worlds of politics, business, and academia (see, for example, Leer, 1999, for a
representative collection of speeches and essays by luminaries
(1)
speaking out on behalf of ‘Cyberspace’) were promulgating their
particular e-topias, with more than a whiff of the snake-oil salesmen about
them. That the self-proclaimed Internet theorists, almost without exception,
seemed to be fervent market populists, did not seem to raise many eyebrows at
the time. The myths of a near and prosperous future were alluring and people
desperately wanted to believe them.
Perhaps most striking of all to the somewhat detached observer
was this sudden matter-of-factness of the appearances of internet related issues
in such a wide range of settings: TV programming, newspaper editorials and supplements,
and virtually every advertising medium at the corporate world’s disposal. The
Internet seemed to be everywhere during the winter and spring of 1999-2000,
with an ‘everywhere’ admittedly limited to places where the mass media were
readily available. The Nasdaq composite, the US technology market index that
helped drive a true ‘dotcom’ mania on both sides of the Atlantic, rose an astonishing
88 per cent in less than five months. It ended its seemingly unstoppable rise
on March 10 2000, after having crossed the 5,000 mark. Whilst there was serious
ambiguity as to what this might actually signify, it did not prevent investors
from gathering in excited knots by the market’s high-tech electronic showcase
on New York’s Times Square to applaud the phenomenon of the age (FT, 09/03/01).
Nor was the exuberance limited to the United States. At the European Technology
Conference in Spring 2000, "the bankers were greeted at the opening night
party by semi-naked women, nipples visible and dabbed in gold paint, daintily
pretending to be fairies" (FT, 22/05/01). The impending dotcom revolution,
or so it seemed, was constructed on the back of a complex and bizarre composite
of 20th century sci-fi imagery of speed and progress, 21st century optimism
of a new glorious dawn in a connected global village, together with a mixture
of more ancient images and signifiers: opulence, wonder, power, wealth beyond
ones wildest dreams, and a fear of exclusion, bordering on paranoia. The excitement
about the New Economy was outweighed only by a sense of panic among investors
that they might miss the opportunity of a generation.
The extent of involvement was reminiscent of epochs long
past. People from all classes, castes, professions, backgrounds and ethnicities
sought to gain membership and take a stake in the New Economy. Elizabeth II,
Sovereign of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and Defender of the Faith,
in her magnificence saw it fit to invest in Getmapping.com, an Internet mapping
company. And she was not alone. Housewives, professionals, manual workers and
students got involved by investing in dotcoms listed on the seemingly
unstoppable stock markets, where demand far outstripped the supply of shares.
Shares in Priceline.com, the vendor of discount airline tickets, were bid up to
the point where its market capitalisation was twice that of United Airlines. The
company’s founder, Jay Walker, hailed himself as a ‘New Age Edison,’
inventing and actually patenting a ‘buyer-driven’ business model (Frank,
2001). Investors bought the story hook, line and sinker and the share price shot
up from under $20 to over $160 within the space of a month (April 1999),
bringing Walker an $8 billion paper fortune. In March 2000 Yahoo!’s market
capitalisation stood at $93.7 billion, a figure greater than that of Boeing,
General Motors and HJ Heinz put together. That these Internet entrepreneurs all
seemed to be losing money was dismissed as a triviality:
It takes guts to lose money. Particularly
when it’s other people’s and especially when it adds up to $4 billion. That
is roughly the sum the 13 internet entrepreneurs featured in this book lost
in 1999... The point is that all 13 have in the past - and in the main have
continued to do so -racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in losses with
no end in sight... The pain is possibly eased from the knowledge that despite
these hefty losses, the 12 companies had a combined market capitalization of
$170 billion, giving the 13 entrepreneurs a combined wealth of more than $35
billion... What’s $4 billion when market analysts forecast that the internet
economy will be worth £3.3 trillion in 2003? It’s a question well worth asking:
if your company is first to market in a business revolution, what price success?
(Price, 2000: xv-xviii)
So to the principles of accounting had seemingly been
overturned and traditional barriers of price-to-earnings had been smashed (2).
The past and present did not matter, it was all about the ‘great push
forward’ into a bright new future. Why should ‘the people’ be held back by
the dead hand of the physical world when we could all be ‘Living on Thin
Air’ (Leadbeater, 1999). The light-headedness witnessed in early 2000 was
nothing compared to the spirit of optimism forecasted for the near future. Scott
Kriens, CEO of Juniper (a company competing with Cisco in the internet
infrastructure market), suggested in those heady spring days that estimates of 2
billion internet users by 2002 were far too conservative. By 2003 there would be
10 billion internet users! Forecasts for population growth (3)
, like the balance sheets that didn’t add up, and the cash spent without any
consideration for profit or return, were merely inconveniences, trifles to be
ironed out at a later date. Of course, new internet users could always be
imported from Mars, as one journalist mischievously suggested (Parsley, 2000).
E-commerce, dotcom, and New Economy phenomena were not just
linked to internet technology. For many in industry and academia a far more
significant revolution was supposedly taking place. The New Economy revolution,
like all revolutions before it, was a cultural and social revolution. As the
ultra-hip culture of cyberspace became the culture of the corporation, the organisational
world seemed to have become a funky free-for-all. House writers for new magazines
such as Wired, Forbes, and Business 2.0 proselytised about an organisational
world pregnant with brilliant futures. The chronologists at Greenwich put their
minds to reshaping Mean Time (GMT) into E-Time (GET), a new date point zero
that would secure a referential date line for a 24-7 future. Established newspapers
and magazines now carried weekly supplements and columns devoted to e-commerce
and related developments. The Financial Times perhaps went further with this
than any of their dinosaur, print based, competitors, partially re-branding
itself as FT.com, the dotcom newspaper. Business wanted us to know it had changed,
and a flood of corporate advertisements appeared to convince us of this fact.
Out went the pinstripe suits, in came ‘casual wear’. The New Economy organisations
were youthful, sensitive, soulful, and, of course, profoundly democratic. In
a December 1999 hagiography of Amazon.com, Time magazine hailed its methods
as a glorious ‘dotcommunism’. As one critical commentator put it, it was as
if "Business had set out to destroy business itself, at least as it used
to be practised in the old days" (Frank, 2001: 171). We picked out two
quotes capturing the spirit of this revolution. Understatement clearly was not
part of the agenda.
Consider this: from the other side of the
gulf opened by the Web, virtually all of the structures that management
identifies as being the business itself seem to be bizarre artifacts of earlier
times, like wearing a powdered wig and codpiece to the company picnic. (Levine
et al., 2000: 114)
The great socialist project - the dream of
handing over power to the people - is being realized in front of our eyes. It
is being realized, not by the disciples of Communism, but by the preachers of
free enterprise and market capitalism... None of this has anything to do with
politics. We are simply talking about the logical consequences of the forces
of funk... (Riddersträle & Nordstrøm , 1999: 206)
And then ‘the bubble burst’ and the long dark slide of the Nasdaq began. On March 9 2001 the Nasdaq Composite fell to 2,062, its lowest level since December 1998. This fall represented a decline of 59.2 per cent from its closing peak of 5,048 on March 10 only a year earlier. Similar falls were recorded in other technology markets. In Germany, the Nemax 50 index of Neuer Markt stocks, which peaked at 9,603.36 dropped to 1,931 over the same period, a fall of nearly 80 per cent. This meant the destruction of an extraordinary coffer of paper wealth. The total market value of the Nasdaq dropped from $6,700bn to $3,160bn in one year, a decline equivalent to 35 per cent of US GDP. Cisco’s market value had dropped from $466.5bn to $164.2bn, Yahoo!’s from $93.7bn to $9.7bn, and Amazon.com’s from $22.8bn to $4.2bn. In the UK, Freeserve’s market capitalisation fell from £6.1bn to £980m while QXL.com’s value plunged from £2.4bn to £48m, slightly less that the cash reserves it actually held (4). The slide in technology stocks had no obvious immediate cause. It seemed that investors became concerned about technology valuations, particularly in the wake of a study of cash burn rates at internet companies that was published in Barron’s weekly on March 18, 2000 (FT 09/03/01). The magnitude of the disaster truly struck home when one of the authors received a letter from the magazine Business 2.0 on May 25 2001 informing him: "We’re sorry to tell you that, for economic reasons, we are having to suspend publication of the UK edition of Business 2.0... Thank you again for your interest in Business 2.0 and watch this space!" Given that he had paid a subscription fee of £12 and only received 10 issues, the meltdown had cost him a cool £2.
The quotes, facts and events contained in our narrative so
far are mildly amusing, and many proved so ephemeral it is difficult to imagine
that they have any significance at all. What was all this dotcom hype about
anyway? But they do matter. They provide a unique a window of opportunity to
examine the way business talks about itself, the fantasies it spins, the role it
writes for itself in our lives. And business did talk about itself a lot in
early 2000. The sheer amount of corporate advertising surrounding the e-commerce
and New Economy phenomena was hard to ignore and in late February 2000 we made a
conscious decision to start researching the ways that particular tropes of
e-commerce and the New Economy were articulated and mobilised in the press. We
chose the Financial Times (UK edition) as a source for collecting ads. It is a
widely read newspaper and a respected opinion maker in the business world, and
had purposively positioned itself at the front of the dotcom revolution. This
made it a ‘desirable’ outlet for consultancy firms, hardware and software
manufacturers, dotcom companies and financial institutions to situate themselves
in the unfolding New Economy story.
But did we, as researchers, get our timing wrong, just like
the hapless British investors who poured money into technology shares spurred on
by the April tax deadline? Not quite. E-commerce related advertising actually
peaked in June, with the months of September and October also yielding bumper
crops of ads. The ads tended to run for several weeks, appearing at frequent
intervals. We collected 131 ads in total. The delayed reaction to the end of the
dotcom mania could be clearly witnessed towards the end of the year
(November-December) when the number of advertisements appearing in the press
seemed to shudder to a halt. The content of the few ads that appeared in 2001
would change drastically, but more f this later.
Our primary aim in this study is to highlight the role of
imagery and texts in framing and producing the New Economy. As noted above, the
New Economy (5)
phenomenon proved to be curiously elusive during the period of our study,
an almost uniquely discursively created object (6)
. It was based on confidence and
faith as much as any set of material referents. As a case in point it invites,
or even incites, us to reflect on the apparent truism that whilst lack of
judgment is rare in individuals it is endemic in an age. Of course, not just any
representation can have the effect of persuading the public to believe in its
vision. However, our introductory narrative presses the point that the vision
engendered by the various representations surrounding e-commerce and the New
Economy were perceived as convincing to large numbers of people and, in
particular, those close to the corporate purse.
It is sometimes argued that a focus on the images used in
advertisements neglects the way in which such images are shaped by the economic
logic and social organisation of the relationship between advertising agencies
and their clients (Silverman, 2001). Little is known about the many ways in
which advertising designers produce their work, how the views of graphic artists
do and do not converge with corporate managers’ discourse, or how readers
appropriate and rework ad images and text (Hackley, 2001). Yet, contrary to
Ogilvy (1983) we do know that advertising is constituted from more than simple
design or information communication strategies. A good case can be made to NOT
see advertising primarily as a sales strategy. As Donna Haraway suggested in her
study of technoscience ads:
At least as significantly, the readers of
these ads taste the pleasures of narrative and figuration, of recognising stories
and images of which one is part. Advertising is not just the official art of
capitalism; advertising is also a chief teacher of history and theology in postmodernity...
These ads work by interpellation, by calling an audience into the story, more
than by informing instrumentally rational market or laboratory behavior. (Haraway,
1997: 169)
In our analysis we examine the words and images (making up
‘signs’) that are used in the 131 collected print ads. New Economy discourse
is literally teeming with signs. Veiled by the false obviousness of the
‘natural’, by pseudo economic ‘common sense’, these signs call out to be
coded/decoded. Through our coding of the FT ads, we attempt to categorise and
expose interlocking narratives and situate the emerging themes within a system
of cultural representation. The analysis of ads from a semiotic framework is of
course not original (see, for example, Williamson, 1978) (7).
Following this approach, advertising functions as a complex hierarchical
semiotic register in that signifiers transfer from first order referents of
meaning to second and third order ones. Goldman and Papson (1996)
theorised that the inevitable consequence of this process is that advertising
imagery is eventually able to function and mean without reference, in that any
image can (at least hypothetically) serve to signify any other. Sign systems are
becoming arbitrary. They are liberated from many of the constraints imposed on
other semiotic systems and consequently provide a unique medium suited perfectly
to the representation and construction of myth and fantasy. In a recent book,
Emisson and Smith (2000) provide a schema for analysing advertising materials.
Drawing on Barthes’ work (1957) they propose an examination of the signs in
each advertisement on a first-order level (i.e. the denotative, language level)
before then looking at the myths that are present in the text at a second-order
level (i.e. the connotative level, what is not said explicitly but what is
implied).
Whilst we appropriated the title of this
article from a piece of short fiction by J.G. Ballard (1982), in focusing on the
concept of ‘myths’ we acknowledge an intellectual debt to the work of Roland
Barthes. Barthes contributed a great deal to semiology, textual analysis and,
more indirectly, his work also had repercussions on linguistics and sociology.
But his principal contribution was not a systematic theory but a certain way of
looking at things, an intuitive approach. It was this approach that taught
readers to regard the ephemera of social life as signs. Barthes was attentive to
the ways language and other semiotic systems are embedded in culture, and the
extent to which they are also the means by which culture reflects upon and
renews itself.
In a series of monthly articles, first published
during the 1950s and later collected as Mythologies (1957), Barthes revealed
the ideological misrepresentation, the social ‘lie’ in a film, an advert, or
a discourse. He was seeking out - and denouncing - ideological distortions,
the attempt to make what is thoroughly cultural seem natural and what is acquired
seem innate. In other words, Barthes was hunting for what is falsely self-evident,
what he himself referred to as the ‘what-goes-without-saying’. He produced a
kind of ethnography of society through an analysis of the signs that society
produces. In order to move from the accumulation of these short, sharply critical
pieces on current events to a more general discourse, he was to make use of
concepts taken from Saussure in a theoretical essay ‘Myth Today’ which also
served as a postscript. Myth is to be understood as having two meanings. Firstly
it is, as its Greek etymology suggests, a legend, a symbolic account of the
human condition. Secondly it is a lie, a mystification. In myths the sign is
turned aside from its proper function (its primary denotative function), since
in myth, connotation is parasitic on denotation. For Barthes, the role
of the ‘mythologue’ is to expose the semiological chain that myths try to naturalise.
This unveiling is a political act: founded on a responsible idea of language,
the ‘mythologue’ postulates the freedom of the latter.
For if there is a "health" of language,
it is the arbitrariness of the sign which is its grounding. What is sickening
in myth is its resort to a false nature, its superabundance of significant forms,
as in these objects which decorate their usefulness with a natural appearance.
The will to weigh the signification with the full guarantee of nature causes
a kind of nausea: myth is too rich, and what is in excess is precisely its motivation.
(Barthes, 1956/1982: 113, emphasis added) (8)
Whilst Barthes’ earlier writings could be labelled as ‘structuralist’,
after publication of The Fashion System (1967) which represented "a dream
of scientific method" (Calvet, 1994:
161), Barthes took a completely different path, as if his desire for
systematisation had been exhausted and satisfied. With Roland Barthes (1975)
and Camera Lucida (1980), Barthes’ writing had entered a new phase, signifying
a kind of unravelling of his ideas and his own authority. He was now writing
without any of his former theoretical props, without recourse to any grand theory
like Marxism, psychoanalysis or semiological theory. Barthes no longer attempted
to define codes so as to maintain the multi-valence and their potential reversibility.
Far from being unitary and finite, the text is constantly in motion; and each
code is known only by its departures and returns. Codes are thus "so many
fragments of something that has always been already read, seen, done, experienced;
the code is the wake of that already" (Payne, 1997: 20). In the inaugural
lecture that marked his acceding to a position of the highest authority - the
Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France in 1977 - Barthes chose,
characteristically enough at this stage in his life, to argue for a soft intellectual
authority: "...no power, a little knowledge, a little wisdom, and as much
flavour as possible" (1977/1982: 478). It is in the spirit of his views
on semiology expressed in that lecture that we have carried out our analysis.
To quote Barthes:
The semiologist is, in short, an artist (the
word as I use it here neither glorifies nor disdains; it refers only to a
typology). He plays with signs as with a conscious decoy, whose fascination he
savours and wants to make others savor and understand. The sign -at least the
sign he sees- is always immediate, subject to the kind of evidence that leaps to
the eyes, like a trigger of the imagination, which is why this semiology (need I
specify once more: the semiology of the speaker) is not a hermeneutics: it
paints more than it digs, via di porre rather than via de levare. Its objects of
predilection are texts of the image-making process: narratives, images,
portraits, expressions, idiolects, passions, structures which play
simultaneously with an appearance of verisimilitude and with an uncertainty
which it is possible -even called for- to play with the sign as with a painted
veil, or again, with a fiction. (Barthes, 1977/1982: 475)
When conducting a semiotic analysis that is sensitive to
these considerations it is important to recognise that it is a constructive
endeavour on the part of the analyst rather than a purpose directed towards the
discovering of codes as such. The art of semiotic analysis is one of revealing
hidden or partially obscured meanings in order to extend understanding and
elicit further meaningful analysis. This text, like the advertising texts
analysed below and the referents they themselves signify, are in this respect on
an equal and common plain, with neither being privileged. Before proceeding with
our description and understanding of the advertisements chosen for analysis,
some description will be given to the manner by which we derived them. This is
not provided to re-assure a scientifically sceptical readership or to impress an
analytical method as such. By making explicit the process of constructing our
analysis we hope to guide the reader in our rationale and purpose. We
acknowledge that other codes and readings are possible and even desirable, but
that this neither retracts nor undermines our own analysis, nor necessarily
strengthens it.
Rather than undertaking an analysis of each of the 131 different
advertisements we have elected to look for commonalities and contradictions
within the advertisements as a single analytical set. Moving away from a single
level description of each advertisement we identify emergent themes from the
sample as a whole. Our own analytical process draws on coding techniques widely
applied in qualitative research (e.g., Strauss, 1987; Coffey & Atkinson,
1996). Throughout the process of coding one "fractures the data, thus freeing
the researcher from description and forcing interpretation to higher levels
of abstraction" (Strauss, 1987: 55). Leiss et al. (1990) apply a similar
type of analysis in their analysis of advertisements of social communication.
In order to facilitate familiarity with the data set and to assist preparation of the coding process, we completed an exploratory analysis using 12 ads. This enabled an initial set of codes to be developed, followed by a brief analysis of the coding system involving a series of refinements to allow newly emerging themes to be included and examined. Having completed the exploratory coding the analysis was thus extended to the full set of advertisements. As with any coding process, the analysis is not a linear process of exposition and explanation. Additional codes were incorporated into the coding system during the analysis as more themes in the advertisements emerged. As the analysis progressed, many of the initial codes were subsequently modified with some being collapsed into others or dismissed. A detailed profile of the ads analysed and the codes that were assigned to them is given in table 1 contained in the appendix. To help make explicit the relationship between the ads and the codes ascribed to them, table 1 also provides hyperlinks to image files for each of the ads.
There is no way to give us an understanding
of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which
constitute its initial dramatic resources. Mythology, in its original sense, is
at the heart of things. (MacIntyre, 1985: 216)
Our coding revealed a number of classifications which, as
would be expected, were closely interrelated. In order to construct a useful and
insightful analysis we imposed a series of hierarchies on the codes to indicate
how they relate to, and are differentiated from one another. From this mapping
we identified three main themes, what Strauss (1987) might refer to as
‘axial’ coding. The discriminatory significance of these codes was of course
the result of our analytical process and serve the primary objective of
providing a frame of reference for the meaning we see in the advertisements.
The first of our axial code refers to the types of
language, terminology and text that are used in the advertisements and the ways
these have been appropriated and transformed to convey specific meanings
significant for discourses about e-commerce and the New Economy. Most of the
language referred to in this code is taken from the title and strap lines
present in the advertisements, although, where appropriate, other text from the
ads is also included. We witness here the invention of new terms and phrases,
the introduction of pre-suffixes and abbreviations for existing words, and a
manipulation of existing terminology that is common in corporate advertising.
For the purposes of summary and ease of reference we have labeled this code
‘Discourse Creation’. By examining the advertisements at a syntactic and
semantic level we show the building blocks of e-commerce and New economy
signification which, when compounded and read, feed into prevalent mythologies.
The second code is concerned with what can be thought of as
‘operational’ or ‘transitional’ strategies described in the
advertisements. Most of the advertisements that we examined share a common trait
of offering solutions to current business problems or issues. The operational
and transitional level is described as those proposals, promises and offerings
included in the advertisements that indicate a process or operation connected
with e-commerce and New Economy practices. Operations such as website design,
development and management are characteristic of this type of language. They are
transitional because they tend to refer to a current state of business practice,
a preferred future state of business practice, and offer a service or product
that can operate to effect a transition from the former to the latter. This
aspect of the advertisements is almost always constructed in terms of a
solution. Questions concerning what it is that needs solving, what the solution
is, and what the benefits will be once the ‘problem’ has been solved are
dealt within this coding scheme. For the purposes of summary and ease of
reference we have labeled this code ‘E-commerce and Solution’. This code is
shown to be present in two forms, distinguished by the type of operations and
transformations described and the specificity of solutions offered. Some
solutions are explicitly constructed using discourses such as ‘We can save you
x million dollars’, or ‘You can increase your market presence by x%’(9).
Other devices however represent ‘solutions’ as a generic category.
Many of the advertisements offer ‘solutions’ where no specific indication as
to what this ‘solution’ may actually entail is given. Such discourses have a
tendency to enlist mythical, second order signifiers to covey these generic,
universalistic ‘solutions’.
The third code identified across the 131 advertisements is
concerned with a particularly dominant set of signifiers. For the purposes of
summary and ease of reference we have labeled this code ‘Pushing Forward’.
Pushing forward is discursively framed in two contexts that can be thought of as
forming two sub-codes or categories, namely: ‘globalisation’ and
‘speed’. The first of these sub codes represents a spatial push forward and
the second represents a temporal push forward. ‘Globalisation’ refers to
both textual and visual referents that signify in some way, the world (the world
is ‘getting smaller’), the globe (being connected and wired) and the
dissolution of nationally defined boundaries (business conducted on a global
basis). As well as being constructed in terms of advancement on some kind of
global frontier, the pushing forward code is also represented temporally, that
is in terms of speed and rate of change. This theme includes signifiers of
technological speed (processing power and speed of a computer system), the fast
pace of e-commerce and the New Economy (you must keep up or else your firm will
get left behind), as well as the increasing infringement on the present by the
future (the future is now, the present is already the past).
Having introduced the three principle codes we see as emerging
from our analysis of the 131 advertisements, we will now describe each in more
detail and relate the codes to specific examples.
The rise of little ‘e’
The most explicit level of discourse creation, modification
and adaptation can be seen with the use of the signifier / e- /, usually
represented as a pre-fix to another term (e-commerce, e-business, e-hub, etc.).
On a first-order level, / e- / can be taken as an abbreviation for
‘electronic’ (as in electronic-commerce), although it is clear that the
signifier has a more clearly defined referent than this. / e- / commerce is used
to refer to services on the internet, on-line shopping and trading, and so on;
but not to other equally ‘electronic’ commercial activities, such as
electrical goods retailing, transactions conducted over the telephone, or other
the vast amount of other product and service offerings that involve electronic
equipment or the supply of electricity for instance.
The signifier / e- / enforces a second-order signification that has specific regard to the internet and trading on the world wide web. ‘/ e- ing/’ for example, which is used to signify the transformation of a business from old to new economy, does not signify ‘electricification’ nor ‘electrocution’. In fact it has no material referent in this respect. Andersen Consulting (re-branded with similarly second order signification as Accenture) discuss the / e- ing/ of firms in FT30. Here, the firm attempts to reflect the move that many organisations have made towards e-commerce by using the signifier / e- /. This ‘/ e- ing/’ process is illustrated in the advertisement as a cosmetic surface process that is ‘sprayed’ (e.g. as with a deodorant, cleaning fluid, or paint spray), to produce an instant although temporary cover-up effect (e.g. covering up odours etc). Use of a spray can is further communicative of the way that the stock markets have reacted to e-commerce. Embraced as an amazing revolution resulting in the overvaluation of many firms, the ‘/ e- / revolution’ appears to have ‘worn off’ (odour returns, old paint is revealed). The ad thus uses both second order signifiers / e- / and/ e- ing/ to carve out the discursive context of the message, namely that there are two types of e-commerce consultancy. Most is ‘surface’ / e- / where as Andersen Consulting offer ‘deep’ / e- /, i.e. a lasting effect and the possibility of long term competitive advantage.
Whilst several of the ads make interesting use of the / e- / signifier, (see table 1 in appendix), an interesting modification of this theme can be seen in ad FT21. In this ad from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the signifier is used to greater second order effect. Many of the salient nouns (e.g. strategy) in the text have the letter ‘e’ removed, thus addressing the reader with questions such as; ‘Where is the ‘e’ in your strategy?’ Unless your organisation has / e /, presumably a referent to / e - commerce/ (the implication being that it can be supplied by PwC), your strategy is incomplete and is therefore likely to lead to business failure.
Both ads FT30 and FT21 illustrate the movement of first order signification to second order signification. The fact that FT21 makes no attempt, either explicitly or implicitly, to identify what / e - commerce/ stands for, might be suggesting that, at least in terms of advertising rhetoric, no such referent is necessary. / e - commerce/ itself becomes the sole referent and therefore the commodity aspect of the communication. It is startling how futuristic, fashionable and stylish little / e- / has become. The / e- / in e-commerce denies its referent (electricity) because to openly acknowledge it turns the e-commerce phenomenon from an exciting, cutting edge business process, into one that sounds rather antiquated and manual. Signifiers of e-commerce conjure up images of slick office buildings, full of slick young executives hot-desking all over the place, talking about slick new websites, and feeling passionate about an imagined, fantasised liquid flow of trillions of bytes of information through an intercourse of millions of terminals, servers and computers. But discussions about electronic commerce do not stimulate the same kind of enchantment. Electronic commerce almost conjures up the image of Edison selling light bulbs to old Mrs Jones from the hard wooden counter of a mid-west hardware store.
New technology terminology
In addition to the / e- / signifier, an abundance of new
words related to e-commerce and the Internet have emerged. Terminology including
/b2b/, /b2c/, /WAP/, the /New/ economy, /m-commerce/, and /dot.com/ have either
been created in order to represent new myths or have been adapted from existing
managerial discourse and recast.
One reason for why language seems to have been so readily
adapted and modified, and why existing grammatical structures have been so
eagerly transgressed, might be in part attributable to the form and structure of
the Internet medium itself. Hypertext protocols and domain name restrictions
limit and reshape the use of conventional grammar, capitalisation and spelling.
Domain names cannot contain capital letters, spacing or punctuation. They all
bear a post-fix (.com, .org, .dk, etc.) which, although initially having some
purposeful signification (company, organisation, Denmark), now serves only as a
marginal referent. Email and web writing etiquette (netiquette) has changed the
way users write language and therefore modifies expectations when reading it.
A series of ads from Sun Microsystems (FT8a, FT8b, FT31, FT11) clearly illustrates this emergent fluidity of English language usage and the second order, mythic signification that is created as a consequence. A strap line in these ads stakes, that ‘we’re the dot in .com’. This piece of text is confounding for so many reasons that it almost makes the statement totally vacant of meaning, although most readers would no doubt take from the ad at least some ,if not all, of the sentiments intended. Even if we dismiss facile interpretations, i.e. that Sun Microsystems associates itself with values of punctuation, a full stop etc., and look for more appropriate significations, we find little in the way of meaning. The ‘dot’ between the domain address and the postfix is simply a point of grammatical necessity. Its only role in signification is to differentiate between that which proceeds and precedes it. Furthermore, the postfix ‘com’ is equally devoid of explicit significance. The analysis becomes a little clearer when the phrase is read as part of the visual imagery included in the ad FT8a & FT8b. FT8a 'The Incredible Growing Business’ is designed as a Hollywood film poster type image showing ‘the business is showing phenomenal growth’, symbolised by the fast, upward ‘rocketing’ of a skyscraper. In ad FT8b ‘The Making of The Incredible Growing Business’, the exterior image of the business given in the previous ad is supplemented with a ‘behind the scenes’ explanation for the growth. The message (we’re the dot in .com) is signifying that, although Sun’s contribution may encompass only a small component of the overall business process, a behind the scenes function, it is this ‘support’ that provides the foundation for an exciting new business venture with potentially limitless growth. The basis of this growth, the reason why the ‘dot in .com’ is so crucial, and the process for achieving growth are neither illustrated nor justified. The powerful images of immense business growth are offered as referents of themselves.
Parallels with this ad can be seen in ad FT88 for Kyocera. As well as choosing a humble association with the ‘dot’ to reflect their core, seemingly minor, behind the scenes role in e-commerce success, the ad simultaneously links the minuscule (inconsequence) with the supreme (exponential growth). The narrative is constructed around myth signification that great things can and will spring from (almost) nothing, as long at the right advice and expertise is commissioned. These ‘Jack and the bean stalk’ type narratives promote rapidity over moderate and consistent growth, as well as inviting and encouraging investors and dot.com hopefuls alike to commit to small e-commerce projects with the promise of immense profits and wealth.
E-commerce & Solution
Explicit discourses
A large percentage of ads are attempting to sell a range of products and services, ranging from consulting to hardware instalment. These ads tend to draw on and employ endorsement narratives including: representations of past personal ‘conquests’FT12: ‘Using our own e-business suite, Oracle saved $1 billion in one year’); representations based on and around specific reputations and brand values associated with former and current clients (e.g. FT2: Siebel’s testimonial from Cable and Wireless), and representations incorporating impressive statistical records (e.g., FT104) ‘We created more than 125 e-marketplaces and added billions of value to our clients’ businesses’).
Ad FT25 for IBM
incorporates a clear endorsement narrative involving British Airways. The ad
announces the role IBM has played in helping ‘British Airways and thousands of
other companies’ to build a ‘self-service website’. The use of blue chip,
establishment endorsements such as BA is semiotically significant because it
illustrates the potential sign value that e-commerce ventures can gain from
servicing high profile brands and clients. The image used in ad FT25
is also intriguing. The scene is set in a traditional interior (bare wooden
floor, old-fashioned lamp and set of drawers) but with evidence of modernity and
contemporary life (highly visible plug sockets and leads). The elderly cleaning
woman dons an apron and mops the floor using old-fashioned cleaning equipment.
There is not a vacuum cleaner in sight. The image of the wise old sage of a
cleaner in a contemporary environment constructs and represents the need for a
‘trusted hand’ (IBM and BA) to help you through the transition from the old
to the new.
The dominant narratives of revolution, a brave new world,
"out with the old and in with the new", and so on, would on one level
seem to contradict with this type of endorsement by establishment brands. It
reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of the e-commerce myth. On the one
hand the future of the New Economy is going to be markedly different from the
traditional economy, with plenty of opportunity for new start-ups, new ventures
and new business practices. Such a hopeful and radical vision implies the demise
of the traditional economy and its constituent players (including both IBM and
BA). On the other hand, e-commerce product and service providers use high profile
traditional economy brands to promote and encourage the purchase of their products
and services in the New Economy. For e-mythologies to be remain consistent they
have to incorporate the vision that the size of the New Economy will be much
larger and rapidly changing than the traditional one; that new markets and customer
segments will ‘appear’ which traditional corporate interests will not want,
or will be unable to service, thus paving the way for new entrants. The fact
that consumer markets will either remain at their current size or maybe grow
steadily, and that as in the traditional economy larger more established organisations
will have an advantage, seems to remain unsaid in most ads.
The use of high profile brands to promote e-commerce
organisations testifies that marketing strategies and issues remain relevant,
and that rather than seeing a distinct and revolutionary fracture between
old/traditional and New Economy, one should perhaps give greater credence to
notions of continuation and development. But during the e-commerce boom such
reasoning was not reflected in the narratives presented in advertising materials
or the business media more generally (viz. the poor performance of traditional
equity indices during 1999 and early 2000). That the hopes and optimisms
expressed for e-commerce were somewhat misplaced or overstated may well have
resonance now, but bears little relevance to the dominant myth discourses that
were popularised during this period of unparalleled confidence in New Economy
stocks. The new/old economy divide was clearly a key rhetorical signifier in
e-commerce myths.
FT59, an ad for the
investment bank J.P.Morgan, employs a slightly different set of images and tropes
to communicate a message with similar mythic features. The ad frames the setting
in the theme of success, power and achievement through reference to a $21 billion
deal. But rather than referring to traditional brand endorsement, the narrative
instead draws on ‘old’ economy notions of personality, employee trust and relationship.
This ‘face to the firm’ approach does not use an image of a young, slick dot.com
executive but rather a middle-aged and trustworthy looking company executive.
The graphic spots (dots) that appear all over the page are impressed with finger
prints to further emphasise the lasting presence of traditional principles translated
into New Economy solutions.
Generic discourses
As with those illustrations identified above, many of the
e-commerce narratives are structured by implicating an issue, anxiety or problem
(e.g., how to achieve growth and success in the New Economy), imply a method
(product or service) to address the issue and then give explicit reference to
the resolved outcome (e.g., raised profits, opening up of new ‘e-markets’).
In contrast to these specific e-commerce solutions, other ads are structured
in terms of generic, unspecified expectations and ‘solutions’. These ads, freer
of specific referents and consequences evoke a broader range of myth discourse.
The Nortel Networks ads, for example, (FT10,
FT55) frame the narrative with the question:
"What do you want the internet to be?" This statement locates e-commerce
as an opportunity that is to a certain extent negotiable by the reader, rather
than proscribing a set of schematic issues or anxieties requiring resolution.
The ads offers a series of somewhat incongruent "potentialities" in
answer to this rhetorical question; for example, "like a campfire",
"the collaboration of business and imagination", "a powerful
ally in the global battle against AIDS". Each of these points of closure
could be subject to and interesting individual semiotic analysis. Taken collectively,
it is apparent that the emerging discourse of e-commerce framing the ads develops
the New Economy concept at a different level to the specific and self-contained
identified in the previous section. The aspiration and optimism echoed in these
particular ads is indicative of a much more liberal set of myths in which well
defined inputs and outputs are transformed into generalised potential consequences
of the New Economy. These narratives operate by maintaining loosely, in some
cases arbitrary, signifier-signified relationships, with the mythological character
of the ads being made explicit and acknowledged. The over arching signification
of the narratives reinforces creative, lateral brand values through reference
to myth represented elsewhere in business discourse (e.g. "business and
imagination"). Loosely bound signifier-signified contexts provide a basis
for incorporating metaphor and analogy. For example, ad FT43
for Requisite Technology exclaims, "without a complete e-content solution,
a net marketplace won’t fly". Here "complete e-content", "flight"
and "net-marketplace" serve at signifiers free of referent beyond
this particular text.
Most of ads are constructed with blends of both solution-specific
and solution-generic discursive elements. For example, the ad for PricewaterhouseCoopers
FT21 describes a solution-generic type
myth ("innovative solutions", doing "it all"), generic terms
with nominal referents in which meaning is reasonably structured and
determined (e-business services, e-strategies, e-designs and e-infrastructures,
e-answers), and specific signifiers involving corporate endorsements from previous
and current customers. It should be noted, however, that even specific endorsement
terminology which one would anticipate as being subject to reader authentication
and verification is often represented with equally generic signifiers; for example:
We created a web-based
e-solution for the world’s largest
Terminology such as "web-based e-solution", "most
recognised", "world’s largest", and so on create the effect of
functional specificity without recourse to any reference, or "referent".
This type of discourse has a dual capacity to deny location, firstly by drawing
on the disarming genre of the grandiose, wondrous, spectacular or mysterious,
and secondly by incorporating signs that at first glance seem ‘natural’ and
full of meaning (e.g. "the world’s largest") but on closer inspection
are substantially vacant. The incorporation of this type of terminology
into New Economy marketing communications provides a relatively self contained
illustration of what some contemporary semiologists have come to identify as
‘free-floating signification’. Signs, lacking stable referents are to a certain
extent mobile and transactional within any given system, whereby meaning becomes
increasingly context specific, and almost totally substitutable and subsumable
by other signs. In the example taken from the strapline of FT21 above, the phrase
"web-based e-solution", could quite easy be substituted as "e-based
web solution", or even "solution based e-com web" with little
or no decomposition of meaning. Signification is both at once meaningful and
meaningless. It is at once a totally internalised register as well as alluding
to an unspecified floating and vague referent.
Pushing Forward
Globalisation
The commonly applied discursive metaphor that the world
is becoming more ‘global’ (or less so for that matter) clearly identifies the
second order signification of the term globalisation. The ‘push’ towards greater
global connectivity implicates a range of myth discourse which is closely bound,
perhaps inextricably bound, with New Economy writing and advertising.
Ad FT83, for example, shows an image of
the earth with detail of main land masses that are intimately ‘linked’ to one
another through a Merrill Lynch logo. The signification here is complex. Not
only is the implication that the world is ‘connected’ and therefore a unified
and single ‘global’ entity, but also that Merrill Lynch, graphically, ‘connects
the world’. Representations of global ‘connective-ness’ are powerful signifiers
because they imply control, (benevolent) dominance and power over all that is
known (10) (See also FT125,
& FT63). It is probably for similar
reasons that imperial dynasties often choose to signify their dominion by ‘painting
the globe red’ so to speak, or that military conflict and battles are often
pictorially represented with similar types of imagery. But whilst conflicts
over map-space have over the past century or so been largely associated with
military conquest (11), it is
now organisations and corporate interests that choose to wrap the world in complexes
of arrows, networks and cages to represent their own ‘global’ presence. With
what can be read as somewhat imperial rhetoric if taken out of context, the
Merrill Lynch ad declares they "have eyes and ears in 26 countries... in
all four corners of the globe", and will "help" you to "pounce
on opportunity".
The Morgan Stanley Dean Witter ad FT101
continues this global theme, claiming to "network the world". The
ad impresses upon the reader with totalitarian zeal that the "new global
economy", which will be achieved, not through the use of gun ships and
armies but by the establishment of e-commerce networks and corporate expansion,
will "offer" freedom to all. The signification of this liberation
myth is visualised by the shadow, or "dream" (i.e. what could be rather
than what is) of a bird flying free of its cage, leaving the remaining caged
bird in captivity. The rhetoric of "barrier-free financial markets"
and a "borderless European stock exchange" implicates a mythic corporate
e-topia that will emerge from the push into a connected and joined-up world.
The global ‘push’ is represented more implicitly in a wide variety of ads we collected. Liberal globalisation, as a beneficial and inevitable signifier of the New Economy, is a core mythic theme to the extent that it might be considered almost an archetype of the discourse.
Speed
The construction and representation of a causal relationship between
technological ‘speed’ and business success is a dominant theme in a number
of the ads examined. In ad FT48
Citrix announce their ‘lightning-fast agility to deliver’. The
supporting image of a slick, young dotcom businessman on a jet-powered
skateboard flying in the clouds, well above the skyscrapers below, explicitly
supports the strap line as well as drawing on some of the other mythic
components of freedom, advantage over competitors, reaching great heights etc.
Although the surfer is flying by himself, flying free above the ‘old’
skyscraper institutions below, his opportunities for ‘achieving great
heights’ are assumed to be greater because he is not anchored to the old
referents of the old economy thanks to the ‘digital independence’ offered by
Citrix systems (12). FT8a
draws upon a similar causal referent between speed, technology and
organisational success.
The signification of speed, and references to an intensification of the general
pace of business can act as both a narrative device to convey positive
reinforcing myths (as above), but is equally powerful as a negative
reinforcement device. Ad FT40,
offers the warning, ‘in the surge economy, three year growth projections
shift by the hour’. The veiled threat of being ‘left behind’, the call
to reject existing accounting and forecasting instruments (thus using old
economy referents as signifiers for the New) and the use of vacant signification
(the ‘surge’ economy), operates by introducing the problem of inevitable
uncertainty and playing upon the fear it creates.
FT33 further illustrates the free-floating signification characteristic of New Economy myth. In the ad for KPMG Consulting and Microsoft, the first order signifier of the ‘New Economy’ is itself subsumed as second order through reference to the ‘old e-world’. Rate and pace of change is narrated by implicating a further set of progressive terminology, presumably the ‘new e-world’. In true Baudrillardian fashion we see the increasing rapidity by which signification is created, modified and subsequently re-created as a referent for another set of signification at a second, third, fourth, ‘n’ level order. Vacant of meaning, these signifiers operate by pure difference without any conceptualisation.
FT86 progresses along this narrative
order by contrasting visions of the ‘internet of today’, soon to become the
‘internet of yesterday’, with the ‘Next Generation Internet’ Siemens proposes
the reader to join. This rhetorical device draws upon a classic science fiction
utopian narrative (cf. Smith et al., 2001), with the organisation-as-author
being positioned as both the gate-keeper and the leader of the migration from
the present to the future. The organisation is represented as a liminal entity
spanning the structural oppositional space of present and future. Ad FT5,
also on a salient futurist New Economy myth, asks the reader to imagine an unimaginable
(near) future (‘Throw off the bonds of tyranny of place and time’), followed
by an announcement that the future has arrived and can be entered with the help
of Red Cube’s guidance. The theme is also repeated in FT86.
In these ads the prevailing myth discourse describes the future as a commodity
that is increasingly and speedily being made available for application in the
present. One possible interpretation is that the underlying motivation for these
narratives is to reduce perceptions of uncertainty and risk about the future
by representing it as partially located in the present. A future represented
as unknowable and unpredictable in terms of technological progress and fantasized
opportunities also needs to rest alongside a signified future in which security
is known to exist and risk offset and made manageable.
We already indicated that the steady stream of ads suddenly
seemed to dry up at the end of 2000, never to resurface. The ads that were published
in the new year conceived of ‘e-business’ and the New Economy in radically different
ways. No longer were they signifiers of a near future, but rather of
a recent, rather confused, past FT132.
No longer was a distinction made between "New and old economy", "e-business
and business". Companies with strong brand recognition (IBM, Intel, Microsoft)
now started exploiting their "conservative" credentials for all it
was worth (e.g. FT133). It was again
"business as usual" and new start-ups, new ventures and new business
practices only formed a very marginal part of this agenda. These new advertising
strategies mirrored actual events in 2001. TV programming no longer included
"e-broadcasting" and newspapers discontinued their "e-supplements".
For example, on May 19 2001 The Times newspaper announced it was to scrap
its dedicated e-business page because, "E-business is just, well, business".
Even management gurus now displayed a distinct sense of coolness towards the
New Economy.
The "new economy" appears less like
a new economy than like an old economy that has access to a new technology.
Even the phrases "new economy" and "old economy" are rapidly
losing their relevance, if they ever had any... In our quest to see how the
Internet is different, we have failed to see how the Internet is the same. (Porter,
2001: 78)
All this brings a definite sense of chronological closure to the New Economy phenomenon. However, this is not to say that this brings analytical closure. Perhaps only now, with a little distance emerging, can we truly appreciate what a rich source of research material the New Economy phenomenon has yielded.
So what remains to be said? In our desire to provide a structured narrative, we attributed many stable meanings to the various ads. How can we be sure that we are not locked into a circle of illusion, that our intuitions are not wrong or distorted? The only sane response to this is to say that such uncertainty is ineradicably part of our epistemological predicament; that even to characterise it as uncertainty is to adopt a severely restricted criterion of certainty, which deprives the concept of any sensible use (Taylor, 1985). Our reading depends closely on our culture, our understanding of the world, which by definition we must share, at least partly, with the early 21st century reader. Hence we refrain from ensnaring ourselves in loops of reflexivity. Even if we should choose to travel down that path, textual reflexivity is unlikely to prove satisfactory because it pays little attention to the concept of the reader and retains a naïve belief in the possibility of writing truer texts. As Latour (1988: 170) suggested: "Instead of piling layer upon layer of self-consciousness to no avail, why not have just one layer, the story, and obtain the necessary amount of reflexivity from somewhere else?"
We also refrain from offering a second order analysis which
would involve embedding our codes in a detailed critique, as one of the reviewers
suggested. To answer the ‘so what’ question that this suggestion entails, would
involve proving that we are doing more than just telling stories, that we are
really offering some explanation (13)
(Latour, 1988). Explanation is
not something we aspire to as we believe it is not a desirable goal in the
context of this paper. We wrote this piece for the pleasure of writing,
for the joy of playing with signs "as with a painted veil". This in
itself has serious purpose: to go against "the will to weigh the signification
with the full guarantee of nature" Barthes found so nauseating in myth.
As he suggested in his inaugural lecture, the semiologist should strive "...to
maintain, over and against everything, the force of drift and of expectation"
(Barthes, 1977/1982: 467). Releasing the ‘sign’ by tentatively constructing
new semiological chains is, however, a less frivolous activity than it might
at first appear. It counteracts the aim of myth which is to abolish complexity,
do away with all dialectics, organize "a world which is without contradictions
because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident"
(Barthes, 1956/1982: 132). Yet, we do not intend to ‘fix’ our signification
in an alternative political project from that of the market populists, as this
would make our project bound, finalizable, and subject to the same critique
of an ‘excess of motivation’ Barthes referred to in Myth Today. If our
semiological analysis of the New Economy myths resonates with the reader, breaks
apart their naturalness, then we will be more than satisfied.
Thus we see our text as ‘seriously playful’ (yes, the ambiguity
is intentional), an example of the ‘weak thought’ Rorty refers to in his collection
of essays on (mainly) Heidegger and Derrida. It involves a reflection that "does
not attempt a radical criticism of contemporary culture, does not attempt to
refound or remotivate it, but simply assembles reminders and suggests some interesting
possibilities" (Rorty, 1991: 6). It is also fully consistent with the notion
of ‘dialogism’ developed by Bakhtin (14).
Dialogism is founded on the ineluctability of our ignorance, the necessary
presence of gaps in all our fondest schemes and most elaborate systems (Clark
& Holquist, 1984). A word or discourse undergoes dialogisation when it becomes
relativised, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things.
Bakhtin did not overestimate the power of the dialogue. He knew that dialogue
does not guarantee forward movement. It merely opens up the possibility of forward
movement. Nor does dialogical interaction lead to some final and irrevocable
‘triumph of truth.’ For truth cannot triumph without becoming a dogma, a totalitarian
lie. Dialogue is essentially interminable, which led to the arch-Bakhtinian
concept of ‘unfinalizability,’ according to which anything could give birth
to something new and more fertile. Bakhtin’s view on the generic expectation
of closure is perhaps best expressed by quoting his final words on the impossibility
of endings, with which he closed the last article he ever wrote:
There is neither a first word nor a last word.
The contexts of dialogue are without limit. They extend into the deepest past
and the most distant future. Even meanings born in dialogues of the remotest
past will never be finally grasped once and for all, for they will always be
renewed in later dialogue. At any present moment of the dialogue there are great
masses of forgotten meanings, but these will be recalled again at a given moment
in the dialogue’s later course when it will be given new life. For nothing is
absolutely dead: every meaning will someday have its homecoming festival. (Bakhtin,
quoted in Clark and Holquist, 1984: 348-350)
To paraphrase Latour, this text is in your hands and lives
or dies through what you will do to it. Of course, through our slightly unusual
textual strategies (including exploring the technical possibilities of using
hyperlinks to the ads) we have attempted to encourage certain outcomes and perhaps
forestall others. But this does not detract from our essentially dialogical
intention. We believe the technology enables us to take a truly dialogical perspective
and genuinely invite you to ‘play along’ and examine the ads (including the
ones we did not discuss), thus making engagement with this text a creative experience.
All we ultimately have to say is: ‘to the best of our abilities, and based largely
upon material to which you have full access, this is what we make of the New
Economy phenomenon’. Over to you...
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1. These included presidential hopeful Al Gore, Nicholas Negroponte, Jim Barksdale (Netscape), John Patrick (IBM), Charles Handy and, the Prime Minister of the U.K., Tony Blair. [Back to the text]
2. For example, in June 1999, eBay was trading for 3,991 times earnings while the average P/E ratio for the S&P 500 was about 20.[Back to the text]
3. Even the most expansionary forecasts did not predict a rise from about 6 billion people living on this planet at the turn of the millennium, to 10 billion 3 years later. [Back to the text]
4. An eager analyst from Merrill Lynch had declared in March 2000 on BBC television that QXL.com was massively undervalued at £2.4bn. [Back to the text]
5. In this our study parallels the work of Emmison and Smith (2000) who examined the interplay between words and images in cartoons as an ‘intriguing window for viewing the ways in which societies come to understand their economic and political processes (p.86).’ In particular their study regarded the changing cartoon representations of ‘the economy’. [Back to the text]
6. Thus the vision of bright technological futures tended to remain remarkably faithful to the original meaning of Utopia which is ‘nowhere’ or ‘no-place’ (through the confusion of its first syllable with the Greek eu as in euphemism or eulogy its commonly accepted meaning is now ‘good place’, Carey, 1999: xi.). Strong (if opposite) parallels can be seen between the utopias devised for the New Economy and Samuel Butler’s (1901) utopian novel Erewhon. For Butler’s fictional Erewhonian Society, as with our own real New Economy utopia, technology is the crucial means of and to the future. However, whereas technology, the web and e-commerce are represented as a progressive, emancipatory, even revolutionary means to the future in the New Economy, for Butler’s Erewhonians’ the counter is the case. Erewhon has rejected technology, smashing and destroying even the most basic and everyday mechanical objects. Rather than being understood as a means of social furtherance, technology was deemed to have an inevitable enslaving, dehumanising, desocialising effect. Butler, along with other utopian writers of the period such as William Morris, author of the post-rational aesthetic utopian novel News from Nowhere (1889), is a nostalgic commentator on the impending dawn of technological society. These authors would, if writing today, no doubt take a keen interest in the evolution of the New Economy and severely criticise all of those who look at its impending development as progressively utopian:
"There is no security" - to quote his own words - "against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?" (Butler, 1901/1970: 199) [Back to the text]
7. By looking at signs in a selection of ads, Williamson demonstrated that the meaning in the ads is not just floating "on the surface just waiting to be internalised by the viewer, but is built up out of ways that different signs are organised and related to each other, both within the advertisement and through external references to wider belief systems" (1978: 44). In order for the ad to work effectively on the viewer (i.e. that the meaning given is transferred efficiently), it is vital for the advertiser to draw on the "reservoirs of social and cultural knowledge maintained by audiences."
8. To elaborate further:
Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. If I state the fact of French imperiality without explaining it, I am very near to finding that it is natural and goes without saying: I am reassured. In passing from history to Nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves. (Barthes, 1956/1982: 132) [Back to the text]
9.For a discussion on the use of statistics and numerical discourses in media representation, see Potter and Wetherall (1994). In their analysis of television documentaries about terminal illness they find that statistics and other numerical representations are often used to effect objectivity, scientific authority and actionable targets. They conclude that such discourses have the quality of being more persuasive, regardless of source, when compared with alternative type descriptions. [Back to the text]
10. Baudrillard’s (1981) often quoted reference to Borges’ short story Of Exactitude in Science (Borges, 1954/1975: 131) has some relevance here. Borges mockingly recounts the story of a map which was identical with the country it represented, leading to the end of the discipline of geography in the country. A description which equals what it describes is of course an absurdity. The postulation of a reality which exhausts the powers of representation of the camera or the alphabet, is one of Borges’ most instructive hypotheses. It is the "superabundance of forms", "the will to weigh the signification with the full guarantee of nature" Barthes refers to as "sickening in myth" and "a kind of nausea", that is Borges’ target here. In myth the inadequacy of our representation of reality is disguised by the plenitude and continuity of the words and images we use to represent it, to the point where the reader supposes that what has been said about a given situation is all that there is to be said. The story goes as follows:
In that empire, the craft of Cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire city, and the map of the empire itself an entire province. In the course of time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a map of the empire that was of the same scale as the empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the study of cartography, succeeding generations came to judge a map of such magnitude cumbersome, and, not without irreverence, they abandoned it to the rigours of sun and rain. In the western deserts, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar; in the whole nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography...[Back to the text]
11. For many Europeans alive today, the Second World War probably resides in their consciousness as a giant map of Europe, in which arrows tipped with German insignia trail across from Berlin only to meet arrows tipped with Allied insignia travelling East from London or West from Moscow. [Back to the text]
12.Our sole concern for this lone maverick business surfer can only be that he does not run into the Sun Microsystems skyscraper thrusting upwards (see FT8a). [Back to the text]
13. One of the reviewers asked, with some justification, for quite a few explanations: ‘Why have the ads created this myth? As the hype has faded now, is the myth gone as well, or have we simply switched to another myth? What is the general role of myth in capitalism?’ [Back to the text]
14. Although one finds few direct references to Bakhtin in Barthes’ work, his friend Julia Kristeva certainly introduced him to Bakhtin’s work and they must have had various discussions on Bakhtin’s notions of polyphony, heteroglossia and dialogism (Calvet, 1994). [Back to the text]