{"id":1134,"date":"2012-07-20T04:05:44","date_gmt":"2012-07-20T09:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=1134"},"modified":"2012-07-19T13:06:23","modified_gmt":"2012-07-19T18:06:23","slug":"political-branding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2012\/07\/20\/political-branding\/","title":{"rendered":"Politics, Identity, Branding"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past months, we’ve been trying to encourage our authors and contributors to turn their attention and expertise to politics, a top-of-mind topic for so many readers. A few days ago, Cyborgology author PJ Rey did just that, with a provocative post in our Community Pages on the marketing and public personae of Barack Obama: “The President as Brand<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

There’s a lot to like about and learn from this piece: the basic distinction between Obama the person versus Obama the brand; the way in which prominent individual politicians come to stand in for their parties, policy agendas, and political positions as a whole; and that none of this marketing, branding, and imaging is really new to politics. But there are two things that struck me as particularly useful and uniquely sociological.<\/p>\n

First, I was struck with mediation, the party apparatus, and the representation of the collective.\u00a0As PJ puts it:<\/p>\n

Mediation\u2014through the party, which acts both as organizational technology and medium of communication\u2014transforms the president from an individual office-seeker into a brand. The purpose of branding is to turn the president\u2019s performance of self into something that can be mass-marketed. But, as the layers of mediation increase, the individual official is subsumed into the brand. That is to say that the president cedes control over his individual identity to the collective.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He goes on to say that this is “an example of what Guy Debord called ‘spectacle<\/a>,’ where what ‘was once directly lived has moved into a representation.'”<\/p>\n

The other point that struck me was the underlying question\/issue about identity: who is<\/em> an individual? To be more precise, identity is a product of both action and representation, as well as of the interplay of self-construction and the labeling of others. Not sure I can or should go way into this here, I can’t help but think that our symbolic interactionist legacy serves us sociologists well in realizing these tensions and seeing them play out on a big stage in our political process. Thanks, PJ, for getting me thinking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past months, we’ve been trying to encourage our authors and contributors to turn their attention and expertise to politics, a top-of-mind topic for so many readers. A few days ago, Cyborgology author PJ Rey did just that, with a provocative post in our Community Pages on the marketing and public personae of Barack […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1137,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions\/1137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}