Robert Goldman
Biography
Robert Goldman is an American sociologist, professor emeritus of sociology at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where he taught for several decades. His work concerns the sociology of advertising, commodity culture and visual media, and most of it was written in collaboration with Stephen Papson of St. Lawrence University.[1]
Key Ideas
- Reading ads socially. The method set out in his 1992 book of that title. An advertisement is treated as a compressed social document: it can be taken apart to reveal the assumptions it must rely on to work, the anxieties it addresses, and the exchange it proposes between a commodity and a meaning. Goldman's central mechanism is the commodity sign — the pairing of a product with a socially valued meaning, such that buying the first is presented as acquiring the second.
- Sign wars. The argument of Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising (Guilford Press, 1996), with Stephen Papson. As advertising saturates the visual environment, the supply of available meanings is used up, and brands are forced to compete for signs themselves. The result is escalation: ads that borrow from art, from documentary, from subculture, from social movements, and eventually from anti-advertising itself. Goldman and Papson track how critique of consumer culture is absorbed and resold — the knowing, ironic, self-aware ad being the clearest case.
- Sign fatigue and the knowing viewer. Because audiences become fluent at decoding advertising, ads must work harder and more obliquely, which produces a viewer who is simultaneously cynical about advertising and entirely inside it. Goldman's point is that cynicism is not an escape from the system; it is a competence the system now requires.
- Nike as a case study. Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh (1998) follows a single brand through this process, tracing how a mark detached itself from its product entirely and became a carrier of transferable meanings — authenticity, transcendence, rebellion — which the company then had to defend against the labour reporting that attached different meanings to the same sign.
- Landscapes of capital. Later work, including a large web-based project and the book Landscapes of Capital (2011), analyses how television advertising by corporations and financial institutions visually narrates globalisation, speed, flow and technological inevitability.
Selected Works
- Reading Ads Socially (1992)
- Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising (1996), with Stephen Papson
- Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh (1998), with Stephen Papson
- Landscapes of Capital (2011), with Stephen Papson
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Goldman's account of sign wars describes the condition that platform-era attention operates under, and it was written before the platforms existed. When the supply of available meanings is exhausted, competition moves to the level of the sign, and the escalation has no natural stopping point — which is a reasonable description of a feed. His analysis of the knowing viewer is also directly applicable to a population that is fluent in the vocabulary of manipulation, discusses algorithms freely, and is affected anyway.
Further Reading
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Robert Goldman, Sociology and Anthropology, Lewis & Clark College.
