In Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, du Gay et al. demonstrate how an artifact of modern culture produces social meanings. According to the authors (2) the aim of this book is “To introduce [the reader] to both these strands of the contemporary turn to culture—the substantive and the epistemological—…but also to introduce [the reader] to some of the central ideas, concepts and methods of analysis involved in doing a ‘cultural study’.” The study focuses on a huge international corporation like Sony because it is these multinational conglomerates that typically produce many of the cultural artifacts in our daily lives.
Historically, the mode of production of an artifact was thought to determine its “cultural” meaning. However, du Gay (et al. 3) argue that the meaning a product comes to possess is actually determined by the articulation of a number of distinct but interrelated and overlapping cultural processes: Representation, Identity, Production, Consumption and Regulation. Any cultural artifact must be examined through this circuit of cultural processes in order to adequately understand the meaning it has come to possess.
If we examine AOL, which is a service more than a product, we can see that passing this cultural artifact through this “circuit of culture” helps us understand the meaning(s) it has come to possess. AOL is the Internet Service Provider (ISP) with the largest membership base, nearly 24 million (AOL 01D). The establishment of cultural meaning through representation is evidenced in the selling of AOL. Perhaps the biggest method of representing AOL through language is one of its signature trade-marks “You’ve Got Mail!” The familiar voice alerting users that there is electronic mail in their electronic mailbox, along with its attendant “ding” has definitely fixed the meaning and image of AOL in the public’s mind. This advertising slogan fixes a cult...