Martin & Rose (2007: 311):
A more typical example of a tactical response would be the way in which fans use the Amazon.com website for their own purposes to construct community. In order to exemplify appreciation in Chapter 2 we used one of the in-house editorial reviews provided by Amazon for Stevie Ray Vaughan’s record Texas Flood. But following their ‘Editorial Reviews’ Amazon makes space for ‘Customer Reviews of the Day’, a continually updated flow-through corpus of responses from fans who take advantage of the site to rave on about their favourite star. Here’s a couple of these rave reviews:
Obviously Amazon is trying to sell CDs. There is a clear logic of consumption operating here: ‘if a fan (or even if not), you will like it, so buy it’. At the same time, the fans pursue another interest, namely that of expanding their community. Alongside the logic of consumption there’s a rhetoric of belonging: ‘if you buy it, you will like it, and so become a fan’. As Jay Lemke has pointed out to Jim, this is an exemplary tactical response to the global power of a post-Fordist ‘e-tail corporation'.
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[1] To be clear, this is meant to exemplify 'reading' — an interpretation of a text — as a point on the cline of instantiation beyond the instance pole. Instead, it describes responses to hearing music. Each of these responses is, of course, a text, an instance of the language as system.
[2] To be clear, the claim that fans rave about a musician and his music with the intention of expanding a community needs support from empirical evidence. On the relevant youtube site, the comments are turned off, which might be taken to suggest that any "community building" here was less than successful.
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