I spoke to Kelly for the third time and told her I had read the intro to ‘Thinking through Fashion’ as well as the two chapters on Simmel and Goffman. The Materialist Media theory book she suggested wasn’t available online so I have ordered it to be delivered. I told her how I found way more relevancy in arguments made by Simmel and Goffman than Haraway and her Cyborg theory.
Some questions I had wanted to ask Kelly included;
- Would Simmel and Goffman be classed as Materialists even though they were way before that movement? (I would argue yes but want to ensure I am not contradicting myself).
- Structurally, how would I place my Simmel, Goffman and the Material Turn rethink? Does it still class as a Literature review.
The answers were:
They aren’t materialists, they are sociologists, but when you read them they do talk a lot about he material self; gesture, what we wear etc
Both thinkers were concerned with presenting yourself through your clothes and your decisions and your adornment and your gestures.
Kelly advised that I look at Simmel and Goffman journals and see who has updated these thinkers in terms of Digital Culture.
They are both very old, but they both maintained, that through gesture and decisions and what we wore, we were able to be part of the social world. – I will extend this to social media.
My take-away from this is:
Kelly told me I need a theme that runs throughout and to be careful when talking about fantasy/reality public/private etc. I’m going into too many concepts – i need to think about what it is specifically about… my ‘so what?’
I have found my focus in my thesis examining how we communicate through fashion and dress / the role of fashion and dress in the social world. I will speak about how this space was always a social world that was face to face, real time, real space – now in contemporary life, we still have that space but we also have this digital space that is a social space itself – another dimension.
I am using a phenomenological lens to say that I’m looking at reality as lived by my participants.
We live in a world where we have a social space that is face to face and we have a social space that is not real time and is in en ephemeral digital space. Real time real space – what happens when we think about this and our social life going across digital and physical (as opposed to just face-to-face)?
I am interested in representation from a sociological perspective – Digital fashion, filters – it is all part of presentation of self in contemporary world. I am saying that social categorisation was very clear and now with the digital space, the lines are becoming more blurred and Gen Z are able to utilise both these realms to perform the self – we live in both these spaces.
Questions to take-away:
What is my ‘so what’? I think it is about the material! Need to update to these other spaces where we have to perform ourself – it is just a different form of dress rather than physical – still a material.
Instead of presentation of the self, is it self representation? – think about the difference between these two things.
Kelly suggested I go to academic support to get on top of the structure of my essay – have booked a tutorial with Graeme.