locating the subject: teens online @ ninemsn

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Locating the Subject: Teens online @ninemsnStephen Atkinson a & Helen Nixon aa University of South AustraliaPublished online: 20 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Stephen Atkinson & Helen Nixon (2005) Locating the Subject: Teensonline @ ninemsn, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 26:3, 387-409, DOI:10.1080/01596300500200276

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Locating the Subject: Teens online @

ninemsn

Stephen Atkinson and Helen Nixon*University of South Australia

In this paper we examine how the figure of the teenager is positioned within the discourses and

practices of commercial online media. In particular, we explore how the popular, Australia-based

web portal ‘‘ninemsn’’ works discursively to shape the identities of young people. Ninemsn not only

constructs and circulates selected representations of teenage media users, but also makes available

to them particular kinds of texts and communication practices. At the same time it pursues its own

commercial agenda, which aims to attract and expand particular audience segments and niche

markets and sell them on to advertisers for a range of media forms and products. Ninemsn’s

development of ‘‘personas’’ to aid the processes of site design and marketing is especially notable as

an attempt to more precisely outline particular subject positions for users and offer detailed

representations of imagined consumers to advertisers.

Introduction

Growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Providence, Rhode Island,

provided me with a particular orientation to the relationship between popular

culture and schooling. Popular culture was where the action was*/it marked out a

territory where pleasure, knowledge, and desire circulated in close proximity to the

life of the streets. There was always something forbidden about this culture, with its

comics, pinball machines, restricted codes, visual excesses, and overly masculine

orientation.

My friends and I collected and traded comic books, learned about desire through

the rock and roll of Little Richard and Bill Haley and the Comets, and drank to the

blues of Fats Domino. We hated Pat Boone and didn’t know the suburbs even

existed. We felt rather than knew what was really useful knowledge. And we talked,

danced, and lost ourselves in a street culture that never stopped moving. Then we

went to school. (Giroux, 1994, p. ix)

It’s difficult, on first reading these opening paragraphs to Henry Giroux’s (1994)

Disturbing pleasures: Learning popular culture , not to be reminded of Blackboard jungle

(Books, 1955) and its hard-boiled evocation of rock ’n’ roll, urban grittiness,

testosterone, and the thrill of violence and transgression. On closer examination what

stand out are the metaphors and descriptors of movement, traffic, and trade, the

*Correspondence author. University of South Australia, St Bernards Road, Magill, SA 5072,

Australia. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0159-6306 (print)/ISSN 1469-3739 (online)/05/030387-23

# 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/01596300500200276

Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education

Vol. 26, No. 3, September 2005, pp. 387�/409

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symbolic and spatial mobility inherent to the street. In the interstices of Giroux’s

ensuing discussion of the chasm between popular ‘‘youth’’ culture and the language

and concerns of formal education it appears that it is not so much the content of

popular culture per se that he finds missing from the ‘‘middle class’’ curriculum as the

dynamism through which popular culture evolves and is circulated or, more

correctly, evolves by means of its circulation. In contrast to the transience,

experimentation, irreverence, and stylized ‘‘illiteracy’’ of popular culture, for the

young Giroux school was stasis, stricture, and containment, an artificial environment

divorced from the concerns of young people, especially ‘‘working class’’ young

people, outside its gates.

In connection with this, another distinction that can be noted is that school in

Giroux’s experience was separate from the marketplace and its commercial

imperatives, from the agora of daily life and everyday exchange. Although he never

mentions money changing hands, the coin in the slot, or the venal reality that Bill

Haley and the Comets, as well as signifying teenage rebellion, was a successful

product of the then burgeoning popular music industry, Giroux’s elemental vision of

the ‘‘pleasure, knowledge and desire’’ of life outside school is underpinned by brands,

labels, cash, and commerce. Over a decade later today’s children live in an era in

which not only has the marketization of education become firmly established, but

commercially produced media culture has become ever present in everyday life.

Educational researchers have long been interested in how young people engage

with the media and popular culture and to explore how this is bound up with

affiliations, identities, and pleasures (Buckingham, 2000; Howard, 1998; Kenway &

Bullen, 2001; Sefton-Green, 1998). The continuation and development of those

concerns into the appraisal of how young people use new media, however, has been

complicated by the acknowledgement that ICT is now central to both formal

education and popular culture, making the divisions between school, leisure, work,

commercial, and domestic spaces more permeable. This has in turn arguably made

the idea of ‘‘informal learning’’ (and the elevated view of popular cultural texts and

technologies it implies) more compelling and contributed to a more extended view of

literacies. Internationally, the advent of multimedia and internet-connected personal

computers has forced the field of literacy education to grapple with an expanded

concept of literacy that includes notions of ‘‘new’’, ‘‘multiple’’, and ‘‘multimodal’’

literacies (see, for example, Alvermann, 2002; Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Gee, 2003;

Hawisher & Selfe, 2000; Kress, 2003; Lankshear, Gee, Knobel, & Searle, 1997;

Lankshear & Knobel, 2003; Snyder, 1997). A key issue has been how to research and

theorize changing forms of text, meaning-making and communication associated

with online environments in which people are literate in a variety of semiotic domains

(Hagood, Leander, Luke, Mackey & Nixon, 2003).

Within the field of education more generally, whether informal learning is seen

as something irreconcilably distinct from the formal curriculum and productive

either of conflict or creative tension or as part of an undiscriminating continuum,

one sector of a sphere incorporating school, home, and leisure spaces and activities,

it is readily accepted that popular culture and the media are central to it

388 S. Atkinson and H. Nixon

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(Buckingham, 2000; Sefton-Green, 2003). Informal learning as it takes place

through television, the popular press, or new media has consequently become the

topic of increasing academic research, books, and journal articles (Sefton-Green,

2004). For the most part these have prioritized the user’s perspective to gain a better

understanding of how the media is experienced, how social and cultural meanings are

made through engagement with texts and practices, and then to see how these feed

into ideas of informal learning and its associated literacies (see Sefton-Green, 2004).

What this emphasis has tended to sideline, however, is an examination of the evolving

context in which new media culture is being produced and the ways in which this

context in turn constructs children and youth as social subjects who engage with that

culture. In this paper we hope to contribute to the educational research literature

which foregrounds the values and power relations embedded in what is made

available to young users of digital media. We do this by considering some of the ways

the economic imperatives, power relations, and promotional and business practices

associated with commercial media online shape the informal learning experiences of

young, school-aged people.

A major difficulty in researching these questions in theory and practice is that new

media are rapidly changing and difficult to fix for the purposes of close study. In a

sense their newness has remained a constant, a condition characterized by the

accelerating speed with which hardware and software are superseded, and they

continue to be bound up in discussions of future potential rather than just analysis of

established use patterns and effects, even while some of their uses bear similarities to

those of other, older media. Likewise, the World Wide Web is neither easily defined

nor researched. It is a social space, a place in which a good deal of ‘‘information

trading’’ is conducted (Jones, 1999), and a volatile territory of discursive struggle

between those who want cultural participation, access and code to be free and open

and those corporate interests that seek legal protection for their property rights (see

Lessig, 2004; Poster, 2004). At the same time, since the mid 1990s the web has

become an increasingly commercially saturated context for content, communication

practices, meaning-making, and identity and community formation. This is not just a

matter of commercial and corporate interests seeking to exploit the medium for

profit. Rather, the development of ICT and the web is by now thoroughly associated

with the market and the creation and supply of consumer demand. The rapid

supersedence of computer and web technology, for example, is itself a relation of the

strategic market value of obsolescence and the business projections that help

determine the shape of things to come. In the current climate ICT and the web

are both becoming more mobile and more concerned with the delivery, via

broadband, of content to subscribers. This emphasis on content and the consequent

allocation of a greater bandwidth to downstreaming at the expense of users’ access to

upstream capacity has led to the claim that the web is on the way to becoming

another broadcast medium dominated by the relationship between producer and

audience (Roscoe, 1999; Tseng & Eischen, 2003).

Teens Online @ ninemsn 389

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Locating the Subject

Our starting point is derived from a seemingly straightforward but easily overlooked

premise: that informal learning sites, technologies, texts, and literacies in consumer

economies are significantly shaped in response to market forces and the discourses

that support them. Further to this, the paper pays particular attention to the media

and popular cultural enterprises’ own research and development agendas and the

discursive construction of the cultural spaces, texts, products, consumers, and

audiences that result from them. In our view these forces and discourses deserve

close attention within education because of the regular engagement that many

school-aged children have with them.

Like academic research, market research goes well beyond the empiricism of polls

and questionnaires to deal in identities, aspirations, and cultural and generational

affinities. New media corporations have been particularly active in their application

of ethnographic research methods to the fundamental problem, that experienced by

all broadcast media (see Ang, 1991; Scannell, 2000), of accumulating knowledge

about their audiences. In the case of commercial media this is ultimately used to

package users, or consumers, as commodities for advertisers. One of the ways

commercial web portals set out to make the needs, desires, and motivations of

visitors to the site more tangible is to produce fictional representations of what are

deemed to be ‘‘typical’’ members of each targeted market sector. These ideal

subjects, or ‘‘personas’’, help website designers, content producers, and online

advertisers to better imagine their target audience and therefore determine the

appropriate mode of address. Personas, in Althusserian terms, facilitate the process

of ‘‘interpellation’’, thereby allowing otherwise unknown and invisible visitors to a

site to be ‘‘hailed’’ and positioned as ‘‘concrete subjects’’ (Althusser, 1971). As a

consequence, the subject positions available to the young users of commercial

websites are also, in part, determined by the discourses that contribute to the

creation of those sites. In the case of ninemsn, the particular commercial web portal

that will be looked at here, the preferred position and orientation established for

users is that of the ‘‘‘subject of consumption’, the individual who is imagined and

acted upon by the imperative to consume’’ (Miller & Rose, 1997, p. 144). It cannot

be assumed that young people will automatically take up these subject positions or

imagined that the possibilities for agency are weak in the face of such elaborately

conceived structures. Yet, by placing limits on what is offered and by basing these

limits on the knowledge claims of market research, commercial websites construct

parameters that constitute the micro-contexts and preconditions of the web user’s

engagement with the site.

There are notable parallels between educational research that seeks to establish

knowledge about young people as the subjects of learning in studies of their

engagement with new media and that carried out by media companies which

‘‘interpellates’’ teenage web users as subjects of consumption. As we have noted,

some of the research methods used, for example, are alike, even if their agendas are

often in opposition. In addition, both are equally complicated by uncertainties about


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the coherence of their particular categorizations of ‘‘teenagers’’ or ‘‘young people’’;

both hail the young web user/consumer and therefore to some extent predetermine

findings by fixing their respondents as concrete subjects. To adapt Raymond

Williams’ (1961, p. 289) caution about the reification of ‘‘the masses’’, however,

there are no such things as teenagers, only ways of thinking about people as

teenagers. As heuristically useful as such constructions may be, extrapolating

generalities from closely examined samples or identifying specific characteristics

from a field too cursorily observed risks obfuscating both diversity (and therefore the

particularities of contexts, groups, and individuals within broad categories) and any

shared commonalities across categories. This paper does not attempt to assess the

relative truth or otherwise of ninemsn’s constructions of the ‘‘young ninemsn user’’,

nor does it presume to suggest that young web users accept ninemsn’s invitation to

occupy the subject positions offered to them; research shows that children engage

with and appropriate media culture in different and often unpredictable ways (see,

for example, Buckingham, 1993, 2000; Marsh, 2005; Mitchell & Reid-Walsh, 2002).

Rather, we focus on the ways in which a popular and financially successful

commercial web site discursively animates an image of the teenage subject of

consumption and consider how those representations and the impetus for them, i.e.

the site’s quest for advertising revenue, might work alongside other factors to shape

the experiences of its young users.

ninemsn.com

ninemsn is a 50/50 joint venture between the ‘‘new media’’ arm of the Australia-

based Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd (PBL), the company headed by media baron

Kerry Packer, and the international software giant Microsoft, whose MSN

messenger and Hotmail are among Australia’s, and the world’s, most widely used

communication software programs. It is also an amalgam of old and new media

forms and their audiences, readerships, and communities of users. Since its official

launch in March 1998 ninemsn has become, according to the media and market

research organization ACNielsen/NetRatings, Australia’s most popular web portal,

with an estimated 704,000 visitors to the site daily, a figure that constitutes 74%

of Australians using the web each day and 77% of those aged between 14 and

17 years. As an integrated media portal ninemsn has proven successful on all

counts. Despite a slow start in terms of revenue from advertising, in 2004 it returned

its first significant profit.

Like PBL, Microsoft, which first made its fortune with desktop operating software,

is also a relative newcomer to the online world. Until the late 1990s the Internet

browser market, for example, was dominated by Netscape, and Microsoft’s

Explorer struggled for market share until Version 4 was launched with Windows

98. The key to Explorer’s eventual market dominance was that from Windows 98

onwards Explorer was thoroughly integrated into the operating software, making it

extremely difficult, if not impossible, for users to run other browsers. It also


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meant that people wishing to upgrade to new versions of Explorer as they became

available could not do so without purchasing new operating software. These issues

led to complaints and law suits against the anti-competitive practices of the

company. Both Microsoft and PBL have in their own ways vigorously defended

their proprietary market dominance against incursions by smaller competitors. Their

corporatist urge to monopolize has also placed them in opposition to alternative

views of the web that emphasize openness and diversity whether valorized in the

form of open source operating software and peer-to-peer file sharing programs or

through the ethos and aesthetic of anti-hierarchical participation in cultural

production and distribution.

It is significant in this light that ninemsn’s launch roughly coincided with the

Australian Federal government’s announcement of its digital broadcasting policy,

which gave incumbent television networks, of which PBL’s Channel 9 is the largest

and most profitable, a 10 year monopoly on digital television broadcasting and

allocated the bulk of available bandwidth to the development and transmission of

widescreen high definition TV (HDTV). This was seen by many as further evidence

of Kerry Packer’s political influence and as a victory for the nexus of political

conservativism and established media corporations over the more radical and

pluralist promise of the interactive digital age. Since then the continuing expansion

in bandwidth and downstreaming capacity and consequent improvements in the

quality of audio-visual streaming has even begun to outpace developments in

computer processing speed. This, in connection with the escalating consumer uptake

of broadband services, places ninemsn in an enviable position to capitalize on the

imminent boom in Internet broadcasting and to more thoroughly integrate its

television, publishing, and web services.

While the aim of ninemsn may have been to take commercial advantage of this

long awaited ‘‘convergence’’ between the media and new digital communications

technologies*/the ‘‘superhighway’’ named in the 1990s but conceived in the early

1970s*/in its current state the site seems largely geared to complement television

programs broadcast on Channel 9 and to act as an adjunct to Australian

Consolidated Press (ACP, a subsidiary of PBL) magazine titles, rather than as an

overarching web presence. This suggests that ninemsn also evolved in response to

Channel 9’s perceived need to compete with the Internet for the audience’s

attention. In many ways ninemsn presents an example of the ‘‘remediation’’ (Bolter

& Grusin, 1999) or ‘‘webification’’ of ‘‘old’’ media values and the transfer of an

established corporate style and commercial attitude towards the audience from old

mass media to new digital media. ninemsn thus epitomizes one view of commercial

web portals as the free-to-air television networks of the future, one-stop-shops

fostering consumer loyalty and gathering mainstream audience communities around

its content and services to sell on to advertisers. It also confirms that the dichotomy

between old and new media has become far less distinct than was once frequently

asserted, something that is particularly noticeable in TV websites’ conceptualization

of the audience and the persistence online ‘‘of offline modes of audience address’’

(Siapera, 2004, p. 156). As Eugenia Siapera noted, the web presence of television


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networks is engaged ‘‘in an attempt to rewrite the digital under its own terms, to

impose its own televisual mode onto the as-yet undecided internet mode, to shape it

after its own image’’ (p. 168).

In keeping with this, it is telling that Microsoft programs accessed through the site

are also promoted to advertisers as vehicles, or literally ‘‘programmes’’ in the

broadcast television sense of the word, for their messages. Thus, in the literature

addressed to potential advertisers an application like MSN Messenger is described as

being analogous to a high rating television programme like Neighbours or Friends ; a

gathering point for considerable numbers of people, an audience who although

diverse, have this thing in common, they all gravitate to the one interface, the one

venue for the messages of sponsors.

Furthermore, although MSN and other communication programs are available for

use at any time of the day or week, the idea of ‘‘prime time’’ or peak hours is also as

much as possible translated to traffic on the web, evincing a similar range of

advertising premiums, with the added advantage for prospective advertisers that the

total group of users can be more precisely subdivided according to age and gender

Figure 1. Taj: 14�/17 year old boy. From ninemsn media centre (http://mediacentre.ninemsn.

com.au/mediacentre/why_buy/persona2.aspx) Reproduced with the permission of ninemsn

Pty Limited


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through the determination of particular use patterns for each category. This suggests

the potential to schedule advertisers’ messages and synchronize them in accordance

with the habits of their target market. Information available on the site makes it clear

that where users go within the site is potentially only as important as when they go

there. For example, with regard to school-aged young people, prospective advertisers

who visit the ‘‘Personas’’ page on the ‘‘Media Centre’’ site attached to ninemsn are

invited to ‘‘click here to see when teenager Taj is online and what he is doing’’ (Media

Centre, 2004a). There they find out that he logs on to MSN at 5.00 pm to advise a

friend with a technical problem (see Figure 1). ‘‘Georgia’’, on the other hand,

representative of the ‘‘tween’’ audience, chats at 7.30 am ‘‘with a couple of girlfriends

from school on MSN Messenger about a school project that is due today’’ and at

4.00 pm is ‘‘back on MSN Messenger to chat with her friends and hang out on

Dolly’’ (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Georgia: 8�/13 year old girl. From ninemsn media centre (http://mediacentre.ninemsn.

com.au/mediacentre/why_buy/persona1.aspx) Reproduced with the permission of ninemsn

Pty Limited


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Fixing the Subject

In marketing and design, especially of ICT and software interfaces, it has become

common in the earliest stages of the design process to create ‘‘personas’’ or ‘‘user

archetypes’’,1 such as Taj and Georgia, as a way of more precisely identifying and

categorizing target users, their tastes and habits. Personas are detailed representa-

tions of ideal consumers derived from quantitative and ethnographic market research

that are initially used to provide a central focus for what are often very large teams of

workers charged with the accomplishment of disparate tasks. However, far from

simply functioning as common anchor points and ‘‘a shared basis for communica-

tion’’ (Pruitt & Grudin, 2003, p. 3), once created personas begin to assume a

tangible presence of their own as active consumers-to-be of the product or web site

on the drawing board: they are given names, faces, goals, and behaviours to put flesh

on data and to encourage workers engaged in IT design and programming to think

more carefully about how to best satisfy the needs and desires of particular market or

audience sectors.

Dominant paradigms for thinking about the web that emphasize the fragmentation

of the audience or market and the potential for interactivity between groups and

individuals have been the cause of equal measures of anxiety and hope among those

seeking to exploit its commercial potential. Promoters of e-commerce, for example,

stress that success in the field pivots on responsiveness to the suggestions,

complaints, and requests of consumers and the willingness to personalize services

offered through the development of individual customer profiles. In line with this,

advocates of persona use argue that it is always better to design for a specific user

than for everyone and anyone in general: while once managers of traditional

broadcast networks might have advised their producers to remain aware of the

diversity in unity that comprised the television audience (see Ang, 1991) or the

‘‘constellation of individuals’’ out there listening to their radios in an array of

locations (Scannell, 2000, p. 10), the atomized web demands an even more

multifaceted approach: dispersal amongst a cornucopia of choices and the often

seemingly solitary practices of individual users alone in front of computer screens

make any kind of generalization far more difficult to sustain. At the same time market

and academic research into media use has attempted to deal with the notion that not

only are audience members ‘‘active’’ consumers, they now have the potential to be

‘‘interactive’’ consumers.

The invention of personas takes ‘‘imagining the audience’’ to another level that is

at once more acutely focused and more elaborately fictional. For some the fictive

element is precisely the point: well-wrought personas emerge from the fertile

confluence of objective social research and the creative imagination. Their successful

use is claimed as an indication of the effectiveness of well-researched fiction to

generate insights and assist designers to think more empathetically about how people

use products and media in the ‘‘real world’’ (see Pruitt & Grudin, 2003). Alan

Cooper (1999), the designer widely acknowledged as the first to promote the use of

personas as design tools, sees them as a pathway to ‘‘sanity’’, as a way of designing


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technologies and interfaces that facilitate the realization of people’s goals rather than

frustrating them. They are also claimed to democratize the process of design because

they are based on the creation of a virtual feedback loop between user and designer

that ensures technology is more accountable, accessible, enjoyable, and rewarding.

Technology is not ‘‘dehumanizing’’, he says, IT designers are. Personas are

proclaimed as a way of reminding designers that the users of their designs are

people. He described them, and their unearthing, as follows:

Personas are not real people, but they represent them throughout the design

process. They are hypothetical archetypes of actual users. Although they are

imaginary, they are defined with significant rigor and precision. Actually, we

don’t so much ‘‘make up’’ our personas as discover them as a by-product of the

investigation process. . . . Personas are defined by their goals. Goals, of course, are

defined by their personas. (Cooper, 1999, p. 124; original emphasis)

Goals, Cooper claimed, are pivotal to a designer’s ability to think personas into

being, just as the motivations of characters are the key to an actor’s entry into their

roles. Indeed, the way designers animate personas by incorporating them into

elaborate scenarios in which they are followed through their use of the software or

product being designed was likened by Cooper and others to ‘‘method acting’’.

Designers get inside and ‘‘inhabit’’ their personas, temporarily becoming them,

thereby allowing ‘‘them’’, after a self-fulfilling, circuitous logic, to determine their

own goals: ‘‘. . . knowing what he [sic] knows and feeling his feelings. We try to think

the way our persona thinks. We forget our own education, ability, training and tools,

and imagine ourselves as having his background instead’’ (Cooper, 1999, p. 179).

Personas then are imagined into being, after which their creators ‘‘adopt’’ them,

wearing them like masks and speaking through them. When designers have become

sufficiently well acquainted with their personas they feel confident enough to

intuitively know how they will behave in almost any given scenario. John Pruitt and

Jonathon Grudin, who oversaw the design of the MSN personas, put it this way:

‘‘Well-crafted personas are generative: once fully engaged with them, you can almost

effortlessly project them into new situations . . . we do this kind of extrapolation all

the time, we are skilled at it*/not perfect, but very skilled’’ (Pruitt & Grudin, 2003,

p. 12). In contrast to recent reassessments of academic research methods and

theoretical approaches in the humanities and social sciences, correct persona use in

marketing and design is expressly about the complete erasure of the researcher from

the process and the total reification of the subject. Properly following the steps

outlined in the Persona creation and usage toolkit (Olsen, 2004), for example, claims to

‘‘Allow you and your team to live and breathe your users’ world as if they were a close

friend or part of the family’’ and to:

Allow you as a designer to filter out your own personal quirks (or those of real users

that you interviewed) and focus instead on behaviours and motivations that are

typical of a broader range of users, while still being able to relate to users as

individuals. (Olsen, 2004, p. 1)


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There are striking parallels here with critical anthropologist Michael Taussig’s (1993)

exploration of the mimetic faculty and his discussion of the ‘‘magic of mimesis’’

employed by ethnography to construct knowledge of its subjects: ‘‘granting the copy

the character and power of the original, the representation the power of the

represented’’ (p. xviii). He asked:

Can’t we say that to give an example, to instantiate, to be concrete , are all examples of

the magic of mimesis wherein the replication, the copy, acquires the power of the

represented? . . . If I am correct in making this analogy with what I take to be the

magician’s art of reproduction, then the model, if it works, gains through its

sensuous fidelity something of the power and personality of that of which it is a

model. (1993, p.16; original emphasis)

The channelling, medium- or shaman-like, of personas then casts design as a dialogic

process whereby designers make decisions based on imagined interactions with

archetypes assembled from the results of ethnographic market research. In so doing

the ethereal, elusive user is made certain and concrete and becomes, in effect,

embedded in the final design. In the words of one advocate of their benefits,

‘‘personas help define the product by replacing the abstract, elastic user with the

vibrant presence of a specific user who becomes part of the design process’’ (Sinha,

2003, p. 1).

The shaping of personas, Cooper noted, is a precise and rigorous art. It is also

somewhat idolatrous. Persona designers insist that although hypothetical (not

withstanding that they may often be based directly on people actually encountered

during forays into the field), personas should be spoken of or written about as if they

are real, addressed on a first name basis, described as if they are familiars

(Freydenson, 2002). In this way, harking back to Taussig, a persona acquires a

‘‘sensuous fidelity [and] something of the power and personality of that of which it is

a model’’. Or, in the words of a spokesperson for ninemsn:

We try to understand an audience through numbers, charts and graphs, but often

times we lose sight of the people who are represented by these statistics. The

ninemsn audience is comprised of a broad range of users at different stages of their

lives, who use ninemsn in their own unique way. To help better define the people

behind the numbers, ninemsn has created personas for some key audience

segments.

It is through this process of reconstitution, from ‘‘numbers, charts, and graphs’’, that

tween Georgia (8�/13 years), teenager Taj (14�/17 years), single professional

Sonia (20�/29 years), married mum Kath (35�/44 years), married businessman Mike

(35�/49 years), and retiree Ron (55�/ years) all came into being. Their goals have

subsequently played a part in determining how the ninemsn site looks and functions.

But, importantly, these personas, as with those of other enterprises, outlive the

design process to serve a second function as representatives of the audience in

promotional literature directed at advertisers. Personas thus serve a dual but related

purpose: to assist with the design of content and interfaces by standing as

representatives of the target audience and to act as representatives of consumers to


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attract advertisers and their revenue. At the same time they shape the kinds of texts

and discourses made available to teen web users and promote and legitimate certain

cultural practices and not others. However, it should be remembered that the

assertion of particular characteristics and demands inherent to the categories

teenager and tween is largely for the benefit of discourses and practices positioned

outside those categories and they may not constitute the primary source of

identification for people actually falling within those age groups. Rebekah Willett

(2003), for example, in her study of the construction of the ‘‘digital tween’’,

noted that not only did the 11�/12 year old girls participating in her research not

self-identify as tweens, although they recognized that they occupied a cultural

position between children and teenagers, they actively rejected the tastes and

behaviours regularly attributed to the category. Other researchers agree that even

when young users do take up what the media offer them, it is often deployed in ways

that are unpredictable and transgressive (see, for example, Buckingham, 1993, 2000;

Mitchell & Reid-Walsh, 2002).

Teens Online

‘‘Taj’’ is presented to prospective advertisers as a typical teenage ninemsn user, a

representative standing for the many, ‘‘one of the 700,000 kids aged 14�/17’’

(333,000 of them boys) who ‘‘visit the ninemsn network each month’’ and whose

practices, attitudes, habits, and preferences suggest features and a trajectory that can

be targeted now. Indeed, to hesitate, the tone of the call to advertisers infers, would

risk missing out on a ‘‘pivotal’’ opportunity. Taj is an online advertiser’s dream and

confirmation of rapid changes to the media marketplace.

Taj is at the pivotal point in his life where he is beginning to define his brand

affinities. He is savvy, and sees the Internet as an advanced communication and

entertainment medium. He is a light user of traditional media sources. (Media

Centre, 2004b)

Just as the changing nature of traditional media sources and their uses, through

convergence with digital networks was the impetus behind ninemsn’s creation, Taj is

the product of attempts to come to terms with a shifting conceptualization of the

audience. While the ‘‘mass audience’’ for the ‘‘mass media’’ may have always been a

convenient fiction, it has become still less plausible in light of the post-Fordist

marketing paradigms of segmentation and audience niches and the amplification of

media choices. The turn to personas is indicative of the recognition that audiences

and consumers are diverse, gathering, at best, as segments and affinity groups.

Market research undertaken in relation to ninemsn’s ‘‘youth’’ audience covers people

aged 14�/24 years. However, the 14�/17 year olds in that group are constructed as

being very significant for online advertisers because market research shows that

significant numbers in that age range do not regularly read newspapers, listen to

commercial radio, or watch more than 2 hours television a day. In contrast, ‘‘72% of


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all 14�/17 year olds access the Internet weekly or more’’ and, therefore, ‘‘youth hard

to reach on traditional media may be accessible on ninemsn’’ (ninemsn, 2004b).

Research for ninemsn is precisely an attempt to track and predict the increasingly

uncertain habits of particular sectors of the audience in order to present advertisers

with new market intelligence and new, more precisely defined consumer targets,

defining them, ideally, as precisely as Taj and his peers define their own ‘‘brand

affinities’’. In connection with this, the role of forecasting future trends has become

huge business with massive databases, finances, and computer programs dedicated to

projecting where Taj and those like him will be next so that media, communications,

and marketing companies can be there to greet them. In contrast, tween Georgia is a

younger consumer who is beginning to define and fix her own media interests and

brand affinities; ‘‘she has grown up with the Internet and is just beginning to

experiment for herself ’’ (see Figure 2). As ‘‘over 440,000 tweens visit the ninemsn

network, [and] over 225,000 of these girls are like Georgia’’, advertisers targeting this

demographic are keen to pay for exposure to the 8�/13-year-old audience.

Taj, typical of many models of young people’s engagement with the media, is

described as ‘‘savvy’’ (see Figure 1). This renders him a knowable but ‘‘knowing’’ and

challenging target. At the same time it paints him in more idealized shades that draw

attention to his willing and ‘‘active’’ participation in the consumer market and the

way he has incorporated online media into his everyday life. As David Buckingham

(2000, p. 105) noted, the ‘‘sentimentalisation’’ of young media users as savvy and

‘‘active’’ is favoured by media companies; perhaps because it is the antidote to the

other, opposed sentimental construction which sees children as innocent and

therefore vulnerable to, and requiring protection from, the predations of the market

and the media that drive it. ninemsn is, along a similar tangent, also keen to establish

that it is part of a daily routine which, importantly, contributes to, rather than

detracts from, young people’s school attendance and homework. Taj uses ninemsn

sensibly and responsibly, for leisure pursuits like playing games and chatting to

friends, but never at the expense of the demands of his formal education. This is

made more explicit in the case of Georgia, whose ninemsn use works in concert with

a responsible attitude to school. In the morning she chats to friends on MSN in order

to exchange information about a school project, while in the evening she ‘‘uses

ninemsn Search to research her latest school project’’. Despite these explicit

references, in Taj and Georgia’s daily schedules school features predominantly as a

blank space between the hours of 7.30 am and 3 pm. Whether this is deemed to be by

choice or as a result of adult supervision is not made clear, but it nevertheless

functions as an assurance of ninemsn’s benign objectives.

The attribution of savviness also suggests Taj is worldly wise and difficult to dupe,

the diametric opposite of the passive consumer, the disavowed dream of advertisers

and bane of media theory. To capture the attention of a savvy youth, advertisers

are called upon to address consumers in a more direct and involving manner, to

produce self-reflexive campaigns that acknowledge Taj’s knowingness and scepticism

of the familiar tropes and strategies of advertising and to thereby construct


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‘‘more meaningful connections between brands and their customers’’ (ninemsn,

2004a, p. 19).

The tension between an acknowledged uncertainty about the knowing subject and

the desperate need to claim knowledge of him or her can be considered a strength

and weakness of the use of personas. While for designers personas may offer the

secure fiction of a stationary target, this sits uneasily with the recognition that people,

especially ‘‘savvy’’ young people, use online media in a fluid, ‘‘elastic’’ way that is

always subject to change (see ninemsn, 2004b). ‘‘Mass media’’, the ninemsn

document Creating consumer connections claimed, ‘‘is linear . . . whereas online is

elastic’’ (p. 25). This use of the metaphor of elasticity is at odds with the one

employed by persona designers to describe a too ‘‘rubbery’’, poorly realized image of

the projected consumer, one that can, they suggest, be stabilized by the use of a

persona. The contradiction is that by diminishing the elasticity of the subject, by

making it concrete, a major, perhaps the major, rhetorical feature of the subject’s

assumed behaviour from another perspective is ignored. At the same time then, there

is the risk of an over-determination and a deformation of the subject deriving from

the designers’ agendas and goals and those of the corporate enterprise.

Hailing the Interactive Consumer

Any attempt to fix the image of the web user, especially the savvy young web user,

remains somewhat anathema to other common descriptions in which he or she, far

from ever being concrete, stable, or predictable, resembles nothing so much as a

disembodied blur in a state of almost constant motion. Motion and links, as Shields

noted, are fundamental to the ‘‘ontology of the web’’ (Shields, 2000, p. 145; cited in

Bell, 2001, p. 190) and, we might add, of its users. Early attempts to map web use

and interconnections between sites and networks of users and online communities

were an acknowledgement of this. Communication between Internet users through

e-mail, Instant Relay Chat (IRC), listserves, and bulletin boards and movement

through cyberspace (‘‘surfing’’), utilizing such features as hyperlinks, demands a new

way of visualizing communities of affinity and practice and their release from the

physical anchorage of shared geographical space.

In thinking about digital, computer-based media such practices are frequently

collapsed into the concept of interactivity, with its potential to erase distinctions

between text and practice, audience and producer, and to render each coordinate

on the network equal to others in a non-hierarchical web of relationships. Yet

‘‘interactivity’’, as a number of commentators have noted, always poorly defined and

under-theorized (Bucy, 2004), has come to stand for a whole range of processes,

many of which are far removed from the democratizing, emancipatory potential

sometimes claimed for it. For Lev Manovich (1996), for example, much interactivity

in the new media, whether between users and software interfaces or users and

networks like that constructed by ninemsn, is ‘‘totalitarian’’ because it seeks to

absorb users and their practices into its system while at the same time objectifying


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and delimiting thought processes and creativity by equating them with hyperlinks or

reducing them to a series of pre-programmed point-and-click options in a menu. For

Manovich what is presented as open access and participation more closely resembles

co-option and the ‘‘externalisation of mental life’’. For many others discussion of

interactivity has necessitated the development of a typology of degree that locates it

along a sliding scale with mediated person-to-person exchanges at one end and such

things as responding to an online poll at the other.

This continuum, however, is unhelpful when it comes to assessing forms of

interactivity intended to accumulate data and produce commercially or politically

useful knowledge of ‘‘interactees’’. In conjunction with this, for Stromer-Galley

(2004) the term interactivity has come to essentially describe two distinct but often

conflated phenomena. The first, more politically (writ large) potent, position

pertains to mediated communication between people. Interactivity between people

presumes a level of mutuality and responsiveness, factors that are missing from

the second type of interactivity, which relates more specifically to communication

between people and computers or networks. In this form of interactivity commu-

nicative relations are never entirely reciprocal and the level and range of

opportunities for interaction afforded by a web site’s design, for example, is

taken as a measure of its functionality. In some cases, through web sites’ use of

‘‘cookies’’ for example, users’ interactions with networks are performed entirely

automatically, without their conscious intention or knowledge. Stromer-Galley

categorized these two phenomena as ‘‘interactivity-as-process’’ and ‘‘interactivity-

as-product’’, respectively. While there has been some criticism of the usefulness of

these categories for the purposes of a growing field of interactivity studies (see Bucy,

2004), they resonate well with the sorts of tensions at work in the subject positions

we are describing here.

Conflation between the two main types of interactivity identified by Stromer-

Galley is perpetuated in ninemsn literature, which claims that ‘‘interactive digital

campaigns . . . enable a two-way dialogue between brands and consumers’’, as if to

propose the participation of consumers in advertising campaigns and product design.

Whether this is something to celebrate or something to be suspicious of is dependent

on one’s view of the agenda behind such an endeavour: whether it is primarily seen to

benefit the consumer by contributing to the identification of specific areas for change

or improvement, perhaps even to the satisfaction of individualized demands and

needs, for example, or whether such information is seen to primarily aid the

corporation initiating the ‘‘dialogue’’ by increasing market or political control at

the expense of that of the consumer or citizen. This may constitute the dialectic of

this form of interactivity and of its subject, between the user’s (or consumer’s or

citizen’s) ability to choose and the provider’s determination of the choices available

wherein the user is simultaneously ‘‘subject’’ and ‘‘subject-to’’.

These tensions exist similarly in the commercially motivated advocacy of

interactivity and the information gathering it facilitates. The opportunities for

interactivity promoted to ninemsn users as a way for them to make a personal

contribution to the site are simultaneously, in the site’s ‘‘Media Centre’’ section,


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presented to advertisers as a way of accumulating information about individual

consumers and audience sectors. Interactivity has a particular commercial utility for

the company or organization behind a web site, because it enables the site, via the

download, the competition, the online poll, or the feedback form, to be an effective

central point for amassing and tallying the data received with each interaction.

Interactivity is thus promoted by ninemsn on both sides of the portal screen,

‘‘as-process’’ to users and ‘‘as-product’’ to clients. In the site’s FAQ to advertisers, for

example, we find the following question and answer:

Q: Do you sell e-mail databases?A: We do not sell databases. However, we can implement one for you through

competitions where entrants opt in for further information. We also havesubscribers who opt in to receive a wide range of newsletters that coveranything from travel to finance who you can target. (Media Centre, 2004c)2

For market and media analysts the web represents both a challenge and a promise,

because although it is representative of multimodality, transience, and the atomiza-

tion of the audience and the market, it is simultaneously a converged, centralized

point for a wide variety of media use and consumer activity. It therefore functions as

the perfect apparatus for tracking movements, purchases, interests, and trends.

Nielsen/NetRatings collects data on over 70% of all global Internet activity, a figure

unimaginable for any other discrete media use. Global companies such as The

Netherlands based VNU, which since 1999 has claimed AC Nielsen as one of its

subsidiaries, are poised at the pinnacle of a triumvirate between advertising agencies

and media enterprises, because they provide market research and ratings intelligence

to bolster confidence in the gambles of both. A major motivation for this has been the

need to track advertising expenditure and measure its efficacy. In order to do this on

the web it is the interactive consumer who is tracked and his or her habits and

proclivities logged. As related ninemsn literature notes:

At a time when marketing budgets are under close scrutiny, online has provenattractive to advertisers because it can be highly targeted and is measurable. A clickfrom an ad to an online travel agent to a Melbourne hotel and flight booking can allbe tracked. (ninemsn 2004a, p. 17)

The language and practices of surveillance that corporations apparently share with

the security state is another feature of the web that from one perspective seems to sit

uncomfortably with the freedom, participation, access, and community once more

typically offered to web users.

The Internet is the vehicle that typifies the range of choices now offered to media

users and the fluidity and unpredictability with which users can shift between

mediums, modes, platforms, and virtual destinations, clicking on links, making new

contacts, and responding to suggestions from friends and other media platforms.

This is acknowledged in ninemsn’s Media Centre slogan, ‘‘make the most of your

media mix with ninemsn’’, and in their claim that as ‘‘the number 1 online publisher’’

they ‘‘offer a variety of environments to reach youth, including ninemsn network,

Dolly, ninemsn mobile, Cleo, Cosmopolitan , music and MSN Messenger’’. This


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media mix is reflected in the activities engaged in by ninemsn’s young personas. For

example, Georgia uses MSN Messenger, ‘‘subscribes to the NW [New Weekly] email

newsletter’’ and ‘‘hangs out on Dolly’’ online because she is also a Dolly magazine

reader. Her older counterpart Taj plays games, downloads and listens to music,

follows up information presented on a television sports show, searches for the

solution to a computer problem and communicates this to his friend via MSN chat,

all in the course of one day, all through the Internet, and, naturally, all through

services provided by ninemsn.

ninemsn, by offering a single entry point for a whole gamut of these interconnected

products and services, and their associated ‘‘new literacies’’ (see Lankshear &

Knobel, 2003), has been constructed not merely for the convenience of web users

but as a bottleneck through which consumers from multiple segments of the web

audience can be corralled for the benefit of advertisers, both as a source of audience

for their messages and as a way of more precisely tracking and ‘‘profiling’’ their

behaviour and ‘‘brand affinities’’. This then can be seen as a way of girding the World

Wide Web, temporarily reconstituting an audience from its scattered elements and

empathic unions, by constructing a virtual arena in which to contain, tag, and

register web users who pass through it no matter their niche or sector.

Conclusion

Like other media, the web has the capacity to provide stories and symbolic forms that

educate people about how to buy, consume, negotiate, and value commodities and

services (see, for example, Collins, 1989; Featherstone, 1991; Kellner, 1995; Lury,

1996; Seiter, 1995). In the process it offers teens, ‘‘single mums’’, and retirees alike

characters and textual forms ‘‘out of which plots can be formed of imagined lives’’

(Appadurai, 1990, p. 299). As we have discussed, it is not only web users who are

offered these narrative pathways. Interestingly, in the packaging of consumers as

commodities the media provide online advertisers with constructions and stories that

are uncanny reflections of those offered to users. With the production of ‘‘personas’’

media companies fashion ideal subjects and scenarios that allow advertisers to

pinpoint and address their targeted consumers. However, prior to this personas are

fundamental to the process of designing the site and they are, therefore, instrumental

in the formulation of the subject positions users are invited to occupy: these subject

positions are the spaces left by personas once the site has been constructed around

them. Personas like Georgia and Taj can be envisaged as poised, janus faced, at the

keystone of the portal looking both ways toward subject-as-consumer/user and

subject-as-commodity.

While the images used to promote both sets of positions, those for users and those

for advertisers, may appear superficially identical to one another, there is an

underlying discursive tension between the ‘‘subjects of consumption’’ presented to

advertisers and the identities and subject positions offered to ‘‘users’’, especially

when considered in connection with other discourses of the web. Critically, this is


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because the notion of the interactive web ‘‘user’’ is conceptually at odds with that

of the consumer, the ‘‘read-only’’ recipient of content (Daley, cited in Lessig,

2004, p. 37). Mark Poster (2004) has noted that the whole idea of consumption

is problematized by the digital nature of the products on offer; products that are

not consumed, but uttered, read, listened to, watched, and very simply duplicated or

manipulated and redistributed. In reality, of course, consumption has never

been an inherently passive process with predictable outcomes for media companies

or academic researchers. The uses and meanings of all media and consumer

products are negotiated at points of reception and open to adaptation into a diversity

of contexts and practices. While not exceptional in this regard, this is a paradigm

that has received particular emphasis in discussions of new media. The challenge

they pose to established laws governing copyright and rights to distribution is

one feature of this, one that derives directly from new media’s extension of

wider access to the tools of production and transmission and the proliferation of

the range of uses (and abuses) that can consequently be applied to digital and

online cultural products. Corporations like ninemsn, and its constituent bodies PBL

and Microsoft, however, have remained resistant to this conceptual shift from

consumer to user.

The proposition that people ‘‘use’’ rather than ‘‘consume’’ the media activates the

possibility of a plethora of purposes and a restiveness that commercial enterprises like

ninemsn cannot, however they might try, totally control or account for. As we have

been careful to point out, actual child and teen media users do not necessarily take

up the subject positions and ‘‘plots of imagined lives’’ offered by the media. Indeed,

there are times when they actively play with and resist the constructions and

limitations imposed by some media forms. The claim to market knowledge is,

therefore, also problematically diminished by these uncertainties. The creation of

personas in the design phase of web portals like ninemsn can be seen as a generative

step in the circuit of knowledge production that allows users/consumers, via their

imagined representatives, to speak for themselves, thus purporting to fill the lacunae

of reliable information about who constitutes the market and the audience and what

they want. It is significant that such elaborate strategies for claiming knowledge of

the audience are generally commissioned by corporations that, in a counter-

trajectory to that attributed to audiences and niche markets, are becoming larger,

more monolithic and monopolistic, and more interested in solutions to marketing

and audience gathering problems that cater to the economies of their own

increasingly massive scale.

While ninemsn provides ample opportunities for interaction with the site and

movement through it, these opportunities are, as much as possible, calculable and

contained within the parameters of the portal, so that advertisers can be assured of a

steady stream of traffic back and forth past their messages. Interestingly, close

scrutiny of the links embedded in the ninemsn portal reveals that very few links, even

those that lead to sites for ventures that are not directly part of ninemsn’s interests,

although hosted by them, lead to other, potentially competing, sites or portals. While

there is no guarantee that users will keep to these pathways, with search engines,


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‘‘favourites’’, and the address bar beckoning it is fair to say that the paradigms of

borderlessness and movement are not ones warmly embraced by ninemsn’s modus

operandi, any more than channel surfing has been welcomed by television networks

(Ang, 1991).

Although traces of personas can be found embedded in ninemsn’s design, they

are currently visible primarily as a feature of the site’s ‘‘media centre’’, where they

are used to appeal to advertisers, to say ‘‘this is a typical member of your target

market, this is what they do and when’’. In performing this function these images

and descriptions continue to determine and place limits on the products, narratives,

and symbolic forms on offer. What this means for young users of the site is

impossible to say with any certainty. There is nothing to suggest that the subject

positions indicated by personas are ‘‘irresistible’’. The prevalence of alternative

subject positions and interpellations ensure that those of ninemsn and other similar

portals are not without competition, both from online sources and other media. Yet

commercial sites like ninemsn have become, if we are to believe the ratings, an

increasingly significant part of young people’s engagement with online media and

important contributors to the overall discursive context of the web and the activities

of its users.

While the chasm described by Henry Giroux at the beginning of this paper

between the discourses of popular culture and those of formal curricula may have

narrowed in terms of content and technology, it remains for schools to come to terms

with the increasingly commercialized aspect of the lives of students outside its gates.

The market actively promotes many of the subject positions offered to young

school-aged people and these in turn play a part in determining how students go

about occupying those offered by schools. If informal and formal learning are to be

properly incorporated into a total view of education that is life-long and not limited

by institutional parameters, the role of the market in determining many of its features

needs to be more thoroughly examined and negotiated. But what form should this

negotiation take? On the one hand the market discourses that hail subjects

of consumption may appear to challenge and contradict those of formal education.

Yet the refusal to engage on those grounds only serves to cut schools off from

the dynamic processes that circulate through political life, culture, and the media

in capitalist consumer societies and thus renders them and their students less

equipped to participate in the development of those spheres through productive and

critical interaction.

In our view there is no option but for schools to make the ‘‘changing landscape of

communication’’ (Kress, 1997) a legitimate object of study. This requires paying

greater attention to the screen as a ‘‘new space of representation’’ (Kress, 1997) and

to online worlds as an integral part of the communicational webs in which young

people now participate (Beavis, Nixon, & Atkinson, 2005; Nixon, Atkinson, &

Beavis, in press). In a social context in which meaning is made through multiple

forms of semiosis, understanding how people ‘‘read’’ and ‘‘write’’ and communicate

using multimedia and online technologies is a key challenge for education. In this

paper we have concentrated on personas and the discursive construction of the tween


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and teen user on the ninemsn site. Our emphasis has been on the centrality of

commercial imperatives and processes to the discursive construction of particular

socio-cultural identities in an online environment. This is one aspect of website

production which we believe could legitimately and productively inform critical

approaches to the study of web sites in school curricula.

Useful guidance for teachers about how to do this kind of work is available from

the field of critical literacy (see, for example, Comber, 2003; Comber & Simpson,

2001; Luke, 2000), which focuses on who produced a text, what vested interests

they might have, what worldview they promote, and so on. However, the web both

is and is not like other ‘‘texts’’ available to be read and produced within schooling.

Moreover, the web both is and is more than sets of multimodal texts; it is also

crucially about social participation in forms of communication. Any critical

interrogation of the web requires the use of different and additional questions than

those familiar to most educators, or literacy educators at least (Kerin & Nixon,

2005). It requires, for example, a focus on the possibilities websites offer for

‘‘interaction’’ and cultural production and the ways in which they invite commu-

nication with site producers and other site users. As we have tried to point out in

the case of ninemsn, these possibilities are in turn shaped, at least in part, by the

ways in which web site producers imagine and construct their target audience.

Our goal has been to suggest that changing practices of online and cross-media

advertising, marketing, and promotion are key to this process and therefore need

to be taken seriously as both objects of educational research and material for

curriculum inquiry.

Notes

1. There would seem to be some resonance between the design and marketing communities’

understanding of the term and the Jungian sense of ‘‘persona’’, where it refers to the face an

individual presents to the world, a mask distinct from a deeper sense of self, and also to the

etymological origins of the word, ‘‘per sona’’ meaning to ‘‘sound through’’, as in the case of

an actor in character who speaks, whether literally or metaphorically, through a mask (see

Hartley, 1999, p. 14). Personas in each of these instances are presentations for the world of

appearances. This raises the related issue of perception. It could be argued that the tension

between how one is perceived and how one wishes to be perceived is a core problematic of

both academic ethnography and market research, one which further contributes to the

difficulty of determining the representativeness of samples.

2. The use of the verb to ‘‘opt in’’ places an emphasis on the voluntary and consenting nature of

the interaction, thereby allowing it to be considered a transaction or form of ‘‘transactivity’’

in which information is given in exchange for services or ‘‘further information’’. ninemsn’s

privacy policy underscores this understanding when it states that it will not disclose personal

information it collects unless (among other reasons) ‘‘We believe it necessary in order to

provide you with a service which you have requested’’ and ‘‘We will never share your

personal information with a third party or allow a third party to promote its products and

services directly to you without your explicit consent’’ (ninemsn privacy policy: http://

help.ninemsn.com.au/support/privacy.asp#4).


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locating the subject: teens online @ ninemsn

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