Why Starbucks Won’t [insert adjective here] Italian Coffee Culture

Starbucks will open their first Italian location in Milan in 2017. Let the baristi lament! Savor a final espresso! No, wait. Starbucks arrival won’t stop Italian coffee culture. The focacceria and Italian food survived McDonald’s arrival (1985, Bolzano); the local bar and Italian coffee can resist Starbucks. Neither space replicates the market niche the other occupies. Whereas the Italian bar offers coffee and community, Starbucks offers space and anonymity.

Italy has a tangled relationship with Americanization, industrialization and consumerism. Until the Marshall plan helped kick-start Italy’s boom economico in 1950s, most Italian families couldn’t support the consumer-driven lifestyles glamorized in their favorite Hollywood films. Yet neither the major political parties at the time (the Partito Communista Italiana and the Democrati Cristiani) wanted Italians to adopt consumer morals, which they viewed as threatening to social wellbeing. Soon families gathered around the TV set to watch Carosello, a half-hour program that showed only commercials. Average Italians relished indulging their long-held desires for glamour and novelty. Italy was becoming a country of consumers.

Yet resistance continued. Supermarkets remained rare until the 1970s. American television gained force in the eighties. Mickey Mouse comics remain (in-part) generated internally. Although consumerism shifted Italian habits, American-consumerism continued to remain one-step removed from mass culture.

In this sense, Starbucks enters a market characterized by resistance, which there is no reason to believe it will overcome. The phenomenon Starbucks is 'rocking', 'struggling against' and 'threatening' must be identified. Is it Italian coffee culture? Italian bar culture? Italian conviviality? The impossibility of finding working wifi? Italian interpretations of American coffee culture? Saying Starbucks threatens Italian coffee culture is sensational journalism that negates analysis.

Breaking down the arguments for and against Starbucks in Italy begins to reveal why a disappearance of current Italian coffee culture is doubtful:

Claim number one: Starbucks will end Italian coffee culture.

This assertion depends on two flawed assumptions, the first being that Italian coffee culture exists and the second being that Italian coffee culture has resisted external influences until now. From North to South, there are more differences than similarities in the coffees Italians drink. Neapolitans sip the dense shots of woody Caffè Kimbo while Pavese prefer longer shots of toasty Caffè Janko. The Bolognese might enjoy a chocolaty marocchino in the afternoon, while in Sicily a caffè freddo calls for gelato. Trieste’s coffee terminology exists nowhere else. Italian coffee culture resists a simple classification.

Not only is Italian coffee culture diverse, it’s in dialogue with drinking trends from abroad. La Marzocco’s cult-status among so-called third wave cafes has pushed them to develop new technologies to increase the barista’s control. In Italy, the presence of American-style coffee houses such as Arnold Coffee, Busters, The Bagel Factory and California Kitchen have popularized flavored lattes and American desserts. Italian coffee culture is not static. In order to destroy Italian coffee culture, Starbucks would have to first create it.

Claim two: Starbucks will end Italy’s convivial bar atmosphere.

This claim implies that bars and Starbucks occupy the same niche. Whereas the bar connects individuals to their community, Starbucks connects individuals to the web. Starbucks could build new communities, but even Italians who drink coffee at Starbucks can enjoy an aperitivo or quick lunch at the bar. Italians might head to Starbucks for American food like Americans go for Italian. Starbucks never destroyed the American diner, nor the English Pub and is unlikely to begin with the Italian.

Claim three: Starbucks will end the impossibility of accessing free wifi.

Although Starbucks may provide an impetus for the country to re-examine how they provide internet, the company is unlikely to revolutionize Italy’s relationship with the net straightaway. Currently, wifi in Italy usually requires an Italian phone number. While Starbucks will likely make wifi a selling point, its unlikely free wifi regardless of country code will be on the menu in the early days. Yet, they may exert pressure to change or help to create a culture of Internet still alien to the country, where only 60% of Italians connect on a daily basis.

Starbucks cannot destroy Italian coffee culture and its institutions because it operates in a different market niche and provides a new service to a new clientele. The chain’s relative novelty, however, makes it threatening. Although Italians will continue to consume their caffè al banco, the competition will cause Italians to re-evaluate their concept of time. These changes won’t impact the society overnight. By entering the Italian market in Milan, Starbucks is entering a market already conversant in Italy-America hybrid culture. The question that remains is how Italians will use these spaces. Will they see them as American? Will they attempt to integrate it into their bar structure? Will it become the freelancer’s office? Will it be a secondary library when institutional ones close for the weekend? How will other businesses internalize this message? Starbucks entry into Italy’s coffee market demonstrates that the country’s notion of time is shifting.

Reading BBC Breakfast as a Narrative of Positive News

Forget exercise. I go to the gym to watch TV news. There are three TVs, each showing a different channel. Sky News balances five minutes of roundtable discussion with soulless ads for Sainsbury. ITV packages high street sales as infotainment. Then there’s my show: BBC Breakfast.

Broadcast simultaneously on BBC One and BBC News, this early morning news program oscillates between infotainment and reporting. The set is BBC red offset with bright white panels and a background projecting an un-British perennially sunny sunrise. In both appearance and tone, the effect is lighter than the archetypical BBC newsroom. Whereas standard TV reporting attempts to narrate events moment-to-moment and person-to-person, BBC Breakfast’s evergreen set reveals a different objective. 

BBC Breakfast resists tumult. Breaking stories are interspersed with interviews and banter amongst hosts. Daily interviews span current events, evergreen cultural debates and compelling personalities. When discussing topical issues, anchors chat with experts — either academics or average Brits with remarkable experience. Such expert narration slows down the news cycle: the interviewees have lived with their topic and gained insight through duration. They’ve earned their authority. Transforming contemporary issues into enduring themes keeps the sun shining in BBC Breakfast land.

The mix of interview subjects speaks to BBC Breakfast’s ability to recast stormy news as sunny stories. B-list celebrities and home-grown sports heroes appear regularly. Each guest boasts a singular claim to fame that implies accomplishment and permanency: that album they released, their ultramarathon adventure. Interview subjects boast a singular accomplishment that defines their identity. Unlike A-list celebrities and Olympic athletes, who must re-prove themselves with each creative endeavour and competition, these minor figures single achievement allows them to stay sunny in viewers’ minds. Focusing on the so-called every person ensures that competition and failure don’t cause stormy skies in BBC Breakfast land.

When the every person isn’t interviewed, discussion topics imply their presence. Weather reports become cathartic moments in which the presenter bonds with the audience over another grey weekend or a gloriously sunny Tuesday. Emotions are performed as if selected from a list of socially approved reactions to Weather. Warmth is good, drizzly mornings a shame. Weather might be capricious but its consistent interpretation reinforces BBC Breakfast’s bright disposition.

Although expert interviews and weather reports craft a comfortable environment, it’s the sports reporting that exemplifies how BBC Breakfast reconciles entertainment with information. Sport balances news and leisure. Teams’ fortunes change by the game and by the season, but team loyalty endures rough patches. This hybrid reflects the breakfast news cocktail. Drama is allowed, but only when an umbrella is nearby to protect against rain.

But it’s not just sport itself that exemplify BBC Breakfast’s viewpoint. Presenter Sally Nugent comes in for her five-minute sport spot to remind the viewers that a female can talk rugby so long as she presents herself as Woman. Perched on the red couch, Nugent wears heels and make up as she speaks authoritatively on cricket and snooker and tennis. The viewer shouldn’t notice who is presenting, just the outcome of Sunday’s Chelsea versus Arsenal game. But the viewer can’t help but internalise a disconnect between Nugent’s shiny shoes and the dirty cleats she describes. BBC Breakfast might allow for the untraditional and let a woman present the news, so long as she reminds the viewer that Woman remains unchanged by Sport.

BBC Breakfast presents information not as entertainment, but as reassurance. If breakfast news treats viewers as friends, gently waking them up to the world, BBC Breakfast presents the volatile world through familiar tropes to affect permanence. The news might frighten, but experts reassure the viewer of the world’s coherence. Daily life may tire, but average folk become celebrities and perform physical feats. Rain may be annoying, but rejoice for the fifteen minutes of sun on Saturday morning. Sports are for everyone, but the same characters suss out the game. BBC Breakfast news doesn’t leave the day clouded in uncertainty. It uses the news to combine drama and consistency, reminding audiences that there’s always a sunny side to daily tumult.

Virtual Reality in the Age of Digital Re-reproduction

Virtual reality presents the future. Filmmakers extol its ability to evoke audience empathy. Journalists champion its potential to mobilize audiences distracted into sensory malaise. Joe-Shmo praises the potential for an alien-esque hat and increased possibilities for video games and porn. Time and space disappears as viewers respond to events and experience beyond their geographic and temporal limits. 

Although VR is positioned as an unprecedented development, it may not be so radical. Virtual reality ushers the viewer into a constructed three-dimensional universe that uncannily resembles a material landscape. This landscape prompts a visceral response like the Lumière brother’s Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat allegedly “caused fear, terror, even panic”. Though they were accustomed to photographic realism, film shocked viewers. Now, despite being accustomed to dramatic moving images, VR shocks users.

That Virtual Reality is needed to jolt audiences the way films once did suggests the medium is more polemical than newspapers and tech-mavens realize. Technology’s development of social forms extends beyond the digital age. Walter Benjamin explored similar matters in his 1936 work ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. At the time, society faced similar cultural and political stressors that were eroding previous modes of representation. Amidst internal threats, European society was fracturing as neighbouring countries became enemies with opposing ideologies. New forms of art — Futurism, Hollywood films, radio — responded by promoting a form of expression that matched the frenetic atmosphere. This, Benjamin argued, shifted how citizens interact with their environment. Art’s ‘aura’ —the unique attributes a product communicated to its audience — was no longer its defining attribute. Whereas art was once limited to irreproducible objects — a play can never be identically re-performed, painting required physical presence — film, photography and audio reduced the importance of being there. Mechanical reproduction collapsed time and space for artistic expression. When the viewer doesn’t need to be in the company of creation to experience art, art switches from a repeated ritual to a singular act. Benjamin contends that reproduced art becomes politicized as ‘exhibition value’ displaces ‘cultural value’. 

This displacement provided the preconditions for celebrity culture, which commodifies the human image. The actor — aware they are offerings themselves to a camera which camera that endlessly copies their image — conducts himself for consumption. The emotions, the unique experience of their character and the audience’s ability to empathise, collapse together as the subject’s image is manipulated through filming, reproduction and editing. Mass marketing emphasizes the divide between man and his image. Representations of the body are sold and consumed, divided and reassembled, to create a beguiling reality for viewers. 

Virtual Reality updates celebrity consumer culture for Millennial culture that prefer to commoditize experiences. If the masses have grown immune to film and photography’s absorption/alienation, VR re-engages audiences by renewing their belief in art’s potential for political expression. Filmmakers and journalists quoted in the New York Times cite VR as having ‘unique potential … to summon emotion in the viewer’, ‘ability to generate intense empathy on the part of the viewer’ and ‘command of presence’. Although these statements seem to promise revolution, read through Benjamin’s history of mechanical reproduction, VR resituates mechanical reproduction for the 21st century. If the economy has shifted from producing commodities to producing experiences, art has responded by moving from producing celebrities to producing immersive digital environments. While capitalism continues to structure Western society, technological changes during the past eighty years have reorganized production and class, conditioning the development of new ideologies and ways to express them. Not only can the viewer enjoy art from any temporal and spatial location, they can experience an event regardless of social viability. 

Whereas Benjamin discussed ‘pure art’ — that is, art made to be art, to represent reality with the implicit admission that does not accurately reflect reality — VR tends to presents itself as a factual depiction, complicating the implications of reproduction. When used as a journalistic tool, VR echoes the Benjamin’s concluding omen, ‘[Experiencing humanity’s destruction as pleasure] is the situation of politics which Fascism is rending aesthetic’. Although VR may use real people and real stories, the editing techniques used to relate these stories are ignored to validate the generated experiences and emotions. While the audience is supposed to understand their response as authentic, the stories presented to them have been choreographed like a movie. VR negates its intended aim and inverts the question it appears to answer: what happens to representation when reality becomes virtual as opposed to lived?

In an ideal world, the multiplication of experiences — whether virtual or lived — would increase society’s empathy, building peace and understanding for conflict-ridden areas. As utopian experiments tend to demonstrate, even societies operating under ideal conditions are subject to strife due to individual interpretations of events. Since VR prizes the individual audience member’s experience as opposed to the collective response, it seems possible that the individualization of technology will intensify film’s alienation. The potential for VR to be a constructive force depends on how society unites the phenomenon with its response. If VR only provides entertainment, it will become another tool for capitalism to monetize Experience. If the separation is presented solely to build empathy, it threatens to commoditize human nature. VR needs to find a midpoint that allows viewers to share emotion, while understanding that an individual’s experience of this emotion remains unique. VR needs to find a storytelling voice that allows for the communication of stories outside of pleasure/information binaries. VR needs an ideology to harness its potential for social change.

Featured image via Flickr: Maurizio Pesce

Perfume ads exemplify printed media's communicative authority

Although digital advertising is diverting money away from print ads, research demonstrates that forming a bond between consumer/brand/product happens quicker when the message not mediated through a touch screen. If Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan was correct when he claimed that ‘the medium is the message’, digital media sends a message of distraction. Print, on the other hand, grounds meaning in a concrete, multivalent sensory world that connects the reader to material life. 

Online readers sense that the screen’s buzz compromises their attention. From the abundance of information to the strain on the eyes, screens homogenise the details they present. Breaking news and cat videos are reduced to pixels. Information is either visual or aural, though spoken messages are easily avoided with mute. Touch screen phones may claim tactile satisfaction, but it’s a monotonous tap that condenses diverse message to a single experience. Tap and read is the modern scratch and sniff; multivalent pathways of information collapse into a producing/consuming unit. Screens replace involvement with more, more, more information, increasing distraction while mitigating investment in presented messages.

Print media retains potential for communicating and disseminating meaning by appealing to the senses beyond the visual. While an artistic front-page can hardly compete with the availability, reproducibility and mutability of digital photos, print media has touch, smell, sound and taste. The feel of the pages, the aroma of the paper, the sonorous thud of a weighty issue, the metallic twang of fresh ink: print products supply readers with a dynamic sensory environment.

The perfume ad exemplifies print’s ability to stimulate the senses. Once integral to fashion and celebrity magazines, bland digital adverts have largely replaced them. Printed on weighty cardstock, the perfume ad announced its presence in the magazine. Browsing the newsstand, the reader could choose Vogue rather than Elle or Vanity Fair based on the number of inserts, visible at a simple flick of the spine as they were printed on narrow pages. The decreased width accommodated that all-important flap, under which might hide perfume ambrosia or the stench of decay. It was never clear which, though a vaguely floral odour permeated every magazine with the inserts. 

The roster rotated: an Estee Lauder scent appeared around Christmas (when they promoted their seasonal gift boxes available at Macy’s), Clinque Happy defined Seventeen and DKNY seemingly loved Lucky. Each season ushered in a new aroma, varying in one or two drops of synthetic compound from last year’s scent. But the promise for renewal remained. Peeling open the flap, the reader altered the width of the page, changed the scent of the magazine and integrated themselves into the message. Rubbing their wrist against four inches of condensed perfume, the magazine and advertisement imprinted themselves onto the reader’s body. The temptation was to sniff it straight away, but the smell developed while reading about Karl Lagerfeld’s latest creative endeavour. When the smell had settled itself properly into the pores, it remained a facsimile of the true scent. A trip to the perfume counter and chat with the salesperson was required to determine whether the aroma nestled in the pages of Marie Claire matched what sprayed from the bottle.

Touch, transformation, smell, visuals, conversation: perfume ads represent the immersive sensorial experience print advertising and media offers readers. This immersion is compelling in an age when every brand manipulates similar visual cues for communicating their brand. Successful digital ads naturalize themselves into the environment, hiding between real posts to produce no more emotion in the viewer than a non-sponsored image. Digital media produces alienation, not immersion.

Print immerses with more than perfume and beauty product samples. Nike’s inserts city-specific running maps, including recommendations for refuelling stops and tips for form. Immersive print ads aren’t limited to inserts. Play-doh’s self-mocking ads re-situate the viewer’s perception of their physical alienation and the company’s ability to bridge the gap between image and material. Apple’s multi-page watch ads translates their seamless aesthetic for the magazine’s form, incorporating the spine into their design. Sharpie juxtaposes a rumpled page with color and known cultural icons to create a visual joke that implies the product’s role in the material creative process . Whereas a digital ad needs to be crafted to invisibility and naturalization, the print’s physical presence retains communicative strength.

If print media is dead, then sensory stimulation seems doomed to becoming ever more homogenized and alienating. Digital media provides simple, visual images that are momentarily arresting before the viewer becomes distracted by a more shocking message. These messages might be impressive, but they fade away as quickly as they came. Print might require more time to produce, but it has a longer life cycle in readers’ lives and minds. What advertisers need is a way to present their message that takes into account the inherent diversity and characteristics of media consumption. Long live the perfume ad.