A moody morning, on my way to China. I am thinking about this engine room of world manufacturing and our own role as consuming surfers. Sorry about the hippy reflection, but that happens while in transit in airports …
As we well know, the forces of capitalism have transformed the surfing industry from a series of backyard businesses into corporate giants with billion dollar turnovers . Competitions are beamed live via the internet, surf-films are released in cinemas, there are numerous surf forecasting sites, surf culture paraphernalia have become collectable, and surf¬ clothing is paraded at fashion shows. A new surf school pops up every day. The take-away food industry, beer companies, telecommunications industry, and the motor-vehicle corporations attach themselves to surfing as fun, freedom, liberation, sporty, and healthy. In his article “Surfing the Third Millenium: Commodifying the Visual Argot” David Lanagan argues that surfing has become more acceptable to wider society because of the influence of business. Surfing’s images and signs have been commodified, and this process means surfing’s capital now involves more than participants. Consumers, shareholders, advertisers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners have a say in the meanings and capital of surfing, even if they aren’t core surfers. “The scale of business allows surfing capital to exert tremendous control over the activity of surfing and its representations” (Lanagan, 2002).
Sociologist Douglas Booth (2005) did a study of surfing’s “political economy”, which includes the material bases of surfing culture including surfboards, wetsuits, clothing, accessories, magazines, books, memorabilia, videos, competitions, tourism, and surfing schools” and the exchange of meanings and values it facilitates. What became clear is that surfers as consumers actually have more than a little say in what is produced and what values and meanings will be conveyed.
My mates have worn apparel and equipment produced by surf companies for years. They claim is that they buy from “grassroots” surfing companies.
The quality of being “grassroots” is deciphered by working out where a firm is located, who owns and works at the company, who they sponsor, whether they demonstrate long-term commitment to an area’s surfing community, and whether they produce essential “hardware” for use – surfboards, wetsuits, legropes, wax, and the like . The grassroots consumption of surfing is meant to be practical and functional, above all else.
If a surfing company or business targets “outsiders” or beginners, or their products are seen as merely commodities or accessories, they’re ridiculed. Non-core participants who consume surfing are devalued and much-maligned as wannabes and poseurs.
The non-core crew supposedly buy “inauthentic” products that identify them for dismissal, exclusion, and ridicule.
Ironically, the participation of core subcultural members is also largely determined by consumption. These participants have also always used consumption to form their identity and construct their own “cultural style”. But the difference is it is they who get to determine the “authentic”, or “right”, products to buy as a “real” surfer. Or they used to …
Ethics and consumption need to be the conversation, and not core vs non-core. Capitalism has a knack for steering the conversation to “buying” instead of not buying as the marker of going surfing.
/hippy reflection
in that sense surfing and consumer culture are linked to everyday practices like everything thing else. the ethics conversation will become increasingly interesting shaped by the context of the post-industrial and dooms-day scenarios. are you taking the ring to mordor clif?
i agree core/non-core narratives are passe. surfers are throw-aheads leary opined. although surfing’ identities are site-hardened and laminated moulds, mediatised and appropriated by a cultural economy succeeding on the open market. there are still possibilities for surfing identities to be throw-aheads not just standing in the curl of a wave or reading the weather conditions. but paddling upon the zeitgeist and trying to consider what a reasonable response to the madness of consumption and pollution would look like from an avante garde making transdisciplinary connections. a reductive reading might foresee the mass economy and mass media interfaces like two monsters gorging on human flesh and ecological destruction. while the outcome and the effect are probably the same within the mass economy and mass media there are movers and shakers vying to construct reality in proportion to concrete that can be laid. there must also be those whose forked tongue became a swallow tail riding a wave abandonment. people ready to do things differently, otherwise.
i hope all goes well with the trip mr possibility – think big act small.