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In Fuery´s case, she seeks to identify how the image can be interpreted through the model of pleasure and how pleasure informs and produces new media culture. The role of pleasure helps to understand the implications new media has for the subject and her modes of cultural consumption. This, in turn, can be connected to the perceptions of dress in the digital images being analyzed in this thesis.
Fuery´s connecting model is the gaze, and she uses it in order to show the complex nature of pleasure within two forms of perception: browsing and looking. In this exploration, scopophilia – the love of looking – is related to the mode of perception specifically enabled by new media: browsing. According to Fuery, browsing denotes a superficial glance and is a concept that emerged in theorizations on television in the 1970s and 1980s. The ‘texts’ projected by televisions created their own narratives, which in turn created ways of seeing: The narratives in television programming had created a new technique of textual consumption which relied on attracting the glance rather than the gaze. Television was produced and broadcast to accommodate and continue viewers ‘disposable’ viewing practices – watching one show for a moment before the next or so on; or glancing at a television program whilst being involved in other activities (reading, conversation, homework.)28 Looking, on the other hand, implies a “more invested act of seeing” – looking takes time. But temporality is not, according to Fuery, the only element that sets both browsing and looking apart; there is also the type of pleasure gained from the two acts. To analyze this, she resorts to the gaze and its relation to pleasure, as theorized by Sigmund Freud in his idea of scopophilia. Since the 1970s, psychoanalytic methodology became popular because of its use within film studies, most specifically because of Laura Mulvey, who used Freud´s notion of scopophilia in her inspections on how women were being looked at in the cinema. Scopophilia, for Freud, is related to the ways
ephemerality”, dominated by the love to look. This love of looking or scopophilia, fits well with the nature of digital media and its imagery of fashion. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1996) 79. 28 Fuery,
113.