Abstract

This paper critiques the idea that a fool and their money are soon parted by using multimodal analysis to explore one of the ways in which people are parted from money: credit cards. I analyse the homepages of two products, the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ as rated by UK consumer organisation Which? In order to understand the range of communication used in these websites, I employ a multimodal analysis of their language, choice of colour, typeface, layout and images (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006; van Leeuwen 2005, 2011). Together, these show that the individual is constructed in different ways by the two products. For the card rated best, the viewer is constructed as a trustworthy consumer who is rewarded for this with further opportunities for consumption. For the card rated as worst, the viewer is positioned as a failed, but redeemable, consumer. The different constructions of the consumer also suggest that ‘credit’ is desirable but ‘debt’ is not. Taking into account the moral complexity of debt, I suggest that the lexical item credit card would be better changed to debt token . I argue that the real foolishness is the system itself, the one that credit cards (‘debt tokens’) index and exemplify. Taking the two sites together, I show that consumption is constructed as both desirable and risky. As credit cards construct the individual as an (isolated) person with few rights and great responsibility (Henry 2010), I suggest that these sites index the central role of the individual as a consumer. A good citizen is parted from their money.

Highlights

  • When people get into debt or lose large amounts of money, it is common to think of them as foolish

  • I want to explore the truth of this proverb by considering the communication that takes place when selling debt in the form of credit cards

  • Making use of tools developed from linguistics to analyse multiple modes of communication (Kress & van Leewuen, 2006; van Leeuwen 2005, 2011), they analyse the multimodal presentation of information and the positioning of author and audience, “in order to identify how the social actors and processes involved in payday lending are discursively represented across this text” (Brookes & Harvey 2016: 171)

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Summary

Introduction

When people get into debt or lose large amounts of money, it is common to think of them as foolish. How negative this assessment is depends on the context; how the money was lost, how much was lost and how the person is otherwise viewed. I use analytical tools developed, in part at least, from systemic functional linguistics These are applied to the homepages of two credit cards being offered in the UK in order to understand whether those who apply for and use them really are foolish. I consider how we might rewrite and rethink our ideas about money and foolishness

Background
Credit cards
The cards
Vanquis
Homepages
Colour
Comparison
Findings
Conclusion
Full Text
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