A Fool and his Money are Soon Parted: A Critical Examination of Credit Card Websites

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.

Multimodal IT marketing discourse: An integrated approach investigation

“…Both the verbal and nonverbal audio-visual content makes up the website discourse which needs to be investigated through integrated approaches due to its heterogeneous components aimed at producing some synergetic impact. Contemporary linguistic studies demonstrate an ongoing search for new integrated ways taking into account a number of parameters to deliver comprehensive insights into the material under study (Abbamonte, Cavaliere 2017;Klushina 2012;Klushina 2016;Kress 2010;Mooney 2019). This paper attempts to identify an integrated approach to investigating the verbal and nonverbal discourse of software vendors' websites.…”