ABSTRACT
By considering an automotive video advertisement as a case study, this chapter brings to life the multiple ways that advertising images are subject to hegemonic (and occasionally counter hegemonic) processes, with an eye toward building the reader's critical sense of how hegemony works as a visual process of encoding and decoding (drawing on the insights of British Cultural Studies). A few other case examples address youth culture as a product of the tensions between mainstream habitus and the search to establish generational style through oppositional practice. The second half of the chapter explores how algorithm-based image sharing often encodes cultural biases, and thus perpetuates damaging stereotypes of minorities. We discuss visual stereotypes of Indigenous people in light of how nonminority consumers appropriate and exoticize images of the other as a means to work through psychological tension in mainstream culture. The chapter finishes with a series of speculations on how cultural marketing through influencers and social media may continue to replicate and solidify hegemonic identities and mainstream ideologies into the future.
