"Great emotions, serious partying". Visual analysis of Helsinki nightclub websites.

Jukka Törrönen & Antti Maunu

Celebrating in nightclubs has become popular among young adult Finns during the past decade. The number and variation of clubs has increased which makes the clubs' life-span often short and their competition for customers often fierce. One way to promote a club is its website. The main function of the site is not to offer 'technical' information (such as location or opening hours), but rather to create an attractive image of the ambience of the club. The Finnish sites seem to display a carefully considered amount of explicit self-praise; the main strategy for attraction seems to be to present the club in a modest, but identifiable and inclusive manner. This is done by identifiable visual layouts, affective uses of language, and by offering extensive picture galleries of the clubs' parties and partygoers. In our presentation we analyse seven websites of Finnish night clubs, and ask what images of themselves and of their clientele the clubs wish to present. We look especially for lifestyle distinctions and ask whether the sites exhibit a Bourdieuan superior spirit of the middle classes, or do they rather downplay hierarchies, which was the result of our previous interview study concerning young Finnish adults' taste in bars and clubs. In our analysis we use the concepts of subject position and focalisation. With the concept of subject position we analyse what kinds of positions the websites construct both for the represented participants (portrayed partygoers) in images and for the implied interactive participant (audience) who communicates with these images. With the concept of focalisation, we, in turn, analyse how the audience is rhetorically persuaded to identify with the action of the portrayed partygoers.