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

• Main Author: Annabelle Mooney
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University) 2019-12-01
• Series: Russian journal of linguistics: Vestnik RUDN
• Subjects: semiotics; multimodal communication; credit cards; debt; ideology; consumption
• Online Access: http://journals.rudn.ru/linguistics/article/viewFile/21770/17232
• ISSN: 2312-9182; 2312-9212

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.