Magazine Audiences

In order to complete the "Magazine Audiences" quest, I rummaged through a stack of old magazines sitting in the corner of my room attempting to find something that stood out. I came across an issue of Import Tuner that was published in February of this year. Import Tuner is dedicated to bringing their readers the latest and greatest happenings in the car tuning world, from slammed Infinities and other small cars, (see picture to the right), the best performance upgrades for certain automobiles, to the incredibly beautiful models that usually grace the front cover. Basically, Import Tuner has everything their subscribers are begging for and more.

I suppose that the overall message of this particular magazine is that if your personal project car build does not involve ridiculously low and poked out stance, much like the Toyota Celica GT to the left, or a horsepower rating higher than 300HP, your build is worthless. That may be taken out of context, but I would imagine it would be difficult not to feel that way after looking through this magazine. Most of the cars featured in Import Tuner are extremely well done and have been well funded. For example, the Celica pictured to the left had well over $20,000 invested into it before it reached its current state. Obviously, not everyone interested in building high-powered cars can afford to spend this type of money. Although this is the message that is depicted, I do not believe the editors over at Import Tuner are purposefully slashing dreams and killing their readers hopes of ever producing such fantastic automobiles. They are simply trying to show everyone the crazy and unique things that owners have done to their rides. The readers will see the featured cars, the advertisements for the performance and aesthetic auto parts, and the stunning girls within each issue. This in turn encourages the readers who do participate in car building to attempt to complete their vehicles at a quality that far surpasses this months special features.

For the editors of this magazine, low cars and high-powered four cylinders consume their lives, and it may very well consume their readers lives as well. Yet, is spending tons of money in hopes of being mentioned in one magazine really worth it? Some may argue that the values of one's life should be deeper than that. In other words, money, cars, and hot girls are not what living life is all about. I am here to defend these gear heads; being involved in the tuning world is much more complex than that. There is a sense of community, of belonging to something huge, that I believe really draws most avid readers in. After completing a build successfully, most owners will eventually take their car to one if not both of the following events: car shows and track days. At these meetings, owners bring their cars together to basically nerd out with each other and look at other enthusiasts vehicles. Someone who was to engage in such an activity could possibly, and most likely will, build life long relationships and feel apart of a massive community.

So in a sense, the implied values and the overt message do conflict with one another. Although the main message encourages readers to spends mad money on their vehicles to achieve an awesome result, the underlying values displayed in Import Tuner somewhat emphasize the importance of belonging to something bigger than yourself.