consumer culture
consumer culture, Consumer culture can be defined as a form of material culture where values, meanings, and identities are shaped around the consumption of goods and services. The significance and character of the values, norms, and meanings produced in consumption practices (e.g., buying, having, being, or doing) define consumer culture. Consumer culture can be considered as a system in which the cultural experience of everyday life with symbolic and material resources is mediated through markets. Shopping is perceived as a leisure activity in a consumer society. In a consumer culture, spaces, platforms, sites, and modes of consumption spread to all aspects of everyday life. Brands have an increased visibility, while advertising seems to be omnipresent.
Capitalism and mass production are considered to be the major factors in the expansion of mass consumption and consumer culture. The mid-19th to early 20th century was a time of rapid growth and major transformations in production and everyday life that reinforced the growth of consumption. Industrialization, mass production, urbanization, and the advancement of advertising cultivated an ecosystem suitable for fostering a culture of consumption. The formation of modern societies enabled the emergence of new ways for people to interact with commodities. In addition to using products for utilitarian purposes, individuals started using products to create their self-images. New modes of generating identities and social distinction through the consumption of goods became possible. Grant McCracken points out that in this period, Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption emerged more systematically. Conspicuous consumption can be defined as the strategic use of material goods to achieve or display social status. The role of consumption in the processes of social differentiation and the focus on competition became essential elements in consumer culture.
Consumer Goods as Signs
Material possessions can carry cultural and social meanings and should be regarded as a communication system. Consumption encompasses the utility of goods as well as their cultural meaning. In the consumer culture economy, the sign value of goods takes precedence over the material satisfaction of wants. Jean Baudrillard argued that in advanced consumer capitalism, sign value and exchange value increasingly overshadow use value. As a result, the commodity becomes a sign. According to Baudrillard, consumption is institutionalized as a signification as well as a social differentiation process. Thus, consumption must be understood as the consumption of signs. Consumer culture uses images, signs, and symbolic commodities to tap into desires and fantasies, suggesting that these goods can provide a sense of idealized authenticity or genuine selfhood. Through the consumption of these signs, consumers may feel a degree of emotional fulfillment.
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Consumption becomes a system in which the self can be developed through purchases. Instead of a singular self, consumers possess multiple roles or images, and they are encouraged to consume signs consistent with the desired role or image (e.g., driving a certain brand of car to indicate being a good parent, wearing a certain brand of T-shirt to indicate affiliation with a sports team, reading a certain magazine to be “cool”). The self exists to display articles that portray a desired image. As a result, consumption becomes the defining feature of the self in consumer culture. As the focus shifts from consumer wants and needs toward providing consumers with signs necessary to build personal images, symbolic meanings may become as important as, or more important than, utilitarian functions. Thus, the signs and images to which commodities are related become more important than the commodity.
The Role of Advertising
Advertising’s role in the creation and development of consumer culture, as well as in promoting an ideology of marketed consumption, has been widely noted. The expansion of production through Fordism (i.e., using the methods pioneered by Henry Ford in the manufacturing industry, characterized by extensive and mechanized mass production) around the turn of the 20th century necessitated the construction of new markets and the education of individuals to become consumers. Advertising, as defined by Stuart Ewen, can be thought of as a philosophical system by which a consumerist way of life is shaped, illustrated, communicated, and sold. Advertising is utilized to create and educate consumers. Advertisers process and influence the reception of signs by consumers.
Advertising acts as a type of cultural mechanics for constructing commodity signs. That is, advertisements are planned to enhance the value of branded commodities by attaching them to images that possess social and cultural value: brand name commodity + meaning of image = a commodity sign. In order to construct such commodity images, disconnected signifiers (images) and signifieds (meanings) are combined in a semiotic equation in an advertisement. An object stands for an image or feeling; then the product replaces the original object in this role and appropriates the meaning of that image or feeling. The commodity sign is created at the intersection between a brand symbol and a meaning system summarized in an image. Thus, advertisements are deliberate attempts to put meaning into goods. McCracken suggests that advertising works as a potential method of meaning transfer by bringing consumer goods and a representation of the culturally constituted world together within a particular advertisement. When the symbolic equivalence is established successfully, properties of the culturally constituted world in the advertisement are transferred to the consumer good. Consumer goods, provided with symbolic value, are both the creators and creations of the culturally constituted world, and advertising acts as an instrument of meaning transfer.
Resistance to Consumer Culture
Resistance and critique of consumer culture developed simultaneously with consumer culture itself starting in the 19th century. Systematic critiques of the institutional basis of consumer culture have been suggested by social theorists such as Karl Marx (Das Kapital, 1867), Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944), who highlight the alienating and dehumanizing effects of materialism. Anti-corporate, nationalist, religious, and environmentalist critiques also developed. Anti-globalization activism is another resistance movement with a major anti-consumption position. Other anti-consumerist behavior includes boycotts, culture jamming, and demarketing.
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Elif Izberk-Bilgin defines two discourses in the consumer culture resistance theories. The first is the manipulation and enslavement discourse that depicts the market as an area of domination, where the passive consumer is seduced by an oppressive dominance of the market. Consumers are thought of as passive spectators. Consumption is a means of satisfying false needs; thus resistance is seen as futile in this discourse unless a mass movement arises. The second is the agency and empowerment discourse. According to this view, consumption is viewed as a practice to make sense of the world through self-development and creation of identity projects. Consumers are thought of as creative co-constructors. Consumers have agency to challenge, negotiate, and transform the social order. Resistance is achieved through the act of constructing an authentic and sovereign self.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.