Consumer culture case study

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Content

1.  Introduction

  • Definition of “Consumer Culture”

  1. Quotations
  • Slater

 - Consumer culture is a culture of consumption

- Consumer culture is a culture of a market society

- Consumer culture is, in principle, universal and impersonal

- Consumer culture identifies freedom with private choice and private life

- Consumer needs are in principle unlimited and insatiable

- Consumer culture is the privileged medium for negotiating identity and status within a post-traditional society

- Consume culture represents the increasing importance of culture in the modern exercise of power

3.  How is magazine publishing part of “Consumer Culture”

  • Analysis

4.  Conclusion

5.  References

Introduction

- Definition of “Consumer Culture”

“Consumer culture” generally refers to the way in which consumption is organized

within modern capitalist societies over the modern period, gathering social weight and

importance from the eighteenth century onwards, with periods of huge transformation

in the twentieth century. To use the term “consumer culture” is to emphasize that the

word of goods and their principles of structuration are central to understanding of

contemporary society. This involves a dual focus: firstly, on the cultural dimension of

the economy, the symbolization and use of material goods as “communicators” not

just utilities; and secondly, on the economy of cultural goods, the market principles of

supply, demand, capital, accumulation, competition, and monopolization which

operate within the sphere of lifestyles, cultural goods and commodities.

In Distinction (1984), Bourdieu seeks to map out the social field of the different tastes

in legitimated “high” cultural practices, as well as taste in lifestyles and consumption

preferences. Both culture in “high” sense and culture in the anthropological sense are

therefore inscribed on the same social space. The oppositions and relational

determination of taste, however, become clearer when the space of lifestyle is

superimposed onto the map of class structure whose basic structuring principle is the

volume and composition (economic or cultural) of capital that groups possess. Thus,

Consumption can be see as a set of social and cultural practices that serve as a way of

establishing differences between social groups, not merely as a way of expressing

differences. Lifestyle is an outcome of both economic and cultural capitals.

Quotations

-- Slater

- Consumer culture is a culture of consumption

Core social practices and cultural values, ideas, aspirations and identities are defined

and oriented in relation to consumption rather than to other social dimensions such as

work or citizenship, religion or military: a culture of consumption.

Dominant values of a society not only organized through consumption practices but

also in some sense derive from them. Thus, contemporary society is described as

materialistic, as more concerned with ‘having’ to the exclusion of ‘being’, as

commodified, as hedonistic, or more positively, as a society of choice and consumer

sovereignty.

The values from the realm of consumption spill over into other domains of social

action - consumption becomes a central focus of social life, values of consumer

culture acquire a prestige that encourages their extension to other social domains.

- Consumer culture is the culture of a market society

Modern consumption is mediated by market relations and takes the form of the

consumption of commodities. The consumer’s access to consumption is largely

structured by the distribution of material and cultural resources, which itself is

determined in crucial ways by market relations – above all the wage relation and

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social class.

From a Marxist perspective, it is the wage-relation, it is capitalist relations of

production that produce the consumer.

Consumer culture is incompatible with the political regulation of consumption that

suppresses the market. It does not arise in non-capitalist societies.

- Consumer culture is, in principle, universal and impersonal

Consumer culture is often identified with the idea of mass consumption. Market

relations are anonymous and in principle universal.

The idea that consumer culture serves a general public also promotes a more positive

idea ...

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