Recap of the Lecture on Consumerism
Consumerism -|Manufacturing desire
Desire- False need |Intrinsic part of the system, would
Greed- Need for Commodities -|work if there was no profit made
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Social Control |
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Freedom |
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Satisfaction Inequality
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Dis-guided- Idea of freedom, happy because they can afford/earn expensive cars for example
The idea of mass production is intrinsically linked, to make capitalism expand. Things become meaningless
Big businesses use advertising and brands to sell their products to make them popular.
Freud- Irratonal desires and animal instincts are what he believed humans to be like. The idea of civil society is really incompatible to our desires. 'The Pleasure Principle'
Bernay- Public Relations P.R. Attempt to initially sell, to link this to brands or movie stars and later to Politicians. Had an amazing career. Employed by the CIA at one point, to destabilise his beliefs on certain countries.
Consumer society, to exist we have to desire commodities so the wealth of our country succeeds.
Ways of seeing. J. Berger
pages 129-131
'In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of publicity images everyday of our lives. No other kind of image confronts us so frequently. In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such as density of visual messages.
One may remember or forget these messages but briefly one takes them in, and for a moment they stimulate the imagination by way of either memory or expectation. The publicity image belongs to the moment. We see it as we turn a page, as we turn a corner, as a vehicle passes us. Or we see it on a television screen whilst waiting for the commercial break to end. Publicity images also belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually renewed and made up to date. Yet they never speak of the future.
We are now so accustomed to being addressed by these images that we scarcely notice their total impact. A person may notice a particular image or piece of information because it corresponds to some particular interest he has. But we accept the total system of publicity images as we accept an element of climate. For example, the fact that these images belong to the moment but speak of the future produces a strange effect which has become so familiar that we scarcely notice it. Usually it is we who pass the image- walking, travelling, turning a page; on the TV screen it is somewhat different but even then we are theoretically the active agent- we can look away, turn down the sound, make some coffee. Yet despite this, on has the impression that publicity images are continually passing us, like express trains on their way to some distant terminus. We are static; they are dynamic- until the newspaper is thrown away, the television programme continues or the poster is posted over.
Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately benefits the public (the consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers- and thus the national economy.It is closely related to certain idea about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser:freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of 'The Free World'.
For many in Eastern Europe such images in the west sum up what they in the East lack. Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice.
It is true that in publicity one brand of manufacture, one firm, competes with another; but it is also true that every publicity image confirms and enhances every other. Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but its publicity as a system only makes a single proposal.
It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more.
This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer- even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.
Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour.
-Depressing thought, false needs means we can never actually be happy
-Not just Eastern to Western, for person to person. Natural competition between them to seem better.
-Increases the ideology who can be better which enforces people to buy things. Community and society buy into competition.
-The way people try to be individual and follow social trends.
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