Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

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СКАЧАТЬ women, show viewers the results of their recent shopping trips. Haulers describe and display clothing, accessories, and cosmetics from popular chain stores (such as Superdry, Bebe, and Victoria’s Secret) in malls and shopping strips around the world. Prices and bargains are mentioned frequently. Unboxing videos are a curious hybrid of unofficial marketing and product demonstration. Technology unboxers might demonstrate the features of new iPhones or computer games, while toy unboxers film children playing with various toys. Unboxers might assemble Lego kits, break open Disney Frozen-themed chocolate eggs, or open up McDonald’s Happy Meals and then have children play with the toys.

      It could be argued that people in general, and especially children and teens, are becoming more immersed in consumer culture as they become more deeply enmeshed with the internet. This is even more the case now because we increasingly carry the internet—and the ability to shop there—with us all the time on our smartphones. As a result, consumer culture has become an even more inescapable part of our daily lives. Furthermore, consumption on the internet is increasingly wedded to the material world. You can pay for parking and rental cars using smartphone apps. An app allows a driver to open the doors of her rented Zipcar with her phone and honk its horn to locate it. The Hunt app brings into play a community of fashion-minded people to help us hunt down desired fashion items.

      Ask Yourself

      How much of the time that you spend online is devoted to shopping or purchasing? Try keeping a log of your internet use for a few days. Note how many times you went online and on how many of those occasions you bought something or browsed sites devoted to consumption. Are you a typical internet consumer? Why or why not?

      A Postconsumer Culture?

      Many people are now doing something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago—saving money. The personal savings rate in the United States has changed over the past few years. In late 2007, it dipped to close to 3 percent of disposable income. At the height of the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, it spiked to more than 8 percent. By late 2018, even though the economy had improved considerably, the personal savings rate was still a comparatively high 6 percent (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis 2018). People who are saving more of their money are obviously using less of it to consume.

      These changes in the behavior of consumers and their attitudes speak to a change in the larger value system. Consuming less is a sure indication of at least a temporary decline of consumer culture. It may even be the beginning of a postconsumer culture. Among the characteristics of such a culture, beyond buying less and saving more, are sharing more things in the “sharing economy” (Belk 2014; Sundararajan 2016), renting consumer items (such as dresses on sites like Rent the Runway), taking pride in buying less expensive or even recycled items, buying less showy brands (a Kia rather than a BMW), dining at home more often than eating at restaurants, and showing a greater concern for the environment in terms of what we buy and, more important, do not buy. It is not clear that we are in a postconsumer culture, and if we are, it is uncertain how long it will last. However, just as we entered what is best described as a consumer culture in the last half of the twentieth century, it is at least possible that we are entering a postconsumer culture in the first half of the twenty-first century.

      Another chink in consumer culture has been created by organized groups actively seeking to subvert aspects of both consumer culture and the larger culture. The success of Burning Man is one indication of such subversion. Begun in 1986, this annual weeklong event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert today attracts 50,000 participants who commit themselves during their stay to self-expression, decommodification (for example, cash transactions between participants are banned), and community building (Chen 2009; Jones 2011).

      Culture Jamming

      Culture jamming radically transforms mass media messages, often turning them on their heads completely (Kuehn 2015; Lasn 2000). It is a form of social protest aimed at revealing underlying realities of which consumers may be unaware. The hope is that once people are made aware of these realities through culture jamming, they will change their behaviors or perhaps even band together to change those underlying realities.

      The best examples of culture jamming are to be found in the magazine Adbusters and the media campaigns it sponsors. The magazine’s main targets are in the realm of consumption, especially web and magazine advertisements and billboards. The idea is to transform a corporation’s ads into anticorporate, anticonsumption advertisements (Handelman and Kozinets 2007).

      The following are some examples of the ways in which culture jamming turns commercial messages inside out:

       “Tommy Sheep” is a spoof of a Tommy Hilfiger ad, with sheep (presumably representing the conformists who buy such clothing) pictured in front of a huge American flag.

       “Absolute on Ice,” spoofing an Absolut vodka ad, depicts the foot of a corpse (presumably someone killed by excessive alcohol consumption) with a toe tag.

       People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) used the Burger King logo with the phrase “Murder King” to raise awareness of animal brutality in the beef industry.

       FORCE, a feminist organization, culture jammed Victoria Secret’s “Pink Loves Consent” advertising campaign by using social media to troll the company’s online brand community with the goal of starting a meaningful conversation about sexual consent (Madden et al. 2018).

       Brandalism, an activist artist movement, subverted advertisements with art at bus stops during the 2015 United Nations climate conference in Paris to promote environmental sustainability (Lekakis 2017).

      These examples show the hidden realities (sickness, death, sexism, environmental problems, and other miseries) and goals (conformist consumers, obscene profits) of corporations. A broader objective is to show viewers the folly of consumer culture, which encourages the consumption of numerous harmful substances (e.g., cigarettes, alcohol) and wasteful goods and services (e.g., expensive clothing). In addition to advertisements, culture jammers create memes to spread ideas and information that challenge the status quo (Lasn 2012). For example, one meme designed by culture jammers depicts a photo of Walmart with the following words: “One of the biggest companies in the world owned by one of the richest families in America . . . holds food drive for needy employees instead of paying them a living wage” (CursedByTheDiceGods 2017).

      “Absolut Impotence” is an example of culture jamming intended to counter the alcohol industry’s influence by suggesting that alcohol will negatively impact drinkers’ lives. Is this an effective way to change consumption?

      Used with the permission of Adbusters Media Foundation.

      Cyberculture

      The internet is, as mentioned before, one site for the proliferation of consumer culture and perhaps postconsumer culture. It is also the site of an entirely new culture—cyberculture (F. Turner 2008). That is, the internet as a whole (as well as the individual websites it comprises) has the characteristics of all cultures, including distinctive values and norms.

      Some of the distinctive values within cyberculture are openness, knowledge sharing, and access. These values have their roots in the open-source software that emerged before computing became an attractive commercial opportunity. They are also rooted in the СКАЧАТЬ