Consumer Culture

Today we live in a world that is fueled by the market. We have this consumer culture that we live by. By this I mean all I see are people striving to have the newest thing, regardless of how long ago they bought the newest model. A big example is the iPhone; one year they release one version and then the next year a newer version comes out. Another example of our Consumer Culture is how people have to have the name brand of everything. The iPhone can be looked at as another example but what I am thinking of is how all the teenagers have to have Abercrombie and Fitch, or Aeropostale. But the way I see it what is the difference between a t-shirt from one of those stores or a store like Old Navy; besides one shirt costing $50 and the other costing $10. People are willing to pay for a brand these days and get caught in the hype of the brand. The culture thesis states how businesses are “circulating cultural commodities and manipulating people’s consciousness”. The three words that stand out to me and should stand out to everyone is, “manipulating people’s consciousness”. In our society everyone has to follow the trend and someone is not going along with that trend, they are looked down on from deviating from the consumer culture.

In our world today, we are surrounded by different outlets that feed us ideas of what we should wear, how we should look, what we should eat, how we should act, how we should live our lives. Often times we get caught in the flow of the consumer culture and live the life of society rather than live our lives as individuals. As a result of the culture industry blasting us with images of how we should live, these images both stimulate consumption and deflect critical thought. So therefore we can see that the culture industry is telling us how to live in order to make money. This can be equated to Lemert’s “Center” with how those with all the power, and money, dictate what the norms are of society.

 Through multiple media outlets, we view hundreds of commercials and things that companies want us to buy. These commercials feed into the consumer industry, influencing what society is. People make their decisions based on what the commercials say and what others are doing. But in the thesis of the culture industry, it is argued that the needs of people are false “when people do not arrive at them freely but rather have them imposed on them from the outside, through the subtle acculturation processes of capitalist everyday life”. Businesses are relying on their commercials to coerce you into buying their product, but what I think this argument is saying and what I believe is that even with the consumer industry telling us how to live, we need to make our own decisions based on what we actually need and not what we are told we need. If we choose based in the overarching consumer culture then we have not chosen for ourselves but for the business’s wallet. The thesis of the culture industry makes a good argument when they that “false needs are generated by the one-sided relationship between cultural producers and consumers” and that “people accept their subordinate relationship to the giant colossi of corporate cultural production as second nature”.

If we don’t change our ways, and start thinking for ourselves, our culture will be based off of what the businesses want it to be.