MDST*1030 Lecture 8: Advertising, Consumer Culture and Desire, Postmodernism, Pastiche, Parody and the Remake P1
Week 8: Advertising, Consumer Culture and Desire, Postmodernism, Pastiche, Parody and the
Remake
We are relentlessly confronted with media images every day.
Consumer Society
-Capitalism as a system depends on the consumption and production of a large amount of goods
—well beyond those that are necessary for daily living.
-Consumer choice is central to capitalist consumer cultures.
-Individual choice is often promoted by advertisers as something extremely important and crucial
to a person’s happiness within society.
-Advertising tells us what we should desire, who we should envy and describe life ‘as it should
be’
-Rise of consumerism takes place in the context of shifting values.
-Identity, in consumer society can be purchased in the absence of the meaning derived from
close family/community.
T.J. Jackson Lears ‘Theraputic Ethos’
-Where we go from Protestant work ethic, civic responsibility, self-
denial to leisure, spending and individual fulfillment
-In a culture that was becoming increasingly modernized (late 1800’s),
people began to feel stress and anxiety about the new fast-paced
lifestyle of the urban communities.
-Advertisements used therapeautic ethos to give hope for relieving
some of these stress and anxieties by offering commodities that would
aid in creating self-fulfillment and/or self-improvement. For example,
the nineteenth century advertisement above shows an African
American maid tending to an upper-class white family while they put
on clothes assumed to be starched with “Hovey’s Sunday Gloss
Starch.” This ad, aimed at women (housewives), communicates the
message that high-class, rich women use this brand of starch, and that
if the consumer uses it, she will be high-class too.
The Cathedral of Commerce
-Simultaneously, shopping transformed from a mundane act to an activity
of leisure and entertainment through the creation of visually pleasing
spaces for shopping.
-The Flaneur emerged as a man who window shops and strolls for pleasure
—whose primary activity is looking.
-As urban populations became more concentrated, the commute of the
average individual increased — giving rise to the use of billboards to
advertise to an increasingly mobile community.
-The billboard became an iconic form for the idea of the consumer on the
move.
-Advertisers began to produce simple graphic design that could be consumed quickly and
effectively
Cultural Capital
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