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Consumer Culture and Postmodernism

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Submitted By alinamalina111
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In everyday life we are surrounded by consumption. We buy items every day, we pass millions of shops on our way home and see every other person carrying a branded shopping bag. So what exactly do we mean by consumption? The everyday use of the term nowdays states that 'consumption' is about 'use'. In postomodern accounts, cultural consumption is seen as being the very meterial out of which our identites are being construct – we become what we consume. Mackay (1997, p.4)

In the 20 th century mass production has led to the commodification of culture, with the rise of cultural industries. Consumption serves the interests of manufactures seeking greater profit, and citisens have become the passive victims of advertisers. Mackay (1997, p.5) Boudreillard has a theory about consumer commodities. In late capitalism they developed the capacity to take up a wide range of symbolic associations which overlay their initial use-value and hence become comodity signs which leads to the loss of a sense of reality.Featherstone (1991,p. 56). Commodities came to lack authenticity and met ' false needs' . Consumers began to have a passive role , be manipulated, rather than creative and active beings.

Karl Marx in his theory of capitalism says that production is for the market and for profit. Veblen's in his reaserch explains how goods are used as symbolic markers of social status, and how consumption is for the purpose of imprassing others.Mackay (1997, p.4)

In 1984, Bourdieu provides a seeing of social relations as cultural as well as econimical. He argues that cultural capital is distributed in such way that social groups have different capacities to vest cultural value in symbolic goods.Mackay (1997, p.7) Consumption is the articulation of a sense of identity.
What shapes our identity? Is it something that comes from inside of us, or something that we have been influenced

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