Pop culture - Shopping Flashcards
Why study consumption?
Consumption is bound up in our everyday lives.
These practices affect our experiences of space and place. This creates assumptions.
Dedicated spaces are created from this.
Consumption is central to identity. The branding used is what forms and marks our identity.
What is Mansvelt’s (2005) definition of consumption?
Mansvelt 2005
“[T]he complex sphere of social relations and discourses which centre on the sale, purchase and use of commodities”
What is Williams’ definition of consumption?
Williams in ‘Key terms’
To use up, exhaust.
The act of buying and using some kind of commodity.
The consumer, consumer rights, consumer culture, consumer goods.
What is Clarke et al’s (2003) definition of consumption?
Clarke et al 2003
“What consumers do in practice, what they get out of it and their meanings, feelings and accomplishments”
How is identity formed through consumption?
Example: Schlitz.
“In America you are what you trash”.
- Do the leftovers of personal selection of consumer goods make a self portrait?
- What does it say about you? How readily do you throw things away? Distribution of things and our ability to consume within a geographical context.
What is ideology?
The set of assumptions about the world upon which cultural artefact is founded.
A ‘false consciousness’, or distortion of reality in favour of particular ends.
“Ideology distorts our view” Zizek.
Rituals and customs that bind us to a political social order that are reinforced and gradual change the norms.
How do we consume music and technology?
What you listen to forms a part of your identity.
Consumer culture as a way of life.
Headphones enable a person to escape reality and enter their own world, to temporarily remove themself.
Identity performances - Dating apps have created a way in which people consume one another e.g. swipe right to consume.
How do places form spaces for consumption?
Example: Arcades.
Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Project (1940) - Arcades are destinations for consumer culture. Window shopping has created an aesthetic. Can be consumed both indoors and outdoors.
How do places form spaces for consumption?
Example: McDonalds.
McDonaldization - Designed to be fast for greater efficiency. Consistency across branches through iconography, no matter where you are in the world.
How has tourism influenced consumption?
The tourist gaze:
Consumption of spaces. Influenced by images, reviews and advertisements.
Buying into particular meanings of places.
Example: Disneyland.
A consumption space with particular atmospheres and brand associations.
Multiple opportunities to consume e.g. attractions, gift shops, food outlets.
Merchandising.
Tourist consumption spaces
Example: Disneyland and Dismaland.
Disneyland:
A consumption space with particular atmospheres and brand associations.
Multiple opportunities to consume e.g. attractions, gift shops, food outlets.
Merchandising.
Dismaland:
Critiques consumption culture but is also consumed e.g. when souvenirs are sold on Ebay.
Do consumers have agency and can they resist?
Consumers are active and creative - We interpret and invest with meanings and appropriate them into our lives through practices of consumption.
Consumers can actively resist and subvert cultural politics e.g. culture jamming.
What is commodity activism?
Example: Beach body ready campaign.
Using juxtaposition to create new meanings.
Using humour as an everyday tool to destabilise power.
Shopping interventions which can draw attention to corporate ethics.
Culture jamming - Reworking dominant discourses (adverts) to subvert them.
Example: Beach body ready campaign - The norms being portrayed are embodied in our acts of consumption.
