This book report is on the society of the spectacle by guy Debord. It is a theory that our society is dominated by images and characterizes and drives our consumer society. The images we see are seen through various methods such as Advertisements, television and other media outlets along with banners and signs. People in consumerism see images of things for them to buy and they go and but things and the reality that the world makes becomes what they are about. Regardless if the people have the money or not they can get credit and pay for it with money they don’t have. This idea of credit for everyone helps the people with power to attain more money and power. The more technology progresses the easier it becomes to enhance the consumer society and move into new market areas and continue to move forward with the new way of life in American and the world.
Debord states that “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”(34) This relates to ties between money and the spectacle or images. Advertisements and other methods of getting images out there require money to produce and get out to public. When a product is wanted by the public it then is consumed and helps the upper-class and more powerful people to gain wealth to continue to flood our mind with consumerism. With this money and social control over the mass population there is control by institutions. With constant pressure to buy certain products Debord states “the spectacle is a permanent opium war waged to make it impossible to distinguish goods from commodities.”(44) When people don’t know why they are purchasing a certain product for its social status they are under the spell of consumerism and will do as they are encouraged to do by the power t...
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...e are a consumer society and we are driven by images. I think it is a problem the way higher class people use this to improve their fortunes and slowly killing our economy. I agree with Debord on about all of the points he made. I don’t find myself caught up in this consumer society for the most part, but I can see how it grips certain people and it gets to the point where it defines them. I believe that Debord dislikes the new society, so I wish he would have come out and said more negative things about the consumerism. The way Debord states individual points rather than a single theory is interesting because he can jump from one point to another without adhering to certain factors. This allows him to look at things from many different angles, which is important when you’re talking about the world, which is very complex and is comprised of many different variables.
The author sees medias of all kind (television, newspapers, the Internet...) as covering a negative role especially in the United States, where they extend the values of the ruling class to all other social groups, while creating and broadcasting a negative image of the poor as parasites, predators exploiting the resources provided by the wealthy because of their laziness. Widespread embrace of 'hedonistic consumerism' (p.60) by all people is something Hooks sees as the cancer of American society today. It's a system which has tragic consequences both psychologically and behaviourally on the poor as personal value is considered to depend on material ownership. The desire to be wealthy is seen as the only meaningful aspiration, and the failure to satisfy one's material longings triggers psychological torment and
Everyone is in a consumer’s hypnosis, even if you think you are not. When you go to a store and pick one brand over the other, you are now under their spell. The spell/ hypnosis is how companies get you to buy there things over other companies and keep you hooked. Either through commercials or offering something that you think will make your life better by what they tell you. For example, you go to the store and you need to buy water, once you get to the lane and look, there is 10 different types of water you can buy. You go pick one either because the picture is better or you seen the commercial the other day and you want it. During the length of this paper we will talk about two important writers, Kalle Lasn the writer of “The Cult You’re in” and Benoit Denizet-Lewis writer of “ The Man Behind Abercrombie & Fitch”. They both talk about similar topics that go hand and hand with each other, they talk about the consumers “Dream”, how companies recruit the consumers, who cult members really are, how people are forced to wear something they don’t want, and about slackers.
Thus, as America’s society advances, “wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied,” as demonstrated in Galbraith’s text from The Dependence Effect. On the other hand, producers always actively advertise to generate wants and hence, these wants depend on production. This also means that the consumer does not spontaneously create his own wants, but rather the same entity of production creates them and later satisfies them. However, the products created do not really satisfy anything because the companies who created the products instigated this want from the beginning and the consumer, by himself, never possessed the urgency of the desire that he now satisfies by buying the product. Hence, from America’s highly materialistic society emerges the “Dependence Effect” which entraps most Americans in a boundless cycle.
It is believed that there is a tension between social classes in America. Typically, people of lower classes choose to imitate those of higher social status. As a result, advertisers have a tendency to take advantage of this tension in order to profit from people of the lower and middle classes. In “The American Upper Class,” G. William Domhoff says that “exhibiting high social status… is a way of exercising power” (Domhoff p.34),” which is something important to all social classes. According to Judi Puritz Cook, author of “Consumer Culture…Sales Discourse,” advertisements in print as well as in visual media seem to create “the promise of status mobility through consumption (Cook p.373).” In the article, Puritz explains how television programs on channels such as the Home Shopping Network are examples of how the media exploits the anxiety caused by social standing.
Advertisements thrust products and services at consumers that they deem necessary in order to be loved, beautiful, happy, and fulfilled. Without these “necessities,” we feel judged, out casted and criticized. These possessions, however, make us self-loathing. Subsequently, we lose our sense of significance and find it hard to accept love and friendship from the people surrounding us. People begin to evade meaningful relationships and commitments—choosing instead to fill the personal hollowness with a display of power they attain from their material possessions. The society we live in reduces us to things; it diminishes our personal relations and portrays connections as transactions, only advisable if there is something to gain. These ideas can be found within John Kavanaugh’s book, Following Christ in a Consumer Society, in which Kavanaugh creates a name for the American way of life--the "Commodity Form." The Commodity Form values products, marketing, and consuming while promoting strategic manipulation that more possessions equate to increased happiness. Within the Commodity Form, people are seen as “replaceable and marketable” objects (Kavanaugh 26)...
It aimed to concentrate on the influence of consumerism on a person as the embodiment of a consumeristic society in the post modern era. In post industrial era, a consumer society in which people craving to be updated with the new style packs in all field. In other words, the people have to face terminal exclusion and rejections that are the comeuppance for those who fail to come up with the images the community presents. People are forced to re-conciliate with the consumption policies of the society and that is the path one can be recognized
In reality, consumers are only purchasing items to give themselves short term happiness but in the long term, purchasing items proves to make us feel empty and unfulfilled. As Americans, we should be pursuing minimalism or in other words, we should only be buying items that are necessary to our survival. This is one of many main reasons why Tyler Durden forms Fight Club and Project Mayhem, which is because he believes that this consumer-based culture is destructive to our society. In a way, consumerism is an endless cycle of propaganda proposed by companies advertising their products to consumers causing them to believe that they need or want these items but in reality they don’t. Thus, consumers are “trapped” in this concept and will work jobs that they hate but pay well just to support their lifestyle in this harmful culture. In a sense, materialism has become the center of our identity because our society defines an individual by what items he/she has. Likewise, materialism is taken to the extremes when our human body parts are seen as tools to make money. Palahniuk writes, “The truth. We made soap out of
Furthermore, Consumerism creates an opportunity for mass markets to steadily grow to influence our evolving society. We see how mass marketing changes the way a society operate and view it. Consumerism relies on human desires. Society has a countless number of habits to be disappointed. Mass Marketing has boundless opportunities to create new products to meet those desires. Every day businesses compete by inventing a new product to satisfy purchasers' wants and needs. Mass marketing portrays societies to want more than they have now, a bigger house, a better car, more money, more shoes and cloths. This increases economic poverty, and increase in debts by...
With the dawn of the industrial era, railroads arrived in the United States. This invention completely revolutionized American consumer culture, allowing manufacturers to ship goods to their buyers at much quicker rates. As a result, consumers could buy items from the other side of the country, and no longer had to make their own goods. As the US shifted to shipping things through railroads, advertising arrived to the scene. Radios and newspapers were dense with advertisements whose sole goal was to convince the reader/listener that their his or her’s life is incomplete without the proposed product. All of a sudden, the US became a society unsatisfied with “just getting by”. Consumers “needed” items with the latest technology. Fulfilling basic needs was no longer enough because consumerism had completely transformed American society. By painting money as a symbol of status and happiness, consumerism has trapped the public in an endless cycle of going to great lengths to attain wealth, finding the wealth as unsatisfactory, convincing themselves that more wealth would make them happier, and repeat.
We live in an era of constant change, where things evolve with a speed so high that we can hardly keep up with it. We are faced with a wide-range of choices in every field of our lives and we constantly have to educate ourselves in order to make the best decisions. Specifically in the field of shopping people encounter so many options that sometimes the reasons of a purchase can say as much about a person as ethnicity, religion or gender can. In order to consume we have to produce first, therefore Lowenthal`s statement is completely reasonable: “We called the heroes of the past “idols of production”: we feel entitled to call the present day heroes “idols of consumption” (Lowenthal, 1961: 115).
Another example which promotes the idea of materialism is commercials that have famous celebrities advertising many products. By having famous actors and actresses promoting materialistic objects, it allows the audience to believe that they need to buy this product to be just like the actor or actress. Bollywood has become modernized and it is now used as a means for “consumption and commercialization” (Rao, 2007) rather than entertainment.
In a consumer driven economy, the purchasing of goods allows it to thrive. Although need is a large contributor to what is purchased, often times it is desire that fills the much needed spending gap. With personal debt on the rise in the United States, it is hard not to think about what would happen if every individual only purchased what they needed. Would that help lower the nation’s debt or would it drive the economy into the ground? With the large presence of advertisements in everyday life, it’s hard to imagine what the day would look like without them. Although advertisements pay for a large portion of entertainment, they will always keep consumers wanting the best of the best, or the most popular, even if it means presenting ‘kind-of’ true information. Living life is no longer about enjoying it, but about status; having the nicest items and being better than everyone because of those material possessions. Utilizing techniques such as distorting facts and emotional manipulation, advertising is a negative impact to society.
As Ritzer (1999a) argues, “people are lured to the cathedrals of consumption, by the fantacies they promise to fulfill and then kept there by a variety of rewards and constraints” (p. 28). Once enticed into the cathedrals of consumption consumers are made captives. There seems to be no choice but to observe and desire. Those denied access to the world of consumption due to lack of resources, mobility or any other factor, are marginalized and excluded (Gabriel, 2005). Thus, these networks may be seen as a mediums via which products are marketed to consumers with the ‘well meaning’ intent of improving their welfare by expanding choice.
dystopia. This permanent state of unrest is what Lefebvre would call ‘the terror of controlled consumption’, for we are conditioned to want something new and to feel that we should be chasing this dream which is advertised to us, in search of utopia.
These fundamental changes in television and the value of its products should be located in broader economic and cultural shifts that have seen a marked drift towards a consumer individualism in which everybody is encouraged to assert their right to the satisfaction of their particular needs and wants