Rise of Consumer Culture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Rise of Consumer Culture - Essay Example This linking culture Snow suggested in the second edition of his book in 1963, calling it a "third culture" where literary intellectuals lived in harmony with scientists, communicating ideas among each other and with the public. Brockman borrowed Snow's terminology of the third culture in his book (1995) of the same title as he daringly predicted that scientists and engineers at the cusp of what would soon become the dot.com boom will dominate this third culture. The boom came, but soon after followed the bust, and Brockman's third culture never materialised as he had hoped. What Snow and Brockman never realised was that a third culture had been moving quietly alongside these two cultures over the last half of the 20th century, one that combined the power of postmodernist intellectual thought and the energy of scientific innovation, helped along by the emergence of a capitalist society of excess wealth and prosperity. This third culture is the consumer culture, characterised by what we can describe as a body-centric attitude of consumption, where almost every conceivable commercial product is available to satisfy every craving or desire, fulfil any dream, and where reality can be reduced to one's identification with ideals created and circulated by the mass media. Essentially a perfect combination of Snow's two cultures - the romantic and the scientific - the consumer culture now defines who and what we are. The Marketable Self This is the scenario where Featherstone and other sociologists situate the body, the consuming subject, which is nothing more than the agent responsible for capturing and defining reality. Straddling the romantic-idealistic literary and the sensual-measurable scientific worlds, the consumer culture entices the human body to know and love it, to be a part of it, and to recognise that that is where its happiness and fulfilment lie. As the consuming subject (the body) attempts to capture - buying, eating, dressing up, or simply experiencing - reality in this consumer culture, it is the body that ends up becoming captive. It is in this context that we can analyse Featherstone's words (1991) that "the consumer culture constructs the marketable self." A main feature of this culture is a powerful popular media that helps in defining who and what we are. In his book (1999) Selling Dreams: How to Make Any Product Irresistible, Ferrari CEO Gian Luigi Longinotti-Buitoni (p. 193) describes the people of the consumer culture as bodies where product creators create a masterpiece the way a Picasso creates a painting on canvas, and where the media play the role of the artist's brush and oil. The body as a canvas Yes. In the consumer culture, "every instrument of the popular media - advertisements, television, and film to the press - provides a proliferation of stylised images of the body and emphasises the cosmetic benefits of body maintenance" (Featherstone, 1991). This strategy makes good business sense. After all, the physical perfection of the body or its idea of eternal youth has been one of our most cherished dreams. Beauty being a subjective judgment of a state of perfection, and the natural forces of aging, weight gain, and biological deterioration seemingly designed to halt our achieving that state, the possibilities for its definition are endless. The