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TV and Consumer Culture
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20362 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
4,610 Words |
| Author
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Diana Owen
Diana Owen is assistant professor of government at Georgetown
University in Washington, D.C. Her most recent book is Media
Messages in American Presidential Elections (Greenwood Press,
1992). |
Image Is Everything. This advertising slogan for Canon cameras reveals much about the culture at which it is aimed. In our postmodern world, "personal" identities are refracted within a system of mass consumerism for which the lens of a camera serves as the primary mechanism of self-definition. Surpassing all other individual agents of mass dissemination, television's lens has become the dominant means through which individuals both view and are viewed by their society.
In America today, the citizen is defined most fundamentally as consumer. Individuals have become increasingly detached from traditional community bonds, and they continually seek self-affirmation and a sense of solidarity through market mechanisms. Our lives and life-styles are in large part manufactured by a system of mass-produced images that pronounces that we are what we own.
Marxist theorists foreshadowed this condition in capitalist societies when they spoke of the existence of commodity fetishism, whereby material goods become invested with social meaning and power outside of their inherent value. Under these circumstances, individuals are duped into submissive acceptance of existing institutions and norms as they come to define themselves and others primarily in terms of their patterns of consumption. The panacea for all of society's ills is to buy and to buy more.
While a strict interpretation of commodity fetishism may be too extreme to describe consumer culture in the United States, there are trends that lead in this direction. Consumers' knowledge of the connection between manufacturers and the goods they produce is tenuous at best and, therefore, is open to manipulation. For example, the slogan Buy American is used as a selling point for many products. Yet, numerous "American" goods are actually manufactured in other countries, frequently under poor working conditions; or they are assembled in the United States but made of parts produced elsewhere.
The driving force behind American consumer culture is an ad-image system that defines our wants, our needs, our selves. Through the mass media, advertising breathes life into products and provides a context for their consumption. Television has become the foremost media mechanism for perpetuating and promoting the ad-image system. Advertising drives virtually all television programming decisions. Consumer values so fully pervade television that the boundaries between programs and commercials have become increasingly blurred. Further, television sets the agenda for other media, such as movies and
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