Ignorance and Power

What happens when specific elements of consumer culture are made explicit? By this I mean, the act of decontextualization that comes with speaking about specific items in consumer culture and the supposed significance they bring in terms of their material components: “you are investing X amount of money and time to buy an electronic item that you believe will bring you self/social satisfaction.” The best examples I can come up with deal with the material/emotional relationships that people have with physical objects in their lives: for instance, coming home after work or school and staring silently at a box that flickers and speaks at you. This material connection inverts the power relationship the person assumes they have with the object. In the explicit version of events, the physical objects obtain a power over the user that the user hopes doesn’t exist. A basic element of consumer culture is satisfaction through choice. The American dream and car culture speaks to the autonomy of individuals in determining their fate. Talking about the material features of consumer culture subjugates the consumer to their material objects rather than the inverse. This is linked to a previous post I made about mass consumption. I had trouble identifying why it is pictures of mass consumption (or waste) terrify me. In these picture, the viewer identifies with the items in the picture as individuals but with their perceived role again undermined: they act as part of a mass of people compelled by greater forces crowding out individual autonomy. This description of mass culture partially explains the compulsion towards trendiness and being ‘ahead of the curve’ – an attempt to recover and individual’s power in mass culture.
Explicitness also initiates a reconsideration process for the people involved. Speaking out about consumer objects presumes that the people being spoken to don’t understand the reality of their relationship to technology. By speaking of it in a decontextualized space, they perhaps begin to question what they do or don’t know about their relationship to technology. This forms a significant line of questioning in the mind of someone using the technology for supposedly their own purpose.


Duncan