After going through most of the same routine as yesterday, I stopped at the coffee shop because I didn't have to be anywhere. I received a barrage of texts as I tried to study, and realized I forgot a big consumer culture factor yesterday - the constant communications. I send and receive texts all day, plus email, and messages on Facebook, too. I had not even thought of these things when writing in my journal. This brought two things to mind. The first was how important communication is to our consumer culture. It happens constantly, and without it our consumer culture cannot thrive. One text was about plans for the evening. Which movie, which bar, which restaurant, that sort of thing. Purchasing decisions are impacted heavily by communications.
The other thing I thought about was how much consumerism we take for granted. How could I forget about communications when I'm doing them all day? It made me wonder what else I forgot...I listened to a lot music, used my phone, ate dinner, surfed the web...all of this stuff so normal that I didn't even make a note of it.
A did some shopping in the afternoon, to buy some new clothes. Erika Rapp port's piece on the shopping experience can be seen everywhere when you're out shopping.
The way that everybody congregates in the same place to do the same task - the social aspect of shopping is definitely intriguing. I also thought about No Logo. All the stores, in fact almost everything I'd seen during my two days to that point, were branded. Klein and Shuh both had asked...
Even the store displays are carefully contrived communications, as shown by both Leach and Rappaport. My own choices are the sum total of many different influences, but the fact that so many other people come to the same choices by way of completely different sets of influences is amazing.
A decided not to go out in the evening, but to stay home for a few drinks with friends. Even this relatively placid activity required a tremendous amount of interaction with consumer culture. What to drink, where to buy it, how to get there; what to eat, where to buy it, how to get there; emails and texts and tunes while my friends were over; the list of activities involving consumer culture is near endless. We had the TV on, but weren't really paying attention to it, but at the end of the evening as I sat down to make my last journal notes I couldn't remember what was on, just an ad that had been played several times. I looked at the logo on my computer, thought about how many companies had built their software into my computer, and realized that there is not much escape from consumer culture. I spent two days trying to figure out how much I interacted with it, and realized that interaction was near constant. If I lived in the woods in a hut I built myself, farmed all my own food, and did nothing but twiddle my thumbs all day maybe I could avoid consumerism, but as it stands it seems all-pervasive.
