OUGD501: Context of Practice - Consumerism Seminar

This session was a follow on from the lecture on Consumerism. At the start of the session we came up with a collective list of key points from the lecture:

• Desire and false need
• False needs vs real needs
• Manufacturing a desire
• Greed for commodities
• Social control vs freedom
• Stratification
• Social control causes mass inequality but it is disguised 

Consumerism acts as a palliative (like a drug/sedative)

• Mass production 

Mass production is constantly expanding, more and more meaningless stuff in the world.

How do big businesses create the need for these things?

• Advertising
• Emergence of brands

Freud:

• Irrational desires and animal instincts 
• The pleasure principle

Bernays:

• Public relations

Link irrational desires to a brand, person or politics.

We are given the illusion that we have a free choice though those options have been chosen for us. 

'We must tame the bewildered herd' - Lippmann

Task:

We were split into small groups and each given a section from John Berger's 'Ways of seeing'. After we had read the section we were asked to dissect and explain it with examples. 

• We all feel we have the right to be happy but we are stuck in social control 
• We work which makes us feel that we have earned the right to these things
• Buying into consumerism makes us popular which in turn makes us feel better than others
• Consumerism helps to mask real life events and makes the consumers believe that they are living in a 'bubble' and unaware to the world around us

Channel - Share the fantasy

• 'I will feel this way forever' the bubble of consumerism
• Social status - the promise of the popularity
• 'Dream like'
• Working and earning the things - it seemed like she was on holiday and she had earned it

Write an analysis of one advert using quotes from John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing'.