..time is such an ambiguous concept.
Why measure it in precise increments when, in fact, it is never so punctilious.
I can be lost in a lasting warp during one night (of reality) or I can blink and months will pass.
For me, time is happening all at once.
Concurrently.
Western culture is a society based on mass consumption, organized around the pleasures of consumption by encouraging self-indulgence in its most blatant forms.
Freedom stems from possession of goods driven by material conditions, in which individuals are constantly seeking a way to tangibly express their increasing power, both locally and globally.
Testing our desires and needs, consumerism is enveloped by cultural forces, to the point where the two are inseparable and indistinguishable. The problem arises when we start to compare culture to consumption, or vice-versa.
Can a person form an identity without purchasing products or brands? Can a person develop an identity without identifying with any particular culture?
Consumers believe that their identity is an effort to build a distinct or acceptable image; self-absorption and narcissism are rooted in the importance of first impressions which lacks depth precisely because popular culture compels it to remain superficial as it is constantly metamorphosing.
Modern consumption patterns seek to promote not so much self-indulgence as self-doubt, creating needs, not fulfilling them.
In this cycle the self becomes translated into one of the possession of desired goods and the pursuit of artificially framed styles of life.
Cultural consumption is predisposed to fulfil a social function, implying that the denial of natural enjoyment constitutes an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied by gratuitous pleasures.
After the onset of globalisation the concepts of individuality and uniqueness have dissipated, or on the contrary, hyper-individualism in the face of globalising opportunities and the virtual fall of frontiers between cultures and brands have dissipated.
Society comes to dominate the individual through the material world of objects and interests, essentially for meeting needs but also for finding a self as advertisers attempt to manipulate the symbolic meanings and messages in an effort to induce consumers to want them, trying to identify their product with peoples’ general desires.
Of broad social concern is a collective disillusionment, an outcome of a structural mismatch between aspirations and real expectations, built around materialistic tendencies and the pursuit of self-interest in relation to the search for pleasure – typical features of a permissive, hedonistic culture.
Check out the whole anti-consumerism sequence.
The principle of modern culture is not restraint but the expression and remaking of the ‘self’ in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfilment.
There are different ways in which consumption influences or impacts underlying identity of individual and collective psyche and the culture it produces. Consumption patterns occur as a result of marketing and advertising techniques and consumers’ needs and wants.
Are we as consumers manipulated by marketing powers, believing that we will have no identity unless we buy the products that will inevitably personify us?
Or do we build personal and collective identity – including that of the marketing forces – by dictating what goods and services are produced and available to us?
Continuous consumption becomes a method of substitute for the genuine development of self or, conversely, consumption paradoxically reinforces aggressive elements, thus making it more difficult for instinctual desires, if any indeed to exist, to find acceptable outlets.
There are differences in how and what we consume, and those differences are manifested in polarity between the tastes of luxury or freedom, and the tastes of necessity, that is to say that our greed – the desire for extravagance – is driving this force of consumption, fuelled by the market forces.
Modern commercial society confronts materialism, egoism, cultural banality and emptiness of ‘self-interest’, generating wealth but not value, which are not true sources of the self and cannot be produced or sustained through self-interested reason.
Palahniuk’s tag line from Fight Club - the things you own end up owing you – fits perfectly into this discourse, whereby we believe that things that we own will liberate us or provide us with more or better opportunities, but our possessions eventually start to control our behaviour and our emotions.
Check out the whole anti-consumerism sequence.
New RSA animated lecture on Education.
Brilliance, as always
Some notes:
- Education is not a guaranteed path to success later in life, and particularly not if the route to it marginalizes everything most of the things you think are important about yourself
- The current system of education was designed, conceived and structured for a different age;
- Assumptions about social structure & capacity, driven by an economic imperative of the time, lead by intellectual model of the mind = academic ability, deep in the gene pool. there are two groups: academic and not, smart and not. All judged by this particular view of the mind. This model has caused chaos
The arts, and science to a degree, are the victims of this mentality. Aesthetic experience – where senses are operating at their peak. You are resonating to this thing that you are experiencing and you are fully alive. Anesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself. And kids shouldn’t be put to sleep, they should be woken up.
We all have the capacity to learn; with age it mostly deteriorates as we become more ‘educated’.
Most great learning happens in groups; collaboration is the stuff of growth.
Always at crossroads – explorational, commercial, operational, even geological – it is impressive that Japan succeeded in forming a robust and independent nation.
Internal demographics, as a result of external forces interminably shaped the Japanese society as it continued forming and developing through lengthy socio-geographical periods of evolvement.
Japanese society is based on the ‘minzoku‘ paradigm, which refers to naturally occurring and mutually reinforced ideologies of race and nation as explanatory factors in social, political and economic relationships.
In Japan, a nationalist ideology with a central motif of the kazoku kokka (family state), was itself the product of a reworking of the concepts of citizen and nation in accordance with myths of common ancestry.
Contemporary Japanese society reflects its historical supremacy – deep-rooted, traditional, progressive, at the same time as it is isolated – theoretically, geographically, commercially.
The London-based Future Laboratory forecasts trends, consumer insight and brand strategy, maps out qualitative and quantitative insights into future consumers.
In other words, they will know what we want before we know ourselves.
So, in essence, consumerism is not driven my demand any more but from the supply side by the profit-making businesses.
They create the need for their products by bringing the future to you, by anticipating market needs: turning data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into insight and creative capital.
How does market control even work? They map out and analyse the ‘cultural triangulation process’ by assessing consumer shifts, along with quantitative and qualitative snapshots of key consumers and consumer insight panels to ‘capture’ new and emerging consumer thinking. New and emerging consumer thinking?
Interested? Future Laboratory, Exposure, iD Factor, Mode Information.
