Social Communication in Advertising by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Advertising & Promotion
ISBN: 9781138094567
Google: Qvb9swEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-15T02:48:07+00:00

Postmodernism for Twitchell does not signal a dematerialization so much as an unleashing of materialism. The demise of the old morals of consumption permitted a vast expansion of material consumption in the post-1970s period. People do not just dream about goods or read their surfaces, they acquire them. People drive massive SUVs, and house sizes in America have doubled and sometimes tripled to make way, not for more children, but for more stuff brought home from the shopping trips to Wal-Mart. Twitchell argues that the reaction to the dismantling of the Berlin wall in 1989 showed that many other countries are eager to join the American way of consumption. The impulse for individuality achieved through consumption of goods is global in its scope.

Although Twitchell acknowledges that the worship and practice of materialism deliver bads (waste, permissive child-raising) as well as goods, people have chosen it over all other social systems. The marketplace provides people with what they want. Twitchell maintains that it is difficult for today’s middle-aged academic critics to offer intelligent commentary on contemporary consumption because they refuse to see that Americans consume in high levels because they simply want goods and hold onto materialism as a dominant ethos of life. Individuals are liberated and freely express their desires in the marketplace. Those who remain in poverty, notes Twitchell, do so because they lack the ability to change their situation.

We have not been led into this world of material closeness against our better judgment. For many of us, especially when young, consumerism is our better judgment. We have not just asked to go this way we have demanded. Now most of the world is lining up, pushing and shoving, eager to elbow into the mall. Getting and spending has become the most passionate, and often the most imaginative, endeavor of modern life. While this is dreary and depressing to some, as doubtless it should be, it is liberating and democratic to many more.

(1996, 290)

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