Reading | Can people "invent" their identity through consumption?

"Manufacturing Consumer: Global History of Consumerism"

[Method] Anthony Galuzo

Ma Ya translated

Gravity | Publishing of Guangdong People's Publishing House

In just two centuries, the world has changed from agricultural society to a business society. In this era of extremely convenient and high -speed consumption, social psychology and social and cultural have undergone profound changes. The rise of market forces has also spawned multiple changes in global society and politics. The prosperity of brands, large department stores, public relations and advertising, and the excessive packaging of commodity value all affects human self -cognition and self -actuality, so that we have "evolved" from self -sufficient producers to "buying and selling machines." This book starts from the European commodity economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. How can we make us "consumers".

>> Selected reading in the text:

Super Consumer: The future of exponential growth (conclusion)

If this book is introduced to the history of consumption until 1960, someone may question. In the half -century after that, is there no new development in the business field? But in fact, we will find that after 1960, all new development is just repeating and amplifying the phenomenon that has occurred. As a conclusion, all the phenomena analyzed in this book as a whole have grown exponentially in the past two centuries.

Let's return to the beginning of this book: commodity circulation. Since the development of roads in the 19th century and the establishment of railways, the speed of commodity circulation has been steadily accelerating. Especially since the 1960s, with the promotion of trade and scientific and technological development, commerce is even more constrained by time and space. In the port of the middle of the 20th century, the transportation of goods still relying on the physical labor of dock workers to complete it, and it took several days to load the goods and remove the goods by manpower. By 1970, the loading and unloading of the goods gradually did not need to be manual. At present, the ports of the port are placed in the container, and the crane is removed from the transport truck from the truck, and then loaded to the ship. In this way, a few tons of goods were loaded in dozens of minutes, and the previous dock workers had to do it for several days in a short period of time.

The modernization of sea transportation has made the process of global production faster. Chinese cotton will be shipped to Bangladesh, made from local workers into T -shirts, and then sold to French chain stores for sale. In modern times, the transportation cost of this journey is not high, and the labor force is very cheap, so the profit is still considerable. In addition, large companies have begun to produce more and more outsourcing to multiple subcontractors, and these subcontractors have also participated in the local scale economy. Because the transportation of goods is no longer an obstacle, logistics no longer restricts commercial development, entrepreneurs have begun to plan to use logistics to produce each component of the best cost to produce products. For example, in order to achieve the purpose of optimizing production costs, smart phone manufacturers split the motherboards, batteries, and screens of mobile phones to subcontractors around the world, while the upstream of the subcontractor is various mining companies.

With the strengthening of infrastructure construction, the psychological and practical distance between people and goods have narrowed. Let us assume that a person has to buy a book in different times. In the 1990s, people would write down the title and author carefully after hearing a good book. A few days later, he had to walk to the bookstore in the city center to order. Essence A week later, the bookstore called the customer to tell the book that the book arrived, and the customer could buy it next time. In the 2010s, people bought books in a completely different way. After hearing an interesting book, he just bought the book with a smartphone with his fingers. If he is particularly eager to read this book, he can also take the goods within 24 hours, or buy an e -book that can be read immediately. The shortening of this purchase process is achieved by the development of sea transport containers and the development of information technology. From the perspective of consumers, it has decreased and even eliminated. People's desire for goods is no longer restricted by circulation and can quickly get what they want. However, the development of technology will never make people's desires satisfy. On the contrary, the more speed, the more impatient people, and the amazing progress of market circulation. It is just a common thing for people now.

The advancement of the logistics chain and the complexity of the production process have strengthened people's worship complex, and people are increasingly unknown to the production background of goods. Taking food as an example, consumers have gradually paid away from the production process in the past two centuries. People can't see how the food they eat is grown and processed, so it is increasingly a tendency to treat food as an independent substance. Essence In addition, with the large -scale popularization of microwave ovens, this trend of ignorance of food has become more significant in 30 years after the 20th century. When people buy frozen fast food, they do not even need to remove food from the packaging, but just put it in a microwave oven to heat it. In this model, consumers are not only separated from agriculture, but they are alienated from the actual production of food, and they may not even know what they eat in this meal at all.

For high -tech products developed by mature industries, consumers are even more ignorant, so it is even more unable to control the content of the goods. For example, the earliest personal computers can only be used by those who understand the traveler, and they often have to disassemble and program themselves. The latest generation of personal computers and smartphones are completely friendly to users. Even people who do not know about electronic devices can use it, so most new generations of users usually do not understand the composition and components of electronic products at all. The intangibleization of infrastructure has strengthened people's worship of goods. The products have become completely abstract. Consumers are not like users, but they are more like bystanders. In the eyes of people, the product looks so amazing and so dreamy, which is out of the specificity of the material, so consumers are more likely to believe in the symbols of marketing discourse that are in trouble. This ignorance is structural, labor division of labor and increasingly complex production process makes it impossible for anyone to master the composition of daily necessities. Most of the modern consumers are engaged in non -production work in a certain professional field, so they are becoming more and more difficult to understand the production industry, and therefore cannot grasp the materiality of the market world. While working and living in cities, home has become people's harbor, and it is a space for people to enjoy intimate and privacy. Early in the early days of their commercial development, equipment such as radio, television, telephone and computers are used for collective use and often placed in shared space. But now, TV has entered people's living rooms, and mobile phones and computers have also become private. Products. With the progress of the times, these high -tech items are getting cheaper and smaller, and everyone can own it. They are everywhere in the family space. After these collectives that belong to the collective change into private products, family members also have their own "frequency" and increasingly unreasonable. In their own world, everyone cultivates their own consumption habits. Compared to dialogue with family, people prefer to immerse in the media world and talk to virtual dialogue.

The development of the Internet has made the image of images perfect for the rule of the media world, just like the impact of the television 40 years ago on the world, the Internet has set off a wave today. The young people who love music in the 1990s need to work hard to remember the music heard in the broadcast, and then look for the author and go to the store to buy albums. If you want to see what this singer looks like, you need to consult the newspaper or lock the TV music channel. This process may take several months. Under the same circumstances, young people in the 2010s only need to take out smartphones, use the applied singing function query with the application of the application, and you can find this song and the corresponding singer, and then you can browse the singer in a few minutes to browse the singer Introduction, photos, and various related pictures associated with search engines. Every day, the network "expands" millions of texts, photos and audiovisual data. Countless information surrounds us, so that consumers are more likely to immerse in diverse communities. Music enthusiasts can watch their favorite Korean pop music, American evening programs or survivalist podcasts through the Internet. Video platforms like YouTube broke the threshold, so that everyone can share a cup. After all, its slogan is "Broadcast You". The rich audiovisual resources make media cultural products excessively subdivided, and people's identity definition has also increased. Of course, various products have also seized their vision. The audiovisual media makes symbolic association closer to the product more closely. Although symbolic engineering is also facing new difficulties, consumers' attention will become decentralized due to a variety of information. In any case, the large -scale communication of the image is still conducive to the development of cultural and business imagination. Through evasion, projection, identification, and imitation, people explore the identity positioning they want. Various links and pop -ups on the Internet have also served the publicity of the goods perfectly, and the symbolic circulation of products has therefore greatly improved.

Consumption history is the history of accelerated circulation of commodities and their products, and it is the history of the development of the market and the media. In addition to the product itself, there is a symbol of the product. This acceleration is not surprising. It is a reflection of the logic of capital self -lifelong, and it is also a reflection of the continuous movement of capital. In this history, endless products are continuously circulating and new consumption habits are endless. Business is constantly providing nutrients for the material world and the ideal world. All this uses human nature to complete. It uses people's desire for safety, self -esteem, power, and groups, and also uses people's identity and prejudice. The most important thing is that it uses people's desire for manipulation and giveness to things that gives things meaningful to things. desire. Commodities have always been a tool to meet people's actual needs and psychological needs, and it is also a language that expresses the relationship between people's thoughts and power. The market makes goods the core tool for consumers definition and displaying themselves, thereby exacerbating people's desire for goods. In a modern, urbanization, and popular society, goods are the center of everything and the object of people chasing. In modern society, a person's identity is neither inherited nor specified. People can "invent" their identity through consumption.

The image of consumers is like the protagonist who is self -reliant in mythology, like an entrepreneur who is working hard to run his identity. In an open environment, consumers understand some "lifestyles" through various media and business propaganda, and then use this to modify their lives. In this consumer myth, people praise the market vigorously and regard the market as a manifestation of freedom. For example, many postmodern writers often praise the image of consumers, depict them into the incarnation of freedom through consumer movements, and praise consumers to rigid people from rigidity. The old system and class struggle were liberated. In the market, no one has authority and endless products allows people to choose between various experiences, existence methods and lifestyles. It can be said that the term "lifestyle" "is the essence of the current consumer ideology. It simplifies life into a style and also draws our lives and consumption." The market provides symbolic resources so that everyone can experience a variety of lifestyles and freely shift from one lifestyle to another. Consumers are completely free and creative. "Only when the society defines themselves, talents really have themselves." In their pen, consumers are also known as "diligent workers." Consumers have to pursue outstanding forever and have to be exploited by industry forever, and they are also the culprits of all these. It is precisely because consumers have been interpreting products, regarding products as personal value, continuously looking for new fashion, and opposing some old fashion that consumers give their destiny to merchants. Industry only needs to produce a variety of cultural resources, and consumers will judge its quality and bad itself. Two Hindu scholars Rohit Varman and Ram Manohar Vikas, Ram Manohar Vikas, have questioned people's casual, free and charming consumption. They studied the "consumers" living in the Campul slums and wrote: "Our data shows that most of these lower consumers have only a few clothes, which can only satisfy food and clothing." In addition, they need to find food for food. He thought about the residence, "consumption controlled by the market has led to systematic exploitation of lower -level groups in the world's marginal countries and regions. It is also these groups to produce those overcurrent and low -cost commodities for the upper people in the society." Essence Therefore, the author concludes that consumption freedom is just the privilege exercised by a small number of elites in the globalization world. "The so -called capitalist freedom gives people's freedom actually does not exist for the vast majority of people in the world." Because the labor force, work and production world are far away from people, they have caused "structural absences", which allows people to produce One illusion seems to be the same values ​​all over the world, and the world lives a bourgeois life. The praise of consumers' freedom is actually a blind eye to production.

As a result, some people are trapped by production, and the other is desperately consumed. People are full of various products at home to obtain the power of controlling things. The market and more and more commodity and media images grow crazy. The more it develops, the more high -end groups can strengthen its omnipotent divine power. The next stage of the commodity process may be the integration of people and commodities. Starting from the popularity of smartphones, people can be connected to the global network at any time. The whole world can be within reach, and shopping is even within reach. For 15 years, people's fantasies that have established themselves through consumption have been extended in the pen of superhumanism. They predict that some techniques may have some techniques in the future to enhance certain capabilities of human beings. In this fantasy, people will become as ductantly, liquidity and "exchanging" as the product itself. People will not be bundled with anything, so they will be free; people will be separated from the entity and therefore have more autonomy. People will always be able to build themselves by themselves. Cyborg may become the ultimate image of consumers. People will no longer be bound by biology. Instead, they can rely on various high -tech prosthesis to be assembled from me. People can build themselves like building an engineering project. As a result, it becomes a "disconnected individual, which is involved in the process of acceleration of various types of neurotic acceleration for expressing their identity."

Although a small number of consumer groups are reflected in the power and convenience brought by various consumption, in fact, the material infrastructure they lives in is actually increasingly unstable. In the global network of the market, in order to create necessary tools, people need to coordinate the flow of various commodities globally. The global economy is closely connected and extremely complicated, making people both dependent on and extremely fragile. The entire chain established by the consumer society began in the era when people no longer used livestock transportation. From then on, various new transportation methods gradually transported personnel and goods at a faster and faster speed. Power depends on the development of non -renewable resources, such as hydrocarbons and minerals, all of which are limited. In this book, we have witnessed the process of index development from the mid -19th century to the early 21st century. However, as financial scholars often say: "The big trees are not higher than the sky." What we wrote here is just the beginning of the history of consumerism, and perhaps after decades, someone will write its ending.

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Author: Anthony Garuzo

Edit: Zhou Yiqian

Editor in charge: Zhu Zilong

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