Two Cheers for Consumerism

I need an explanation of these questions listed below. Please answer in essay format and use evidence from the articles.

1. How convincing are the writers’ arguments? Are they weak or strong, in parts or as a whole? Explain where and provide reasons

2.Is there anything missing from the authors’ arguments that should be included? Explain your answer and provide the missing component(s).

3. Do you find anything in the writers’ treatment of the topic especially misleading or confusing? Provide examples from their arguments and explain why.

Use the 2 article listed below to answer the questions, reviewing both readings by comparing/contrasting their views and also answer by comparing and contrasting while answering the questions.

Two Cheers for Consumerism by James Twitchell

(Reason Magazine, Aug./Sept. 1999)

Of all the strange beasts that have come slouching into the 20th century, none has been more misunderstood, more criticized, and more important than  materialism. Who but fools, toadies, hacks, and occasional loopy libertarians have ever risen to its defense? Yet the fact remains that while materialism may be the most shallow of the 20th century’s variousisms, it has been the one that has ultimately triumphed. The world of commodities appears so antithetical to the world of ideas that it seems almost heresy to point out the obvious: Most of the world most of the time spends most of its energy producing and consuming more and more stuff. The really interesting question may be not why we are so materialistic, but why we are so unwilling to acknowledge and explore what seems the central characteristic of modern life.

And why is the consumer so often depicted as powerless? From Thomas Hobbes in the mid-17th century (“As in other things, so in men, not the seller but the buyer determines the price”) to Edwin S. Gingham in the mid-20th century (“Consumers with dollars in their pockets are not, by any stretch of the imagination, weak. To the contrary, they are the most merciless, meanest, toughest market disciplinarians I know”), the consumer was seen as participating in the meaning-making of the material world. How and why did the consumer get dumbed down and phased out so quickly? Why has the hypodermic metaphor (false needs injected into a docile populace) become the unchallenged explanation of consumerism?

Much of our current refusal to consider the liberating role of consumption is the result of who has been doing the describing. Since the 1960s the primary  “readers” commercial “text” have been the well-tended and tenured members of the academy. For any number of reasons—the most obvious being their low levels of disposable income, average age, and the fact that these critics are selling a competing product, “high culture” (which is also coated with its own dream values)—the academy has casually passed off as “hegemonic brainwashing” what seems to me, at least, a self-evident truth about human nature: We like having stuff.

In place of the obvious, they have substituted an interpretation that they themselves often call vulgar Marxism. It is supposedly vulgar in the sense that it is not as sophisticated as the real stuff, but it has enough spin on it to be more appropriately called Marxism lite. Go into almost any cultural studies course in this country and you will hear consumerism condemned: What we see in the marketplace is the result of the manipulation of the many for the profit of the few. Consumers are led around by the nose. We live in a squirrel cage. Left alone, we would read Wordsworth, eat lots of salad, and meet to discuss Really Important Subjects.

The idea that consumerism creates artificial desires rests on a wistful ignorance of history and human nature, on the hazy, romantic feeling that there existed some halcyon era of noble savages with purely natural needs. Once we’re fed and sheltered, our needs have always been cultural, not natural. Until there is some other system to identify and satisfy those needs and yearnings, capitalism—and the culture it carries with it—will continue not just to thrive, but to triumph.

In the way we live now, it is simply impossible to consume objects without consuming meaning. Meaning is pumped and drawn everywhere throughout the modern commercial world, into the farthest reaches of space and into the smallest divisions of time. Commercialism is the water we all swim in, the air we breathe, our sunlight and shade. Currents of desire flow around objects like smoke in a wind tunnel.

This isn’t to say that I’m sanguine about material culture. It has many problems that I have glossed over. Consumerism is wasteful; it is devoid of other-wordly concerns. It is heedless of the truly poor, who cannot gain access to the loop of meaningful information that is carried through its ceaseless exchanges. On a personal level, I struggle daily to keep it at bay. For instance, I fight to keep Chris Whitte’s Channel One TV and all place-based advertising from entering the classroom; I contribute to PBS in the hope that they will stop slipping down the slope of commercialism (although I know better); I am annoyed that Coke has bought all the “pouring rights” at my school and is now trying to do the same to the world; and I just go nuts at Christmas.

But I also realize that while you don’t have to like it, it doesn’t hurt to understand it and our part in it. We have not been led astray. To some degree, the triumph of consumerism is the triumph of the popular will. You may not like what is manufactured, advertised, packaged, branded, and broadcast, but it is far closer to what most people want most of the time than at any other period of modern history

We have not been led into this world of material closeness against our better judgment. For many of us, especially when we’re young, consumerism is not against our better judgment. It is our better judgment. And this is true regardless of class or culture. 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. Woe to the government or religion that says no.

Getting and spending have been the most passionate, and often the most imaginative, endeavors of modern life. We have done more than acknowledge that the good life starts with the material life, as the ancients did. We have made stuff the dominant prerequisite of organized society. Things “R” Us. Consumption has become production. While this is dreary and depressing to some, as doubtless it should be, it is liberating and democratic to many more.

Targeting a New World by Joseph Turow

Excerpt fr. Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (1998) pp. 1-7

A revolutionary shift is taking place in the way advertisers talk about America and the way they create ads and shape media to reflect that talk. The shift has been influenced by, and has been influencing, major changes in the audiovisual options available to the home. But it most importantly has been driven by, and has been driving, a profound sense of division in American society.

The era we are entering is one in which advertisers will work with media firms to create the electronic equivalents of gated communities. Marketers are aware that the U.S. population sees itself marked by enormous economic and cultural tensions. Marketers don’t feel, though, that it benefits them to encourage Americans to deal with these tensions head-on through a media brew of discussion, entertainment, and argumentation aimed at broadly diverse audiences. Rather, new approaches to marketing make it increasingly worthwhile for even the largest media companies to separate audiences into different worlds according to distinctions that ad people feel make the audiences feel secure and comfortable. The impact of these activities on Americans’ views of themselves and others will be profound, enduring, and often disturbing.

The changes have begun only recently. The hallmark is the way marketers and media practitioners have been approaching the development of new audiovisual technology. Before the late 1970s, most people in the United States could view without charge three commercial broadcast stations, a public (noncommercial) TV station, and possibly an independent commercial station (one not affiliated with a network). By the mid-1990s, several independent broadcast TV stations, scores of cable and satellite television channels, videocassettes, video games, home computer programs, online computer services, and the beginnings of two-way (“interactive”) television had become available to major segments of the population with an interest and a budget to match.

People in the advertising industry are working to integrate the new media channels into the broader world of print and electronic media to maximize the entire system’s potential for selling. They see these developments as signifying not just the breakup of the traditional broadcast network domain, but as indicating a breakdown in social cohesion, as well. Advertisers’ most public talk about America—in trade magazine interviews, trade magazine ads, convention speeches, and interviews for this book—consistently features a nation that is breaking up. Their vision is of a fractured population of self-indulgent, frenetic, and suspicious individuals who increasingly reach out only to people like themselves.

Advertising practitioners do not view these distinctions along primarily racial or ethnic lines, though race and ethnicity certainly play a part, provoking turf battles among marketers. Rather, the new portraits of society that advertisers and media personnel invoke involve the blending of income, generation, marital status, and gender into a soup of geographical and psychological profiles they call “lifestyles.”

At the business level, what is driving all this is a major shift in the balance between targeting and mass marketing in U.S. media. Mass marketing involves aiming a home-based medium or outdoor event at people irrespective of their background or patterns of activities (their lifestyles). Targeting, by contrast, involves the intentional pursuit of specific segments of society—groups and even individuals. The Underground [radio] Network, the Comedy Central cable channel, and Details magazine are far more targeted than the ABC Television Network, the Sony Jumbotron Screen on Times Square, and the Super Bowl. Yet even these examples of targeting are far from close to the pinpointing of audiences that many ad people expect is possible.

The ultimate aim of this new wave of marketing is to reach different groups with specific messages about how certain products tie into their lifestyles. Target-minded media firms are helping advertisers do that by building primary media communities. These are formed when viewers or readers feel that a magazine, TV channel, newspaper, radio station, or other medium reaches people like them, resonates with their personal beliefs, and helps them chart their position in the larger world. For advertisers, tying into those communities means gaining consumer loyalties that are nearly impossible to establish in today’s mass market.

Nickelodeon and MTV were pioneer attempts to establish this sort of ad-sponsored communion on cable television. While they started as cable channels, they have become something more. Owned by media giant Viacom, they are lifestyle parades that invite their target audiences (relatively upscale children and young adults, respectively) into a sense of belonging that goes far beyond the coaxial wire into books, magazines, videotapes, and outdoor events that Viacom controls or licenses.

The idea of these sorts of “programming services” is to cultivate a must-see, must-read, must-share mentality that makes the audience feel part of a family, attached to the program hosts, other viewers, and sponsors. It is a strategy that extends across a wide spectrum of marketing vehicles, from cable TV to catalogs, from direct mailings to online computer services, from outdoor events to in-store clubs. In all these areas, national advertisers make it clear that they prefer to conduct their targeting with the huge media firms they had gotten to know in earlier years. But the giants don’t always let their offspring operate on huge production budgets. To keep costs low enough to satisfy advertisers’ demands for efficient targeting, much of ad-supported cable television is based on recycled materials created or distributed by media conglomerates. What makes MTV, ESPN, Nickelodeon, A&E, and other such “program services” distinctive is not the uniqueness of the programs but the special character created I by their formats: the flow of their programs, packaged to attract the right audience at a price that will draw advertisers.

But media firms have come to believe that simply attracting groups to specialized formats is often not enough. Urging people who do not fit the desired I lifestyle profile not to be part of the audience is sometimes also an aim, since it makes the community more pure and thereby more efficient for advertisers. So in the highly competitive media environment of the 1980s and early 1990s, cable companies aiming to lure desirable types to specialized formats felt the need to create “signature” materials that both drew the “right” people and signaled the “wrong” people that they ought to go away. It is no accident that the I producers of certain signature programs on Nickelodeon (for example, Ren and Stimpy) and MTV (such as Beavis and Butt-head) in the early 1990s acknowledge that they chase away irrelevant viewers as much as they attract desirable ones.

An even more effective form of targeting, ad people believe, is a type that [goes beyond chasing undesirables away. It simply excludes them in the first place. Using computer models based on zip codes and a variety of databases, it is economically feasible to tailor materials for small groups, even individuals. That is already taking place in the direct mail, telemarketing, and magazine industries. With certain forms of interactive television, it is technologically quite possible to send some TV programs and commercials only to neighborhoods, census blocks, and households that advertisers want to reach. Media firms are working toward a time when people will be able to choose the news, information, and entertainment they want when they want it. Advertisers who back these developments will be able to offer different product messages—and variable discounts—to individuals based on what they know about them.

Clearly, not all these technologies are widespread. Clearly, too, there is a lot of hype around them. Many companies that stand to benefit from the spread of target marketing have doubtless exaggerated the short time it will take to get there and the low costs that will confront advertisers once they do. Moreover, as will be seen, some marketers have been slower than others to buy into the usefulness of a media system that encourages the partitioning of people with different lifestyles.

Nevertheless, the trajectory is clear. A desire to label people so that they may be separated into primary media communities is transforming the way television is programmed, the way newspapers are “zoned,” the way magazines are printed, and the way cultural events are produced and promoted. Most critically, advertisers’ interest in exploiting lifestyle differences is woven into the basic assumptions about media models for the next century—the so-called 500 Channel Environment or the future Information Superhighway.

For me and you—individual readers and viewers—this segmentation and targeting can portend terrific things. If we can afford to pay, or if we’re important to sponsors who will pick up the tab, we will be able to receive immediately the news, information, and entertainment we order. In a world pressing us with high-speed concerns, we will surely welcome media and sponsors that offer to surround us with exactly what we want when we want it.

As an entirety, though, society in the United States will lose out.

One of the consequences of turning the U.S. into a pastiche of market-driven labels is that such a multitude of categories makes it impossible for a person to directly overlap with more than a tiny portion of them. If primary media communities continue to take hold, their large numbers will diminish the chance that individuals who identify with certain social categories will even have an opportunity to learn about others. Off-putting signature programs such as Beavis and Butt-head may make the situation worse, causing individuals annoyed by the shows or what they read about them to feel alienated from groups that appear to enjoy them. If you are told over and over again that different kinds of people are not part of your world, you will be less and less likely to want to deal with those people.

The creation of customized media materials will likely take this lifestyle segregation further. It will allow, even encourage, individuals to live in their own personally constructed worlds, separated from people and issues they don’t care about or don’t want to be bothered with. The desire to do that may accelerate when, as is the case in the late-twentieth-century United States, seemingly intractable antagonisms based on age, income, ethnicity, geography, and more result from competition over jobs and political muscle. In these circumstances, market segmentation and targeting may accelerate an erosion of the tolerance and mutual dependence between diverse groups that enable a society to work. Ironically, the one common message across media will be that a common center for sharing ideas and feelings is more and more difficult to find—or even to care about.

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