What Is Health Consumerism?

The rise of consumerist culture in the 1920s and 1930s, which spread rapidly in Western capitalist countries after World War II, is an important part of the Western bourgeois morality. It is characterized by the absolute possession of goods and the pursuit of hedonism. It regards consumption as its sole purpose and consumes for consumption. It deviates from consumption as a means to meet human needs and promote human development. It is an extreme cultural phenomenon, but It is also a far-reaching economic, social and cultural phenomenon in the period of capitalist transition from a production-oriented society to a consumption-oriented society.

Consumer culture

Right!

The rise of consumerist culture in the 1920s and 1930s, which spread rapidly in Western capitalist countries after World War II, is an important part of the Western bourgeois morality. It is characterized by the absolute possession of goods and the pursuit of hedonism. It regards consumption as its sole purpose and consumes for consumption. It deviates from consumption as a means to meet human needs and promote human development. It is an extreme cultural phenomenon, but It is also a far-reaching economic, social and cultural phenomenon in the period of capitalist transition from a production-oriented society to a consumption-oriented society.

Chinese name

Consumer culture

Foreign name

culture of consumerism

It is a value concept and lifestyle related to consumption. Consume consumption as the sole purpose and consume for consumption. Consumerism deviates from consumption as a means to meet human needs and promote human development. It is an extreme cultural phenomenon. But consumerist culture is also a far-reaching economic, social and cultural phenomenon in the period of capitalist transition from a production-oriented society to a consumption-oriented society.

Consumerist culture rose in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s and spread to Western Europe and Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. It advocates the pursuit of conspicuousness, luxury, and novelty of consumption, and the pursuit of unrestrained material enjoyment, recreation, and hedonism, in order to obtain personal satisfaction and regard it as the purpose of life and the ultimate value of life. Consumerism culture is the first form of consumer culture that emerged in Western countries after entering the consumer society. It is a period of capitalism's transition from a production-oriented society to a consumption-oriented society. The post-modern consumer culture formed after the 1970s is a further extension and development of the early modern consumerist culture. Although the emergence of consumerist culture is the result of the combined effect of many economic, social and cultural factors. However, modern media plays a unique and irreplaceable role in the process of disseminating and constructing consumer culture.

The emergence of American Fordism at the beginning of the 20th century brought large-scale production and large-scale consumption, but in the 1930s and 1940s, the outbreak of the capitalist economic crisis and the subsequent World War II brought to the country and people At the same time as economic depression, hunger and turbulence, the entire human race has been brought into a whirlpool of painful war. In order to escape the crisis, western countries represented by the United States have adopted a prescription prescribed by British economist Keynes: Encouraging consumption and increasing investment As a result, economic policies that encourage consumption have been widely valued and implemented in capitalist countries. The Great Depression and War brought pain and anxiety to people, but the instinctive pursuit of finding happiness, creating happiness, and enjoying happiness has made people not In the depression and war years, we only focused on the rice bowl and the gun. On the contrary, because the media itself has the functions of transmitting information, monitoring society, and guiding public opinion, it inevitably became the period to accelerate the spread of consumerist culture, build consumerist culture, and connect A bridge between modern and postmodern.

With the long-term stability and prosperity of the western capitalist economy after World War II, people's attitudes towards consumption have undergone a fundamental change. Consumerism and hedonism, as the ideology propagated by companies through mass media such as advertising, have become mainstream values in the consumer life of western developed countries. With the advent of credit or credit consumption, spending future money, timely enjoyment and enjoyment has become a fashionable consumer lifestyle for Western mass consumers after World War II. And Lukács once pointed out that consumer culture is a kind of affirmative culture, it provides a compensatory function for society, it provides people in alienated reality with the illusion of freedom and happiness, and is used to cover up the real regrets in reality. . Happiness is equated with consumption. The "size" of happiness depends on the "size" of the item. But can consumption really bring people freedom and happiness? The answer of Western Marxists is no. They believe that in contemporary capitalist society, people's consumption is also controlled and manipulated. On the surface, as long as you have the money, you can spend as much as you want. But in fact, people consume according to the intention of the manufacturer and the intention of the advertisement. In the field of consumption, as in labor, people are not free.

However, as the negative impact of the consumerist and hedonistic lifestyles on the environment and energy has become increasingly prominent, the call for changing consumerism has also grown. The rise of greenism, environmentalism, and ecologicalism has also formed a social force to curb consumerism. Historical materialism believes that the ideal consumer culture should be people-oriented, centered on the needs of people's enjoyment and development, and constantly improve the cultural content of consumer goods, consumer environment and consumer life that meet human needs, and continuously improve consumer culture and quality to promote people. Comprehensive development.

1. The value of the symbol is higher than the value of use. In consumer society, more and more non-physical factors are infiltrated into material goods. The design, packaging, and advertising of goods have become more and more important in the production of goods, and they even play a dominant role in the composition of goods. The role directly restricts the production, sales and consumption of commodities. Related to the dematerialization of commodities, the production of symbol systems and visual images has played an increasingly important role in controlling and manipulating consumer tastes and fashion. Here, the symbolic value is considered to be a third value that is different from the value and value of the commodity. The three attributes of the third value of a commodity are information value, experience value, and symbol value. Symbol value is the information value of a product, and Kahneman calls it experience utility.

In fact, everyone can feel the existence of this third attribute in daily life. Example-a wedding ring, its symbolic value is obviously different from its use value and exchange value. It is almost impossible for others to exchange it from the owner based solely on its exchange value; and once lost, its loss to the owner is by no means limited to its market value. Symbolic values express style, style, prestige, and rights. In modern society, this symbolic value has become an important part of goods and consumer goods. The purchase of items is no longer because of the connotation (including use value and exchange value) of these items, but because of the symbolic value they represent. Television has a historical role in promoting the value of symbols and promoting the formation of a consumerist culture. TV ads can effortlessly "stick" romance, singularity, desire, beauty, contentment, sense of belonging, scientific progress and a good life to the merchandise being sold. These goods are often the daily life of the world.

When everyday consumer goods in the world are associated with cultural features such as luxury, singularity, beauty, and romance, it is not so easy to identify the original use functions of these goods carefully. Here, operators are no longer just explaining the meaning of their products, but also "packaging" products with various symbols and graphics. Such "packaging" and products are often difficult to distinguish. The concern of operators is not whether these packages can fully represent their products, but whether they can connect their products with the desires of the audience or consumers. More specifically, the history of marketing shows that marketing can only succeed if you first focus on the obvious desires of the masses and then create new products or repackage old products to meet those desires. What people consume is not goods, but symbols.

2. Hyperreality: Material consumption is transformed into aesthetic consumption with ideological significance. In a post-industrial consumer society, what people consume is not the functional attributes (practicability) of commodities, but the social attributes, that is, the value of symbols, which converts material consumption into an aesthetic consumption of ideological significance. Television has played an important role in this process. When the symbolic image floods television and is played to the extreme, people actually enter the analog world or era that Baudrillard calls. Consumer products already have the ability to combine with a wide range of images and symbols. This combination obscures the value of the product and becomes a commodity-sign.

When the consumer culture with TV as the core media uses endless symbols and images to produce endless reality simulations, consumers often lose their grasp of reality. In this age of simulation, whether it is "original" or "replica" is not the core of the question. Because the reference point is gone, the truth is insignificant. In such times, the focus of producers is not on the production of material commodities, but on the manipulation of capital and the production of "consumer demand". This process is also the transition from manufacturing to services. This kind of service consumption includes education, health, information services, but also entertainment, leisure services and so on. Because capitalism is now primarily concerned with the production of symbols, images, and symbolic systems. The process of symbol production is also a process of cultural construction, a process of creating "dreams". Although the reality covered by culture did not start in the era of consumption, human civilization has long painted all aspects of society with cultural colors.

However, the package of reality in the consumer era really replaced the reality, and the cultural construction of reality is no longer the previous multiple cultures, but only the consumerist culture manipulated by capital, that is, the cultural diversity is consumed by the consumerist culture. Replacement of diversity. "Dream" has become a "dream industry". The so-called "dream" itself is not derogatory, nor is it true or false (the truth has been suspended and covered by culture). In order for capital to operate more smoothly, reduce costs and reduce risks, it must carry out the construction of culture and values. This construction symbolizes the reality of society in a comprehensive way, the direct reality is covered up, and people live in the symbolized "super reality." . The production of image goods is consistent with "flexible accumulation". The consumption cycle of many images is very short. Many images can be consumed in a large space at the same time. The pervasive and transient nature of image products further stimulates people's pursuit of ever-changing fashion.

3 Simulation: People's consumption ideology is dominated. In Baudrillard's eyes, the images generated by these electronic ages by mixing color and other processing are more real than the real thing. But it is impossible to find the truth from such simulations or image symbols that are more real than real. This is a prerequisite for guiding and manipulating consumers. Under this premise, large technology groups were able to achieve the process from guidance to manipulation. In this process, various means of modern advertising and media, cultural works and visual arts, including advertisements, movies, television, literary works, etc., manipulate people's desires and images through images related to or unrelated to the products they want to sell. Interest and construct consumption ideology.

People first experienced the image of that kind of product and the taste of life in using that kind of product, and after clarifying the meaning of our relationship with that kind of product and the self-image of the subject, we went to buy that kind of product. This is like after the history of movies and soap operas, our ideology is already indistinguishable from whether movies are imitating life or life is imitating film. For example, Disneyland is a kind of "surreal" imitative culture. The boundary between reality and illusion is indistinguishable in the depths of our ideology. The reality is imitated to the extreme "real", it is a kind of super reality. For example, many young people in the Mainland are actually based on movies, TV shows, and various fashion magazines based in Hong Kong, China, and capitalist countries such as the United States, South Korea, and Japan. They have already established themselves before reaching modern and advanced consumer societies. About the appearance and aspirations of consumer capitalism. When many mainland girls arrived in the South, they quickly repackaged themselves in the image of movies, TV and fashion magazines.

When young people buy cosmetics and clothing, they always buy according to advertisements and fashion magazines and dress up in that image. Buy a car with practicality in mind. But what kind of car we buy is actually influenced by the lifestyle scenes and images of using cars in advertisements, fashion magazines, a popular movie, or a popular song MTV. A car isn't broken, because we have another model because we are old. These phenomena actually reflect the impact of consumer ideology on China. In a sense, it has replaced the impact of past political ideology on Chinese society. Especially under the influence of consumerist culture, the locality of urban culture across China is disappearing, urban architecture, entertainment culture and youth cool culture are converging, and more and more Americanized or Koreanized. These are all issues that contemporary art and cultural criticism need to face. Consumerism culture is not only reflected in the advertising links of merchandise marketing and promotion, but also in the production and consumption of commodities, forming a ubiquitous cultural environment, manipulating people's desires and interests, and dominating our existence and ideology. .

(1) Form a discrete society: People live by modern media, and gradually disappear into the ocean of "symbols" in the process of consumption. It is also this kind of consumption that makes the public out of reality, not to interact with the cycle of people, and more and more alienated from each other. That kind of harmonious neighbourhood is no longer considered a social need. People have lost their social activities in the true sense; on the other hand, only when the masses are separated from reality can they truly lose their sociality and become isolated atoms, becoming controlled consumer machines.

(2) The boundary between "public domain" and "private domain" has been eliminated. The great influence of television lies in the elimination of the boundary between "public domain" and "private domain" in the traditional sense. The disappearance of this boundary means that the society is in a state of "transparency". All human life is in a state of exposure in a broad sense. There is nothing more sacred in American political life than the president's oval office. The sacredness and the power that accompanies it are inseparable from the mystery. However, through television, there is no viewer who knows the layout of the oval office. Regardless of whether the president's office is magnificent or solemn, the important thing is that it is seen on TV and there is nothing more mysterious. This once secretive place came into the minds of millions of TV viewers nakedly in the supreme place of political life, and they had nothing more to imagine in this regard. The political culture that is closely connected to it must also be repositioned. The line between "private sphere" and "public sphere" in political life has faded.

(3) Creating a "silent majority" that makes the public lose the ability to communicate with the environment and others. Some communication theorists believe that television is like a "black hole" that draws in the audience. Therefore, it is difficult to expect any substantial response from the audience. They just watch passively and silently. It is in this sense that the content of programs on TV is not the most important. According to Baudrillard, the most essential effect of television is its blockade of viewers. The masses disappeared or died symbolically in silence. The only way to prove the existence of the general public is their response to various types of surveys. Social interaction between people no longer exists, and only a bunch of statistics represent the masses. In theory, the media is information. But the reality is that because the public's social energy is "frozen" by the media and other technologies, the greater the amount of information in the media, the less socially. The media is no longer an extension of the masses, but the master of their lives. More precisely, large technology groups have become the masters of the life of mass society through the creation of consumer culture by the mass media. This surreal consumer culture has laid a solid foundation for the multinational corporations' global economic expansion from an ideological perspective.

(4) The boundary between bedrooms and public places has been eliminated, and there is no privacy at all in people's lives. Things that are difficult for the family to talk to each other (especially for the children) are shown to everyone present on the TV. Television reflects all people's lives nakedly like a mirror to all audiences. In this sense, the public loses privacy. Children no longer have childhood and adolescence, and the distance between them and adults has disappeared due to the existence of television;

(5) The public loses their imagination as a result. All human relations are related to objects (commodities), the media, and machines, except for interactions with the government and social institutions (such as receiving unemployment benefits). They all knew what they wanted to know, and even unwilling to know, they were unceremoniously placed in front of them, and life lost its meaning. All human relations are related to objects (commodities), the media, and machines, except for interactions with the government and social institutions (such as receiving unemployment benefits). The relationship between people is gradually replaced by the relationship between people and things. From this point of view, the fulfillment of desire based on symbolic value is nothing more than an illusion. Combined with Marx's alienation theory, from the perspective of consumption, the most serious alienation caused by capitalism is the alienation of human needs (alienation of desire). Marcuse believes that people living in developed industrial societies live a seemingly comfortable life, owning their own homes, cars, modern living facilities and consumer goods, but this is a false "comfort" . Because these "needs" are just "false needs" constructed by the capitalist commodity system. "The modern subject as a consumer, whether it is his needs or the means to satisfy them, is structurally prescribed by the capitalist commodity system. After people regard material needs as their basic needs, they are actually already "Living for merchandise" has taken "commodity as the center of my dreams." "

4 Body imagery: Establish aesthetic standards for consumers. In consumer culture, advertising, popular publications, television, and film culture provide a large number of stylized body images.

(1) The body is commercialized. The body was rediscovered and recoded by the consumer society, gradually mythizing. The dominant themes of the mythical body are "beauty" and "erotic". Of course, this "pornography" is not a primitive or original concept, but a functional concept. It shows some parts of the body, body and muscles, or a certain body shape and "curve" features.

(2) The body is considered the carrier of happiness. Here, the ideal body image is youth, health, slimness and beauty. Televisions and movies have repeatedly suggested that soft and elegant bodies and dimple smiles on attractive faces are the key to happiness, and perhaps even the essence of happiness.

(3) Perfect the body through the accumulation of objects. In order to make themselves beautiful, women have to buy perfumes, massages and recuperations in large quantities. People can only achieve their purpose by "buying in", and they can only show themselves by stacking items, otherwise they cannot find a better way that the whole society can recognize. The urge to desire or pursue beauty is transformed into the urge to possess an object, that is, the identity of the body and consumer goods. Masculinity is linked to the commodity chain of material culture. This is an incredible thing in traditional society. For example, the youth should be "cars, bicycles, music, and yellow books", "monochrome sweatshirt", "satin lapel tuxedo", "color sweater", "striped double-breasted suit" or "double-breasted Buckle "navy blue jacket and so on.

5. Hedonism: A New Moral View.

(1) The establishment of new popular heroes. Pachter once said: Today's popular heroes are no longer the creators, inventors, or accomplished people of powerful empires. It's movie stars, singers, and philosophers who pursue enjoyment. (Pachter 975, 330. Consumption is the hero (virtue) of modern society, not only because consumption constitutes the driving force of capitalist production, but also because the subject of consumption constitutes an integral part of the modern subject.

(2) Those who are thrifty are re-educated. Those who are accustomed to frugality must now "re-educate" and accept a hedonic lifestyle. And educators are advertisements, enticing people to participate in the consumption of goods that were originally restricted to upper-level people. For example, in the advertisement, a young man was covered with dandruff, and the girls avoided him, and the situation changed immediately after using some kind of shampoo.

(3) Create new consumers. Advertising mocks the Puritan concepts of diligence, frugality, moderation, stability, durability, and moderation. Advertising has strongly promoted the disintegration of traditional values. Contemporary advertisements make a housewife anxious to see if she looks like the 35-year-old wife in the advertisement because she doesn't use the Leisure Hour electronic washing machine or dishwasher. In addition, the behavior of people buying for purchase is also related to the need to alienate interpersonal relationships, the need for self-identification, the purification and comfort of the soul, and the establishment of relationships with each other.