Choice Matters

In this week's readings ("Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s" by Lizabeth Cohen, we learned that the direction that consumption takes a society is ultimately the consumer's choice. The document discusses how plans for mass consumption (i.e the radio, department stores/markets, standardized packaging, phonographs, movie theatres, etc.) were meant to assimilate the immigrant culture into American life and create one uniform culture. Therefore, by all groups of Americans subscribing to standardized mass consumption, all people would become one, homogenous, Americanized identity. However, we learn via the document that this did not happen. In fact, immigrant groups used mass consumption to commit further to their respective cultures and maintain cultural independence. For example, instead of mass production assimilating Italians into a "standard culture," Italians rejected department stores in favor of their local neighborhood grocer, played Italian records, and screened Italian films all within their own neighborhood. Instead of the radio sweeping them into mass culture, they began building their own radios and tinkering with DX (distance) capabilities to listen to their desired stations. "Communal radio listening mediated between local and mass culture much like the neighborhood store or theatre." (Cohen) The point is, the people had power over consumption. They took what was intended to control them and made it their own, backfiring on and disrupting the cause of those who sought to strip them of their independence and identity in the name of profit and control.

The same war continues to be waged today and we are losing. As consumers, we have the power to control how we view products and what we do with them. People and ideas are meant to control the course of civilization, not products of mass consumption that as we learned in class, are part of a deliberate system that is engineered to manipulate us and debase our existence as independent beings. Little by little, this system eats away at humanity itself. As we learned from Baudrillard, mass consumption is a social force and a social system. In class, one of the positions on needs that we learned is that needs are a result of social conditioning. The satisfaction of needs is related to adherence to certain values. Well, what happens when the values that we are supposed to adhere to are wrong? We have the choice of whether we decide to belong to the set of people that adhere to these values. Look at the state of the world we live in - we should be adhering to our own values and not the industry's. I hope that the example used in the Cohen document shows that our lives should not be dictated by the influence of mass consumer culture. I'm not saying that we should stop selling and buying products, but what I am saying is that we should return to a practical sense of how we view products and ultimately break free from the egregious cycle and dangerous influence that the advertising (and financial....)industry holds over American society. I also hope that anyone who has been supporting or following #OccupyWallStreet sees that the people still have the ability to change the course of society in the face of the powers that be.

- Benjamin Doda, section 80