Consumerism

Consumerism and media are closely intertwined. Media are supported financially by consumerism, and advance a consumerist agenda by promoting shopping as a means of satisfying personal needs and achieving the good life. Advertising is one central way that media both benefits from consumerism and shapes a consumer society. Mass media and advertising emerged together as key features of modern societies. Popular culture, like movies and lifestyle TV, also advance the agenda of consumerism in ways other than directly selling a sponsor’s products and services. Popular culture and advertising are both highly gendered in their consumerist appeals, targeting girls and women in particular and constructing consumerism as feminized. While some critics distinguish between appeals to consumers versus appeals to citizens, many critical media scholars prefer to think of these identities as combined to form a “consumer-citizen.” Online social media has continued and intensified the consumerist thrust of media, making ordinary people into vehicles for advertising and branding, changing some of the terms of media engagement with audiences but for the same underlying purpose of selling and perpetuating the market system of consumer capitalism.