Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.
The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. (128)
When I first began working in Japan, I had to confront the Japanese people's excessive worship for foreign goods and the fixed idea of what clothes ought to be. I wanted to change the rigid formula of clothing that the Japanese followed.
I will go out of my way to avoid the shopping crowds and the extreme consumerism - I hate all that.
I love consumerism, TV culture, shopping malls. There's nothing I'd ever buy, but I like being there. It's wacky.
We have become too much a society of consumers rather than a society of citizens.
We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit.
Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor.
Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.
Unfortunately, there are some ecological phenomenological chemicals within consumerism.
That's America for you - a red herring culture, always scared of the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald's, Marlboro and K Street.
