Consumer culture can be defined as where social status, values, and activities are centered on the consumption of goods and services, basically in a consumer culture a large part of what you do, what you value, and how you are defined revolves around your consumption of stuff. The need to consume is implemented into our brains from a very young age, therefore this becomes socially acceptable to consume because it is seen to be social to follow the rules of society, e.g we buy our water from the supermarket instead of drinking water from the tap (Grimsley,1970). This essay will specifically argue that society is highly driven by consumerism because in everyday life people are bombarded with advertisements that encourage people to consume the latest object and people do this to be able to gain a certain status, there is a variety of issues as why society is driven by consumerism but that is the main reason people want to have the newest objects to be able to show off and say they have them when in reality they dont need to have the object. This essay is split into four parts. The first part will examin
e how consumption is displayed in everyday life and where it stemmed from, it will also look into Veblens theory of wealth, status, display, and emulation and the fact that within society it is seen to be crucial to be doing better than someone else the need to own something better than someone else. The second part will focus on the work of Max Weber how he argued that it was religion that powered social change, and how Karl Marx explains commodity fetishism. The third part is Marx’s theory of class conflict, Marx argues that the bourgeoisie oppresses the proletariat in every way possible. It then goes on to talk about the London riots in 2011 how the need to consume created these riots and what extent people would go to. The final part of the essay will look at globalization and how the process of cultural globalization happens through the distribution of media coverage. Zygmunt Baumans view on postmodernism and liquid modernity is also explained in the final paragraph he argues that we are stuck in a work where the poor experience instability in life while the rich experience it in a better way.