So this is the Michael Dawson that wrote the Consumer Trap? Great read, really enjoyed it. I'm not familiar with literature on consumerism, so this is the first time I'd ever seen anyone attempt to borrow the scientific management/Taylorism trope to look at consumptive management. That just might stick and take on a life of its own, I hope.
I'm not sure I buy the complicity argument, Doug. Complicity implies knowledge and conscious choice, yet we're so unaware of the extent of what marketing does to us that we think movies like Minority Report are works of science fiction. (if you do, click here: http://www.spss.com/predictive_analytics/) I thought Dawson's book was amazing in how it showed that knowledge and choice was there, but lined up on one side.
JL
At 05:47 PM 12/3/2003, you wrote:
> > I've been reading your book in prep for our interview tomorrow, and I
> > see that you reject Marcuse and Ewen in favor of straightforward
> > explanations - that the masses are coerced, cajoled, seduced, and/or
> > hoodwinked by their masters. In the specific case of you're book,
> > they're forced or lured into overconsuming. But I think this
> > underestimates the degree to which people are complict in their own
> > subordination, and even come to enjoy it. Or, worse, don't even
> > experience shopping as a compulsion or a form of subordination, but a
> > pleasure. But we can take this up tomorrow.
> >
> > Doug
>
>To facilitate tomorrow's interview [and not because I'm a gluttonous
>narcissistic windbag ;-)], I post again.
>
>I reject Marcuse and Ewen because they fail to provide a coherent account of
>the means of ruling-class intervention in product-usage and its
>socio-environmental determinants. They trash "consumers," but provide them
>with no real ammunition for fighting back.
>
>I actually don't think ordinary folks are either very much brainwashed or
>very much complicit in "their" malconsumption. I believe the real problem
>is lack of democractic access to commanding-heights economic decisions,
>which I call "macro-choices." I would contend that both Marcuse and Ewen
>portray "consumers" as being much more robotic and brainwashed than I do.
>
>As you'll see in the last two chapters, I don't think big business marketing
>campaigns have deep psychological effects on ordinary folks. Quite the
>contrary. The controversy lies not there, but in the financial and social
>costs of the marketing juggernaut, and in the capitalists' outdated
>dictatorship over the biggest economic decisions. Marketing's main function
>is to preserve this dictatorship and the profits it facilitates.
>
>The point of explaining the details of marketing is to arm ordinary people
>with accurate information about how big businesses view and treat them, not
>to tell people they're robots. As I argue in Chapter 9, the actual direct
>impact of marketing tactics is minute, and matters much more in the
>aggregate than in the individual case.
>
>Marcuse and Ewen make me want to slit my wrists. They reveal virtually
>nothing about how and why power impinges more and more upon our "free time,"
>and much of what they do reveal is taken way out-of-context. "You're
>robots, so rebel!," is their message. Rebel against what, and for what?
>
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