Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 118

Consumption is clearly highly valued in the United States (and elsewhere; see Nwachukwu and Dant 2014). That makes American culture a consumer culture, one in which the core ideas and material objects relate to consumption and in which consumption is a primary source of meaning in life (Berger 2015; Slater 2015; Wiedenhoft Murphy 2017b). In a consumer culture, meaning may be found in the goods and services you buy, in the process of buying them (in shopping malls, cybermalls, and so on), in the social aspects of consumption (shopping with your friends or family), and even in the settings in which consumption takes place (e.g., the Venetian or some other Las Vegas hotel-casino, eBay; Ritzer, Goodman, and Wiedenhoft 2001). There are norms for the consumption process as well. For example, customers should wait patiently in the queue for the cashier, gamblers at a Las Vegas casino should not flaunt their winnings in front of other gamblers and should tip dealers, and so on.

Contemporary consumer culture is unique (Trentman 2016). In the past, culture has generally focused on some other aspect of social life, such as religion, warfare, citizenship, or work. In fact, in the not-too-distant past in the United States and other developed countries, the core ideas and material objects of culture related to work and production. People were thought to derive their greatest meaning from their work. This was true from the Industrial Revolution until approximately 1970, when observers began to realize that developed societies, especially the United States, were beginning to derive more meaning from consumption (Baudrillard [1970] 1998). Of course, work continues to be important, as do religion, warfare, and citizenship, but many people in the world now live in a culture dominated by consumption.

It could be said that the rise of consumer culture was linked to the rise of the modern world in the West (Campbell 1987). Today, of course, consumer culture has arguably become the culture of the modern West and, indeed, of modernity in general. But consumer culture has also been globalized to a great degree. It has become firmly entrenched in such non-Western places as Singapore (see the excesses of consumption there as depicted in the 2018 movie Crazy Rich Asians), Hong Kong, and Dubai. Japan has been called the premier consumer culture. Even in today’s China, known for its production-oriented culture, a billion-plus citizens are becoming more and more consumption oriented. Shanghai is already studded with huge modern shopping malls, and a Disney theme park opened there in 2016.