The Creation of the American mass market and consumer culture

The Creation of the American mass market and consumer culture PDF Author: Michael Schmid
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638595528
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 11

Get Book Here

Book Description
Essay from the year 2004 in the subject Communications - Journalism, Journalism Professions, grade: 1,0, Indiana University (School of Journalism), course: Journalism J650, language: English, abstract: Robert A. Gross begins his article Markets, Magazines, and More with reference to a quote from Ellen Gruber Garvey’s book The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture which summarizes quite well the essential reason behind many developments that led to the creation of an American mass market. “Why...do men make magazines? To sell ad. space in them. What’s a magazine? So many pages of ad. space.” According to Gross magazines were not so much about content as they were about the advertisements in them. Of course, magazines had to be sold in order for people to read the ads, but the content of the magazine was not designed to improve the reader’s life but to get him interested in the product and eventually make him buy it. Many scholars such as William Leach see this development in the American media landscape from a purely informational and even missionary character to a consumption and marketing based arena as a major move away from the traditional values of media outlets such as the newspaper and others. Leach evaluates this change in his book The Land of Desire where he takes a close look at the changes within the American culture and market. He argues that in the decades after the Civil War “American capitalism began to produce a distinct culture, unconnected to traditional family or community values, to religion in any conventional sense, or to political democracy. It was a secular business and market-oriented culture [...].” He traces this change from the time of the Protestant settlers and early American community life, where the ultimate fulfilment was salvation, spiritual blessings for all and an end to poverty, to the 1900s, where those religious ideals were increasingly transformed and commercialized into personal satisfaction and individual pleasures and profit. With the appearance of “new pleasure palaces” such as department stores, theaters, restaurants, hotels, dance halls, and amusement parks Americans experienced the joy of personal satisfaction. Whereas in the past, Leach writes, “values had taken their character from ... the church; now they were deriving it from business and consumption.” This democratization of individual desire of the post Civil War culture is probably one of the “most notable contributions to modern society” according to Leach.

The Creation of the American mass market and consumer culture

The Creation of the American mass market and consumer culture PDF Author: Michael Schmid
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638595528
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 11

Get Book Here

Book Description
Essay from the year 2004 in the subject Communications - Journalism, Journalism Professions, grade: 1,0, Indiana University (School of Journalism), course: Journalism J650, language: English, abstract: Robert A. Gross begins his article Markets, Magazines, and More with reference to a quote from Ellen Gruber Garvey’s book The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture which summarizes quite well the essential reason behind many developments that led to the creation of an American mass market. “Why...do men make magazines? To sell ad. space in them. What’s a magazine? So many pages of ad. space.” According to Gross magazines were not so much about content as they were about the advertisements in them. Of course, magazines had to be sold in order for people to read the ads, but the content of the magazine was not designed to improve the reader’s life but to get him interested in the product and eventually make him buy it. Many scholars such as William Leach see this development in the American media landscape from a purely informational and even missionary character to a consumption and marketing based arena as a major move away from the traditional values of media outlets such as the newspaper and others. Leach evaluates this change in his book The Land of Desire where he takes a close look at the changes within the American culture and market. He argues that in the decades after the Civil War “American capitalism began to produce a distinct culture, unconnected to traditional family or community values, to religion in any conventional sense, or to political democracy. It was a secular business and market-oriented culture [...].” He traces this change from the time of the Protestant settlers and early American community life, where the ultimate fulfilment was salvation, spiritual blessings for all and an end to poverty, to the 1900s, where those religious ideals were increasingly transformed and commercialized into personal satisfaction and individual pleasures and profit. With the appearance of “new pleasure palaces” such as department stores, theaters, restaurants, hotels, dance halls, and amusement parks Americans experienced the joy of personal satisfaction. Whereas in the past, Leach writes, “values had taken their character from ... the church; now they were deriving it from business and consumption.” This democratization of individual desire of the post Civil War culture is probably one of the “most notable contributions to modern society” according to Leach.

Raising Consumers

Raising Consumers PDF Author: Lisa Jacobson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231113889
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the present electronic torrent of MTV and teen flicks, Nintendo and Air Jordan advertisements, consumer culture is an unmistakably important--and controversial--dimension of modern childhood. Historians and social commentators have typically assumed that the child consumer became significant during the postwar television age. But the child consumer was already an important phenomenon in the early twentieth century. The family, traditionally the primary institution of child socialization, began to face an array of new competitors who sought to put their own imprint on children's acculturation to consumer capitalism. Advertisers, children's magazine publishers, public schools, child experts, and children's peer groups alternately collaborated with, and competed against, the family in their quest to define children's identities. At stake in these conflicts and collaborations was no less than the direction of American consumer society--would children's consumer training rein in hedonistic excesses or contribute to the spread of hollow, commercial values? Not simply a new player in the economy, the child consumer became a lightning rod for broader concerns about the sanctity of the family and the authority of the market in modern capitalist culture. Lisa Jacobson reveals how changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity shaped the ways Americans understood the virtues and vices of boy and girl consumers--and why boys in particular emerged as the heroes of the new consumer age. She also analyzes how children's own behavior, peer culture, and emotional investment in goods influenced the dynamics of the new consumer culture. Raising Consumers is a provocative examination of the social, economic, and cultural forces that produced and ultimately legitimized a distinctive children's consumer culture in the early twentieth century.

A Consumers' Republic

A Consumers' Republic PDF Author: Lizabeth Cohen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307555364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream. Material goods came to embody the promise of America, and the power of consumers to purchase everything from vacuum cleaners to convertibles gave rise to the power of citizens to purchase political influence and effect social change. Yet despite undeniable successes and unprecedented affluence, mass consumption also fostered economic inequality and the fracturing of society along gender, class, and racial lines. In charting the complex legacy of our “Consumers’ Republic” Lizabeth Cohen has written a bold, encompassing, and profoundly influential book.

Children and Consumer Culture in American Society

Children and Consumer Culture in American Society PDF Author: Lisa Jacobson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313015023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
Children play a crucial role in today's economy. According to some estimates, children spend or influence the spending of up to $500 billion annually. Journalists, sociologists, and media reformers often present mass marketing toward children as a recent fall from grace, but the roots of children's consumerism — and the anxieties over it — date back more than a century. Throughout the twentieth century, a wide variety of groups — including advertisers, retailers, parents, social reformers, child experts, public schools, and children themselves — helped to socialize children as consumers and struggled to define the proper boundaries of the market. The essays and documents in this volume illuminate the historical circumstances and cultural conflicts that helped to produce, shape, and legitimize children's consumerism. Focusing primarily on the period from the Gilded Age through the twentieth century, this book examines how and why children and adolescents acquired new economic roles as consumers, and how these new roles both reflected and produced dynamic changes in family life and the culture of capitalism. This volume also reveals how children and adolescents have used consumer goods to define personal identities and peer relationships — sometimes in opposition to marketers' expectations and parental intentions.

Satisfaction Guaranteed

Satisfaction Guaranteed PDF Author: Susan Strasser
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
A history of modern marketing, the dynamic processes of advertising, production, and sales that transformed turn-of-the century America.

Creating the Modern Man

Creating the Modern Man PDF Author: Tom Pendergast
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826262244
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pendergast traces the shift in US periodicals from Victorian masculinity--which valued character, integrity, hard work, and duty--to modern masculinity--which valued personality, self- realization, and image. Arguing that the rise of mass consumer culture was a key factor in the change, he describes how such magazines as American Magazine, Esquire, and True presented masculinity in ways that reflected the magazines' relationship to advertisers, contributors and readers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Consumer Society in American History

Consumer Society in American History PDF Author: Lawrence B. Glickman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801484865
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume offers the most comprehensive and incisive exploration of American consumer history to date, spanning the four centuries from the colonial era to the present.

Marketing and American Consumer Culture

Marketing and American Consumer Culture PDF Author: Arthur Asa Berger
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331947328X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a cultural studies approach to marketing and advertising and shows readers how scholars from different academic disciplines make sense of marketing’s role in American culture and society. It is written in an accessible style and has numerous drawings by the author to give it more visual interest.

A Destiny of Choice?

A Destiny of Choice? PDF Author: David Blanke
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0739172190
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the twentieth century, Americans thought of the United States as a land of opportunity and equality. To what extent and for whom this was true was, of course, a matter of debate, however especially during the Cold War, many Americans clung to the patriotic conviction that America was the land of the free. At the same time, another national ideal emerged that was far less contentious, that arguably came to subsume the ideals of freedom, opportunity, and equality, and that eventually embodied an unspoken consensus about what constitutes the good society in a postmodern setting. This was the ideal of choice, broadly understood as the proposition that the good society provides individuals with the power to shape the contours of their lives in ways that suit their personal interests, idiosyncrasies, and tastes. By the closing decades of the century, Americans were widely agreed that theirs was--or at least should be--the land of choice. In A Destiny of Choice?, David Blanke and David Steigerwald bring together important scholarship on the tension between two leading interpretations of modern American consumer culture. That modern consumerism reflects the social, cultural, economic, and political changes that accompanied the country's transition from a local, producer economy dominated by limited choices and restricted credit to a national consumer marketplace based on the individual selection of mass-produced, mass-advertised, and mass-distributed goods. This debate is central to the economic difficulties seen in the United States today.

An All-consuming Century

An All-consuming Century PDF Author: Gary S. Cross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231113120
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
The victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been home to the most aggressive and thoughtful critics of consumption such as Puritanism and Prohibition. This work offers a history of how market forces came to dominate American life.