Asadorian's The Rise And Fall Of Consumer Culture

The specific topic of Asadorian’s article entitled “The Rise and Fall of Consumer Culture” argues that consumerism has been embedded in our culture, to such an extent that we view it as a “natural” way of life. The purpose of this article seems to be that humans need to realize that our culture of consumerism has everything to do with our treatment of the environment, and it tries to explain exactly in what ways institutions, media, and the government have contributed to this unsustainable state of our society. In the article Assadourian makes his argument that mankind needs to transform its culture to focus on sustainability. His main thesis is that these patterns of consumption are neither sustainable nor innate manifestations of human nature, …show more content…
Further, he showed specifically how each of these pillars of society contributes to this adoration of consumerism. Secondly, with great amount of statistics and examples he builds a foundation on his theory. Thirdly, he alerted us to some specific possible ways of changing our cultural norms. Assadourian implicitly states that conditioning is a huge factor when regarding consumerist culture. An example that he addresses is the investigation of American two-year-old’s and how they found that they could not identify the letter M, but could identify McDonald’s M-shaped golden arches (Assadourian, 2010). When tackling his theory of these institutions reinforcing consumerism namely media he is quick to point out that it’s become the dominant form of leisure time, this then inherently lets his readers know that it has become a part of our culture. He follows up with a study that found that for every additional hour of television people watched every week, they spent and additional $208 a year on stuff. In this example he shows the end result of the media and marketing influencing our culture. The second pillar, government, also pushed the agenda that consumerism is within our culture. Assadourian points out when the U.S President George W. Bush and U.K Prime Minister Tony Blair encouraged …show more content…
How specifically can we balance the need for growth and profit in capitalism with the need for environmental sustainability? How much will the necessities cost if we calculate in the environmentally sustainable costs (Jason Scorse, 2010, p.9)? If we stop the growth that capitalism needs to maintain itself what happens with unemployment rates? Some authors have argued there it is a complicated relationship between growth and unemployment rates with no easy solutions (Magdoff, F. & Foster, J.B., Mar 2010, p.11). Corporations are constantly looking for new resources and exhausting more resources on the international level, how can that be stopped? (Magdoff, F. & Foster, J.B., Mar 2010, p.11). These and many other questions remained