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The Dead-End of Consumerism

The Role of the Media and Cultural Industries

Justin Lewis

We are, in a sense, living in the future. Not our future, but at the beginning of a century that has been imagined and reimagined countless times over the last hundred years. Our predecessors would have been enthralled by possibilities we now take for granted: the revolution in information, communication, and cultural technologies has made what once seemed magical part of everyday life.

And yet the technology and consumer products that were supposed to free us from drudgery, ignorance, and toil have also created a new set of burdens. The demand for gadgetry and goods has become relentless, and the gradual decrease of hours in the working week that defined much of the twentieth century has come to a shuddering halt (Schor, 1991). The model of perpetual growth that created this largesse requires endless effort to keep pace with it. But there is also an understanding that the way we live now is, for all its abundance, full of empty promises (James, 2007).

This chapter begins by exploring why consumer capitalism, as a model for human progress, has become dysfunctional. For Marx (1976), the contradictions of capitalism lay in the drift toward monopoly and the prospect that the in-built division between owners and workers would foment popular discontent. The survival of consumer capitalism into the twenty-first century suggests Marx underestimated capitalism's adaptability – in negotiation with the state and a growing public sector – but it has created a new set of contradictions. These are more than mere quirks: they represent profound problems across a number of environmental, economic, and cultural fronts. While these may not bring about its downfall – capitalism, aided by government, has shown a capacity to endure contradiction – they oblige us to ask whether there might be a less acquisitive and more fulfilling model of human society.

The chapter then considers why the mainstream public sphere finds it so difficult to acknowledge these contradictions, let alone address them, focusing on three ways in which the contemporary cultural industries keep us conceptually bound to a consumerist credo. First, the media and communications industries have come to epitomize the notion of built-in obsolescence based on a perpetual consumerism. Second, our most dominant cultural industry, advertising, provides a cultural environment that makes it hard to imagine a way of being outside consumerism. Third, the capacity of news journalism to question current orthodoxy is constrained by a focus on “disposable news,” displacing the more democratic function of journalism.

Environmental Contradictions

After centuries of growth, humankind now consumes resources at a rate that matches the scale of the Earth. Natural resources dwindle as demands made upon them increase (McKibben, 2006). Although science has become increasingly adept at anticipating these ecological pressure points (witness, for example, the rise of climate science), our society is inept at addressing the contradiction between an economic model based on infinite expansion and a finite Earth.

The list of environmental problems created by this clash is daunting. We produce waste at an unprecedented rate, contaminating the soil, the air, and the sea. We wipe out ecosystems and species to make space for greater productivity. But most daunting of all is the realization that one of the key byproducts of our enormously productive economy is a series of gases that threaten to alter life on Earth.

For over two decades, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published and evaluated an increasing body of evidence that has made the case for anthropogenic global warming irrefutable. Meanwhile, in a collective act of brinkmanship – as if to test the theory to breaking point – we have continued to pump an ever-increasing volume of greenhouse gases into the air (Lewis & Boyce, 2009).

By the time the IPCC issued its fourth assessment in 2007, the question was no longer one of preventing climate change but of ameliorating its worst effects. In practical terms this means keeping the likely death toll – from disease, famine, drought, and the increased likelihood of extreme weather events – to millions rather than billions. Seventeen years after its first report, the IPCC documented not only that the various efforts around the world to tackle climate change have failed to stabilize our greenhouse gas production, but that current mitigation policies will allow that production to increase to unprecedented levels (IPCC, 2007, p. 44). Although the IPCC continues to stress that “many impacts can be avoided, reduced or delayed by mitigation” (p. 69), it is clear that we are running out of time.

The stakes could scarcely be higher. So why is it that, in the face of one of the greatest challenges to humankind, our political leaders seem content with a series of half-measures? The collapse of global climate change talks in Copenhagen at the end of 2009, for example, was greeted with little sense of alarm. A few months later, a BBC survey in February 2010 found that only 26% of British people agreed with a statement that reflected the scientific consensus: “climate change is happening and is now established as largely man-made” (roughly the same proportion who believed that “climate change is not happening” at all).¹ This was actually a drop from the previous year's figure. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in January 2010 found that dealing with climate change was bottom of a list of 21 priorities for government, with only 28% judging it to be a priority (a fall from 38% in 2007).²

At the heart of this inertia is a paradox: our apparent acceptance of the threat posed by climate change is occurring at a time when we have become increasingly risk averse. The influential sociologist Ulrich Beck has famously described countries in the developed world as “risk societies” (Beck, 1995, 1999), where fears of everything from terrorism to pedophilia tend to be amplified into a clamor of overreaction (Lewis, 2006). We live in a time, he suggests, when concerns about health and safety involve systematic attempts to reduce risks to a minimum, and where exaggerated fears of minimal risks – sometimes based on the feeblest of evidence – can induce panic, with very real consequences (see Boyce, 2007, on the MMR vaccine scare in the United Kingdom, where media scare stories significantly reduced the takeup of the vaccine and reduced immunity levels).

As climate science has become ever more certain, our muted reaction to it remains a vexed question (McGaurr & Lester, 2009). There are a number of explanations: the difficulty of appreciating a problem on a global scale, the time lag between cause and effect, and political systems where governments have little incentive to address issues whose manifestations will not be their problem, given the time span of elections.

But perhaps the most fundamental reason for our failure to come to terms with climate change is the credo expressed so vividly by marketing consultant Victor Liebow in the 1940s. Consumer capitalism, he suggested, requires things to be “consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate” (in Packard, 1960, p. 33). It pushes us toward individual acts of consumption rather than collective problem solving.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to blame consumer capitalism for getting us to this point: we can have economic growth and environmental degradation without consumer capitalism, and there is no doubt that the prosperity it has helped create has brought many advantages. But it would be naïve to suppose that the “invisible hand” is capable of the kind of altruistic planning necessary to avert catastrophic climate change. As it now stands, consumer capitalism seems more likely to push us past the “tipping point.”

Economic Contradictions: The Diminishing Returns of Consumer Capitalism

Economic historian Avner Offer (2006) suggests that this superabundance, far from easing our lives, creates a series of problems. The more choices we are asked to make, the less time or resources we have to make them. In the land of plenty, the “rational consumer” – that beloved creature of classical economics – may conclude that the time and effort involved in finding the best product at the best price exceed the rewards of making the right purchase. In short, rational consumers will make rational decisions to give up being rational, opting, instead, for an easy life and resigning themselves to making hurried purchasing decisions. This is consumer capitalism's catch-22.

The proliferation of commodities, Offer suggests, is as much a source of stress as a pleasure, pushing people toward overconsumption (which is the easiest response to an abundance of goods) and thereby diminishing quality of life. This submission to a series of decisions without deliberation involves a loss of self-control, thereby limiting our ability to act independently. In an era of superabundance, the ratio between choice and time stretches to alter the mechanisms of consumer capitalism, to a point where increasing choice becomes dysfunctional.

In a similar vein, the law of diminishing returns – which tends to be applied to systems of production – can equally be used to describe the logic of consumption. Consumer capitalism is predicated on the simple idea that our lives improve in proportion to the accumulation of consumer goods. But its ability to deliver on this promise is unsustainable. As our level of security, comfort, and amusement increases, we experience what economists refer to as the diminishing marginal utility of goods and services: the pleasures of accumulation, in other words, decrease with every purchase. The more we have, the less value each new possession will have.

So, for example, someone with only two pieces of furniture will attach significant value to acquiring a third: partly because it will fulfill a need, but also because it represents a substantial increase in her ability to furnish her home. To someone with 102 pieces of furniture, a new acquisition is of less value – both because the need for it is less pressing and because it represents only a tiny increase in her stock of furniture. As Colin Campbell (1989) has argued, classical economics struggles with this idea, since it cannot “account for the nature or origins of wants and tastes, and offers only the most attenuated suggestion concerning why people buy goods” (p. 40).

This is not to deny the pleasure that new things can bring, simply to understand that the pleasures of consumerism are neither pre-given nor infinite. In the twenty-first century, most people in the developed world have reached the point where the constant accumulation of consumer goods has become a diverting (sometimes pleasant, sometime not) but unnecessary habit. Economists (notably J. K. Galbraith, 1958), philosophers (such as Herbert Marcuse, 1964), and journalists (most famously, Vance Packard, 1960) questioned the nature of need in a consumerist society half a century ago. We do not have to accept Marcuse's rather austere distinction between “true” and “false” needs to appreciate that advanced consumerism is a system in denial of one of the simplest economic (and emotional) probabilities of the human condition: the more we have, the less we need. Just as the cost of goods decreases with volume, so does their value.

But the diminishing returns of consumer choice are deeply repressed. Our current model of consumerism is obliged to cling resolutely to the same promise with every purchase. The idea that each new object we acquire is, by definition, less valuable than the last is not just a lousy sales pitch, it begins to undermine the whole consumerist enterprise. For the system to survive, we must imagine that the pleasures of accumulation are endless. It is an expensive pretense.

Can consumer capitalism survive without endless growth? The easy answer to this is no, although this may be because the possibility is rarely explored. Nonetheless, an increasing number of economists, such as those at the New Economics Foundation, are challenging the principle of economic growth in wealthy countries. They see the current model of economic growth – measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) – as both crude and amoral: a place where war (which creates demands for weaponry as well as the need to rebuild what is destroyed) is better than peace (which creates no demand) and where waste is a virtue.

Because of such glaring absurdities, the New Economics Foundation proposes that we abandon GDP as a measure of social progress, replacing it with a series of indicators that better describe human fulfillment and quality of life. This, in turn, raises the third problem with consumer capitalism: despite the promises of plenty, it no longer has the capacity to deliver the things that we most value.

Cultural Contradictions: Consumer Capitalism vs. the Quality of Life

As critics of consumerism point out (see, e.g., Jhally, 1990, 1998), there is a contradiction between our desires, which tend to be social rather than material, and consumer capitalism's provision, which is simply material. Or to put it another way, we have trashed the planet and mortgaged our futures on the hope of infinite growth, yet all we have to show for it is a mountain of consumer goods. People may have had fun using them, they may even have had fun buying them, but they remain unfulfilled by the pleasures of accumulation.

Things are supposed to keep getting better – this is, after all, the promise of a consumer society. But there is an increasing body of evidence from across the social sciences that suggests that the link between quality of life and our ability to consume is fictitious. Richard Layard (2003), summing up the research on quality of life, puts it bluntly: “People in the West have got no happier in the last 50 years. They have become much richer [. . .] But they are no happier. This shocking fact should be the starting point for much of our social science” (p. 14).³

Layard's assertion, for all its boldness, is too modest. The revelation that quality of life has little to do with our access to consumer goods runs so counter to contemporary conventional wisdom that it should be the starting point for our culture, our economics, and our politics.

And yet the idea that human progress is directly proportional to our ability to buy remains deeply rooted in our politics and our popular culture. Every government, regardless of political hue, is committed to economic growth on the assumption that all else – happiness, security, and human progress – flows from it. The idea that we might begin to think more directly about providing the conditions for happiness, fulfillment, and security, and that we might think more deeply about what human progress actually means, seems almost a distraction. In essence we are all bound to a system that treats us like spoilt children who just want more stuff and better stuff. And, like spoilt children, we are no happier for it.

Tim Kasser's (2002) review of the literature on the psychology of materialism suggests that far from providing happiness or fulfillment, materialist values are associated with a drop in quality of life. Similarly, Juliet Schor's study of children and consumerism suggests that “less involvement in consumer culture leads to healthier kids and more involvement leads kids' psychological well-being to deteriorate” (Schor, 2004, p. 167). Her research suggests that immersion in consumer culture is the key explanatory factor associated with various forms of unhappiness in childhood.

The paradox, for some social scientists, is that within a society income is related to quality of life (Oswald, 2003). But this is easily explained: briefly, in a society that links income with status, people like to feel they are doing well rather than doing badly (Layard, 2003). In other words, those on higher incomes are happier than those on lower incomes because of the respect and satisfaction that accrue from their relative position, not because they have more stuff.

Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) have taken this idea one step further. They provide striking evidence of the problems caused by creating wealth without equality. Their extensive review of the literature shows a relationship between distribution of income and resources and quality of life. The greater the level of inequality in a society, the greater the level of discontent. So, for example, countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, where the gaps between rich and poor are fairly high, measure poorly on the indices of quality of life when compared to the more egalitarian Scandinavian countries.

It is hard to overstate the significance of the quality of life research. The whole premise of consumer capitalism is based on the notion that the accumulation of objects improves the quality of our lives. And yet when this idea is put to the test, it is found wanting. This would matter little if we set no store by it, but consumer capitalism is one of the organizing principles of twenty-rst-century society. It absorbs our time, our energy, and our political imagination.

Living the Contradictions: Media, Culture, and Consumer Capitalism

So why do we remain so deeply committed to a system whose benefits are increasingly limited, whose promises are exhausted, and whose environmental consequences look increasingly dire? Why do we embrace a way of life that makes us no happier or fulfilled, is fraught with contradictions, and will make the planet considerably less habitable? And how might we begin to address these issues and imagine a better world?

Our failure to change course is rooted in a set of cultural practices, all of which push, nudge, and cajole us down a consumerist cul-de-sac. These practices are so much a part of everyday life that they get in the way of a more deeply felt, sophisticated appreciation of just what it is that constitutes human progress and makes life worth living. Central to these practices, I suggest, are the commercial giants of media and telecommunications. For all their moments of brilliance and profundity – and, whatever the Jeremiahs may say, there are plenty of them⁴ – our information and entertainment media have become increasingly suffused with ideas that sustain consumerism and sideline alternatives. None of these practices is inevitable or irreplaceable, but unless we rethink them it will be difficult for us to imagine any other form of society. I shall focus, here, on three ways in which a largely commercial media and telecommunications sector limits our cultural environment.

Obsessed with Obsolescence

The aviation industry has received plenty of flak for its production of greenhouse gases. Environmental groups like Plane Stupid in the United Kingdom protest against airport expansion (Doyle, 2009) while the concept of “air miles” has become part of the environmentally aware lingua franca. Many of those who have calculated their “carbon footprint” will be aware that the most palpable way to reduce their emissions is to fly less. And yet, with far less fuss or scrutiny, the media and communications industries spew out the same level of carbon emissions as aviation (Gartner, 2007). This may seem counterintuitive, since the aviation industry's core business involves burning large quantities of fossil fuel, while sounds and images are more ephemeral. Without a major technological shift, the growth of aviation was always going to be environmentally damaging. The growth of media and telecommunications, on the other hand, might have used sophisticated postindustrial technology in very different ways.

Instead, the media information industries have achieved a level of built-in obsolescence that is the apotheosis of consumerism at its most profligate. As Jonathan Sterne (2007) points out, this is a sector where “obsolescence is not only planned but also forced and engineered” (p. 7). With every passing decade, the various bits of hardware that bring us information and entertainment have a shorter shelf-life. Computers, mobile phones, and electronic entertainment devices are designed to become antiquated with a speed we would not tolerate with other household appliances (Maxwell & Miller, 2009), while technologies for relatively simple pleasures, like playing music or making a phone call, now occupy the same kind of temporality as fashion accessories. While traditional telephones have become emblematic of particular decades of design, US consumers now replace their cell phones once every 12 months (Crosby, 2007) – a level of built-in obsolescence that once would have been unthinkable.

This is hyperconsumerism – a system that tells us not only that we need to surround ourselves with new things, but also that we need to constantly replace what we already have. In the space of 10 years, televisions switched from analog to digital, changed shape to a wider screen, changed shape again to a flat screen, only to be reconfigured once more to various higher definitions of image (which, in turn, require a larger screen to be appreciated). The most recent incarnation – 3D TV – arrives on the scene as the latest installment on this breathless path of constant reinvention.

In the United States, the Consumer Electronics Association calculated that the average US household in 2008 spent over $1,400 per year on a total of half a billion consumer electronic devices (Brugge, 2008). With almost every stage these devices have tended to become less energy efficient, each new gadget or appliance eating up more power than the thing it replaced. In the United Kingdom, sales of flat-screen TVs have been estimated to increase the carbon emissions involved in watching TV by 70% between 2006 and 2010 (Maxwell & Miller, 2009).

The most conspicuous outcome of this hyperconsumption – the vast accumulation of e-waste – is hidden from the view of most Western consumers (Hawkins, 2003). The United States alone dumps 300 to 400 million electronic items per year, and less than 20% of that e-waste is recycled (only 2% of PCs are fixed, upgraded, or passed on to a second user). By 2005, for every new computer manufactured in the United States, one became obsolete (Sterne, 2007, p. 10), while the United Kingdom dumps 1.5 million PCs in landfills every year (Maxwell & Miller, 2009).

The waste from televisions, monitors, laptops, portable DVD players with LCD screens – and many other playthings of the information age – is highly toxic, making disposal or reuse of the more valuable minerals a hazardous business. To cut costs, e-waste is often exported to countries with cheap labor and lax environmental laws, with dismal consequences for the health of those involved (Gabrys, 2007; Maxwell & Miller, 2009). At the beginning of the twenty-first century the electronics industry was, according to the Basel Action Network (BAN, 2002), “the world's largest and fastest growing manufacturing industry, and as a consequence of this growth, combined with rapid product obsolescence, discarded electronics or e-waste is now the fastest growing waste stream in the industrialized world.”

Despite the sleek designs of many telecommunications devices, they are resource intensive to produce. Unlike many home appliances, four times as much energy is spent on making devices like computers or flat-screen TVs than on using them (Williams, 2004). So, for example, the manufacture of a desktop computer and monitor requires 530 pounds of fossil fuels, 50 pounds of chemicals, and 3,300 pounds of water – roughly the same use of resources used in the manufacture of a large automobile (Kuehr & Williams, 2003). The manufacture of computers and mobile devices, digital cameras, and other devices is a dirty business: “If you dig down beneath the thin surface crust of Silicon Valley,” writes Jennifer Gabrys,

In short, the information age is built on submerged mountains of toxic waste, an unsustainable use of resources, and dependence on fossil fuels. While some might see this environmental impact as the inevitable cost of progress, this is not a sufficient rationale. The breakthroughs in information and entertainment technology might have created a cleaner, smarter, more democratic world. Instead, the industries that have profited from these technologies have contrived a level of built-in obsolescence few other industries can match. Media and telecommunications are thus in the vanguard of a consumerist ecology. They have succeeded in making the idea that things should be “consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate” (Liebow, in Packard, 1960, p. 33) seem a natural part of modern life.

There is no doubt that, in the last two decades, there have been rapid leaps forward in digital communication. But to what end? The genius of modern communications has, all too often, been tied to the banality of a cost-effective culture. Despite the constant reinvention of our TV screens, it would be hard to argue that the quality of the programs we watch has improved a great deal over the last decade, if at all. Indeed, the proliferation of television channels is sustained by a commercial model that depends upon the large-scale recycling of old programs – not a bad thing, in itself, but hardly in keeping with the relentless updating of television gadgetry.

Many of the new technologies are sold to us on the basis of a better quality of sound and image. But the permanent revolution in electronic information and entertainment has as much to do with product proliferation and convenience as with technological progress. So, for example, the poor-quality speakers on most components – from digital radios and TVs to DVD players and iPods – produce sounds that are demonstrably cruder than an above-average stereo system manufactured 30 years ago. There is a kind of progress here, but it is often narrowly defined around the aesthetics of the consumer object, without any sense of television's greater social, democratic, or cultural potential.

So, for example, the enthusiasm for digital television often highlighted its potential for interactivity: television would no longer be a top-down technology, proclaimed enthusiasts, but one where interactivity would lessen the gap between producers and audiences. Here was technology bringing power to the people at the press of a red button. And yet the democratic potential of interactive digital television remains largely ignored, especially by commercial media, which quickly discovered that, beyond charging people for votes in reality television shows, there was no money in it (Curran, 2010).

What is remarkable, in many ways, is the ease with which we have accepted – even embraced – this level of built-in obsolescence, while being fairly oblivious of its environmental consequences. Take, for example, the move toward digitization in radio and television. Governments have promoted such a move, and while the benefits of digitization are repeatedly lauded, the environmental costs of switching to a digitized system are routinely ignored. The UK government is anxious to force a switch from analog to digital radio, despite the fact that consumer demand for a new system of reception remains lukewarm. Millions of appliances will become obsolete at the flick of a switch, while simultaneously increasing the energy required to power a radio set (thereby decreasing their portability, and ending the recent development of wind-up/solar-powered radios).

From consumer capitalism's point of view, the beauty of the current model is to create a public so accustomed to the constant production, reproduction, and renewal of media technologies that we see this, in itself, as a mark of progress. This is not to say that the industry's innovations have been pointless – there are plenty of jewels amidst the junk – simply that the imperatives of consumer capitalism have pushed us away from exploring (and developing) the social value of these technologies and toward the accumulation, and replacement, of objects. The communication and entertainment businesses are, in this sense, at the cutting edge of consumerism. Their role is, in this context, both material and ideological.

The relationship of media and communications to consumer culture is bolstered by the way we have allowed the content of media to be increasingly dominated by advertising. Most of our information and entertainment media – newspapers, magazines, radio, and television – are not simply funded by advertising; commercials dominate their output. On television, the proliferation of channels has been driven largely by commerce, so that the proportion of publicly funded spaces has shrunk with alarming speed (Pauwels, 1999; Rowland & Tracey, 1990; Tracey, 1998). The United Kingdom, for example, has moved from a carefully constructed ecology based on public service – with a small number of well-funded channels producing a wide range of high-quality programming – to a commercial system with a politically fragile public service component (the BBC and a small and increasingly reluctant group of commercial networks) and a plethora of commercial channels all chasing a limited revenue stream. This combines with a lax regulatory environment, so that advertising now takes up a higher proportion of UK television programming than at any time in its history.

Genres, like film, that were traditionally advertising-free spaces are now funded by product placement deals and commercial tie-ins. Advertisements wallpaper our public spaces – on billboards, buses, and buildings – and brand the clothes we wear. All our communications media – the mail, the Internet, social networking sites, even phones – are increasingly channels for pitching products. As each medium becomes saturated, advertisers look to invade new spaces with a voracious energy that threatens to colonize the entire cultural landscape.

Advertising has thereby become our most dominant cultural discourse, permeating almost every medium, every cultural space. Despite its manifest dominance, contemporary media, communication, and cultural studies has devoted remarkably little time to the role of advertising in sustaining consumer culture, and it is to this issue that I now turn.

Selling Consumerism

Around the middle of the twentieth century, it became increasingly clear that the main problem facing consumer capitalism was not one of production but of consumption (Jhally, 1998). The abundance of goods, it appeared, may have satiated demand (Packard, 1960): the economist J. K. Galbraith, writing in 1958, marked this period as a time when “the urgency of the wants can no longer be used to defend the urgency of the production” (Galbraith, 1958, p. 127).

There are, after all, other pleasures that come with affluence – notably the freedom and opportunity of more leisure time. Once they were free from want, many people sought to loosen the confines of long working hours. At this point, had we decided to spend our money on buying (free) time rather than more consumer goods, consumer capitalism might have been obliged to turn its attention to producing goods for those in greater need. But the machinery of consumer capitalism is not built for altruistic purposes. In practical terms, there is more to be made in selling superfluity to the rich than necessities to the poor. This meant pouring resources into an industry whose sole purpose was to produce what the system craved – an inexhaustible demand for consumer goods. The advertising industry was thus charged not simply with selling goods, but with selling consumerism. Or, as retail analyst Victor Liebow put it in the late 1940s, making consumption “our way of life,” converting “the buying and the selling of goods into rituals, [so] that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction in commodities” (in Packard, 1960, p. 33).

The advertising industry had, for some time, celebrated the inequity that those in greatest need of its services were those with the greatest resources. It now found itself as the propaganda wing of an economic system – perversely, an industry whose importance grew as people's need for consumer goods diminished. Indeed, the success of advertising in promoting consumer goods created a cycle of dependency. As the volume and range of products proliferated, consumers became increasingly dependent upon advertising to differentiate one product from another.

Advertising, in this sense, is not just another cultural industry. While scholars like Neil Postman (1985) have tried to advance Marshall McLuhan's famous theory that “the medium is the message,” most forms of communication are ideologically ambiguous. Television, for example, may have certain characteristics and properties (Ellis, 1992), but as a technology it is comparatively value-free. It can be consumerist or environmentalist, capitalist or socialist, feminist or patriarchal. Advertising can also entertain forms of ambiguity – the feminist critique of advertising (Wolff, 1991; see also Kilbourne's canonical critique in Jhally, 2000), for example, allows us to plausibly imagine an advertising industry that does not depend on gender stereotypes. But there is no escaping the place where form and content collide – advertising is closely bound to the ideology of consumerism.

Yet advertising is generally regarded – certainly by governments and regulatory bodies – as entirely apolitical. So much so that, in certain contexts, advertisements with an overt political message are seen as problematic (and, in countries like the United Kingdom, in breach of broadcasting codes on impartiality). This is, in part, because we are used to locating meaning – whether it is a TV commercial or a TV program – in individual texts. But the ideological thrust of advertising is precisely in its collectivity. As individual stories they have a certain innocence. Their systemic meaning, on the other hand, is at the heart of a consumerist ideology (Mander, 1977). The moral of the thousands of different stories they tell is always the same: regardless of how much we already have, the only way to pleasure, popularity, security, happiness, or fulfillment is through consumption.

Television or radio programs may vary, but commercials themselves are, for all their symbolic excess, remorselessly repetitive. This is not a new observation, and yet the systemic meaning of advertising is often glossed over or ignored in media and communication studies. Despite the industry's extraordinary growth and ubiquity, we see few attempts to come to terms with the magnitude of advertising as a cultural system.

The failure to interrogate the political significance of advertising and its role in consumer culture is rooted in a rejection of early Marxist approaches to contemporary culture. Any systemic critique is often reduced to a set of Marxist origins, whereby advertising is seen as linked to a set of economic imperatives in which the realities of the conditions of production are suppressed. Such a critique is often dismissed as reductive at a time when Marxist approaches have become deeply unfashionable. There are three problems with this dismissal.

First, although many Marxist analyses of culture may be too crude to appreciate what cultural studies scholars used to call the “relative autonomy” of cultural forms, this was partly because production practices – in, say, the television or film industries – were often only loosely tied to economic imperatives. So, for example, commercial films needed to make money, but this did not mean they had to promote the economic system that produced them. In countries with a strong tradition of public service broadcasting, the relations between culture and economy were more complex still.

The advertising industry, however, is decidedly less complex. For all their occasional wit and panache, advertisements are profoundly functional – unlike most cultural forms where the relationship between content and consumption is less direct, they exist to promote consumption. What was compelling about the critiques of a Marxist approach to culture was the rejection of a totalizing theory that ignored the specificities of cultural production. But ironically, this rejection has its own reductive quality, whereby any attempts to connect economy and culture are rejected. This denial of the connections between economy and culture has led to a failure to appreciate those instances where such a relationship is pivotal, especially in advertising.

Second, this rejection spawned a media and cultural studies that focused on ambiguity and complexity. Advertisements are often rich with meaning: they can be seen as playthings in a semiotic democracy that cannot be reduced to a simple economic function, and where meaning is never guaranteed. And, as many critics of advertising point out, there is no doubt that advertisements do far more than communicate messages about consumption (Williamson, 1995). However, such an appreciation does not mean that advertising's consumerist logic is somehow irrelevant, that other meanings are created while the promotion of consumption is ignored.

All too often, the idea that advertising plays a role in promoting consumerism is parodied as a reductive “hypodermic needle” theory of media influence, whereby witless, passive citizens are commanded to go forth and accumulate. But the dismissal that follows this parody is far too easy. The discourse of advertising can be powerful without being totalizing, unambiguous, or passively received. Indeed, to suggest that such a ubiquitous industry devoted to extolling consumption has played no part in the development of consumer culture is frankly perverse. Even Michael Schudson, regarded by critics like Stuart Ewen as an apologist for the industry, suggests that the advertising industry “may shape our sense of values” (Schudson, 1986; Ewen, 2001).

Third, the observation that advertising portrays a world in which the production and distribution of commodities are either romanticized or (more routinely) ignored may have its origins in a Marxist analysis of the relations of production. But it has long since surpassed these origins, encompassing many other critiques – Naomi Klein's No Logo (1999) and the Fair Trade movement being the best known – which address gender inequalities in production, child labor, the inequities of globalization (where production shifts to where labor is cheapest), the environmental costs of production and distribution, and the growing problems of post-consumption (the disposal of our toxic array of consumer goods).

Again, what is common to most advertising is that it bypasses inequities of global production and the environmental consequences of production, distribution, and disposal, to stress the moment of consumption with remorseless repetition. In this sense, advertising is on one side of a wide-ranging and very contemporary political argument with feminists, labor activists, environmentalists, and the anti-globalization movement. While at times this opposition is overt – the case of “greenwashing” campaigns, for example – advertising's significance is less a matter of persuasion than its ability to keep changing the subject, to return our focus toward the pleasures associated with what Sut Jhally (1998) calls “the dead world of things.”

Because we have allowed advertising to become our most dominant form of cultural expression, it crowds our imaginations and makes it difficult to contemplate a society that is not based on consumerism. If, as Tim Edwards suggests, “consumerism as an ethos and a practice is expanding in importance at a near exponential rate to incorporate everything from health and insurance to education and recreation” (Edwards, 2000), it is entirely in keeping with advertising's voluminous colonization of the communication, information, and entertainment industries. This could, of course, be coincidental rather than causal – causality is, after all, much easier to quibble with than to establish (Lewis, 2008) – but it stretches credulity to suggest that such a ubiquitous cultural discourse has little ideological impact.

Above all, the growth of advertising – the knotweed of contemporary culture – is not innocent or apolitical. Its presence pushes us further down the dead-end of consumer capitalism and offers no way out. As Richard Layard (2003) suggests, legislation banning advertising is a far more sensible policy for increasing quality of life than extending consumer choice. Such a policy is, of course, politically implausible (and probably undesirable), but we do need to consider the positive social outcomes of living in a world less dominated by the discourse of advertising. This involves radically rethinking of current approaches to funding the creative industries, which push us toward increasing rather than decreasing the cultural space occupied by advertising.

Disposable News and Democracy: Rethinking the Way We Report the World

In theory, the news is a place where the shortcomings of consumer capitalism – its failure to deliver an improved quality of life, its environmental consequences, and consumerism's diminishing returns – might be highlighted and debated. And yet a tired orthodoxy prevails. Despite the growing number of critiques of a crude model of economic growth (measured in GDP), the news media's economic framework is as robust as it ever was, solidified by the growing genre of business reporting.

There are, of course, negative consequences if the wealthier people of the world spend less money. But this is because we have designed an economic system that depends upon debt-led consumerism, where production is tied less to human need than to the demands of a consumer economy. For example, developing nations are encouraged to export commodities rather than become self-sufficient, tying them to the vicissitudes of global capitalism. A drop in global demand is bad for these economies because they have been encouraged (by institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) to serve global consumers rather than local interests.

But the environmental, economic, and cultural critiques of consumer capitalism are becoming too persuasive and too powerful to be dismissed. As a consequence, it is no longer possible to assert the idea that “growth is good” as a simple objective truth. Any virtue attributed to growth depends on how it is measured, managed, or achieved. It follows that some forms of economic growth may not be good, while many of the conditions for positive human progress lie elsewhere.

Many of these points are given an airing in news programs, but they are usually confined to the spaces reserved for quirky, counterintuitive ideas. Climate change, meanwhile, even when it is taken seriously, tends to be portrayed as a technological rather than a systemic problem. News coverage tends to focus on solutions that involve refitting the growth model with a series of techno-fixes rather than questioning the nature of the model itself (Lewis & Boyce, 2009). Less consumption – which is almost certainly a necessary part of any attempt to offset the worst effects of climate change – is uniformly presented as bad news, rudely interrupting the model of endless growth. The news media find it hard to countenance an alternative to an economic system of borrow-and-spend, or an environmental model of consume-and-trash.

Why is this? In its ideal form, news occupies a space outside consumerism, addressing us as citizens rather than as consumers. In so doing it fulfills a deeply egalitarian purpose, to inform people about the world and enable them to make considered democratic choices. Many critiques of the news media – from the Glasgow Media Group (see, e.g., Philo, 1995) to Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model (1988) – use this ideal as their point of departure. This utopian model of journalism remains palpably intact, immediately understood by both journalists and critics.

The critical literature on news offers many explanations for journalism's failure to encapsulate Habermasian (1991) ideals of the public sphere – the dependence on elites, on well-worn frameworks, on public relations, and on business interests all compromise the news as a diverse, open, civic space. But part of the problem is also more fundamental: the style, content, and expectations of what defines “news” have been shaped by the needs of an emerging consumer culture.

Terhi Rantanen (2009) has written a compelling analysis of the way in which the news continually reinvents itself as “new.” We can use this framework to examine the purpose and utility of news as a public service and as a commodity form. The key term, in this analysis, is “disposable news,” a form of built-in obsolescence that serves a profit motive but impedes public understanding of the world – an idea that reaches its apotheosis in the repetitive rush of the 24-hour news cycle (Lewis, 2010).

At the same time, the history of journalism is inevitably intertwined with politics and, as Brian McNair suggests, with the rise of democracy (McNair, 2000). In early nineteenth-century Britain, the radical press was clearly an agent for democratic change and promoted the ideal of a universal franchise (Thompson, 1968), at a time when only a certain class of property-owning men could vote. For writers like Henry Hetherington, editor of the Poor Man's Guardian, news was, in part, about educating citizens and encouraging them to take history into their own hands.

James Curran and Jean Seaton (1997) and Kevin Williams (1998) argue that the decline of the British radical press was hastened by the government's adoption of a more liberal approach to news. Initial attempts to suppress the radical press were decidedly heavy-handed, with “taxes on knowledge” that effectively penalized all forms of popular journalism. The adoption of a more reformist, less punitive tax regime allowed the growth of commercial mass-circulation newspapers, requiring a level of capital investment and advertising support that favored more establishment forms of ownership. As a consequence, Curran and Seaton (1997) suggest, newspapers moved out of the hands of radical reformers and became big business, and thus “market forces succeeded where legal repression had failed in conscripting the press to the social order” (p. 9).

But it would be misleading to see the radical forerunners of mass-circulation news as high-minded purveyors of information about public affairs. As Stuart Allan (2000) and Jackie Harrison (2006) make clear, there was no golden age of reporting that was subsequently degraded by the grubby needs of commerce. The radical press may have championed democracy, but these newspapers were also bound by the need to make money and could muckrake with the best of them. Radical editor Henry Hetherington promised that one of his newspapers would deliver “Murders, Rapes, Suicides, Burnings, Maimings, Theatricals, Races, Pugilism and [. . .] every sort of devilment that will make it sell” (cited in Allan, 2000, p. 13).

Indeed, the democratic ideal of journalism, whereby news fulfills a deeply egalitarian purpose – informing people about the world and enabling them to make considered democratic choices – developed alongside the desire to titillate and entertain. In the twentieth century, journalism in the United States, where governments have generally been deeply committed to keeping news in the hands of private enterprise, has also developed a strong cultural commitment to notions of fairness and objectivity.

Nonetheless, the growth of news as a business – its industrialization and absorption into capitalist production from the late nineteenth century onwards – created a distinct set of impulses. The style, content, and expectations of what we think of as “news” were quickly shaped by the needs of an emerging consumer culture. This meant a gradual shift away from news about public affairs toward crime, sport, and other “human interest” (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001), but it also created a working definition of news based on the need to sell it as a disposable commodity. Once news became a manufactured product, its commercial success relied upon the creation of a transitory world where information can be quickly discarded and replaced, rather than a space designed to build common knowledge.

The history of journalism – like the history of media generally – is often understood as an inexorable process made possible by a series of demographic and technological developments. But if the growth of the daily newspaper was made possible by urbanization, the growth of transport networks, and efficient printing presses, its viability depended on making news a constant celebration of the new. As Terhi Rantanen (2009) points out, this is often more a matter of appearance than of substance. It became a necessary fabrication to be constantly up-to-date.

Journalism was thus partly defined, at a key stage in its development, by the notion of built-in obsolescence. The phrase “yesterday's news” captures Victor Liebow's consumerist credo perfectly. News loses its value not because it is no longer relevant or useful, but because it is past its sell-by date, quite literally. Its value, as a commodity, has less to do with its ability to inform than with its sense of immediacy. Indeed, we might say that consumer capitalism succeeded in making news the ultimate dispensable item, one that needed replacing on a timescale even the fashion industry would regard as indecent haste.

Thus began a cultural economy based on the “thirst to be first” (Lewis & Cushion, 2009) – a point famously satirized by Evelyn Waugh's Scoop in the 1930s. In this disposable world, newness is all. But in this context, what passes for new is rarely novel or original. The “shock of the new” in journalism is occasional rather than routine, and we are rarely offered ideas that change the way we view the world. News is new only in the banal, temporal sense that it is recent (and often not even then).

So while journalism retains a laudable sense of democratic purpose, it is constrained by its form: news became a commodity almost as soon as it was defined as news. Those in the newspaper business quickly understood that to become profitable, news has to become disposable. In essence, the more rapidly news could be made to appear out of date, the more regularly it could be sold. The newspaper thereby evolved into an object that represents a consumerist dream and an environmental nightmare – something that, by definition, needs replacing on a daily basis. The move to a 24-hour news culture has only sharpened the sense of news as a disposable commodity.

This political economy leaks into a philosophy. The idea that consumer goods should be built to last, rather than used up and replaced, has become almost passé, while we have contrived a world in which it is usually both cheaper and easier to replace something than to fix it. If journalism still has the capacity to go beyond this model, it is restrained by the degree to which it encapsulates it. Its currency is, in part, its currency. Journalism thus has a tendency to celebrate new things rather than new ideas (Lewis, 2010; Rantanen, 2009), a consumerist ideology that leads us back, inevitably, to a very limited, consumerist model of growth.

Indeed, the “growth is good” framework is so central to news storytelling about the economy that it pushes all conflicting concerns aside. Witness the way in which the problem of climate change was immediately sidelined during coverage of the recession from 2008 to the present. Part of the problem, of course, is that when economies are structured around a certain model of consumer capitalism, a recession will have negative consequences, notably for those who lose their jobs. But these problems are rarely balanced against the negative environmental (and human) consequences of growth, and there is almost no discussion of how rich countries might happily survive without economic growth.

The current crisis in journalism – prompted by the Internet, which has made it more difficult to sell news as a commodity – is both a threat and an opportunity. The danger is that news will become a cheap, mass-produced space designed to maximize market share, paid for solely by advertising revenue. In this scenario, the reputation of journalism will sink further in public esteem, and we can be sure that the contradictions of consumer capitalism will not be televised. But there is also a chance to refocus our attention on the democratic purpose of news, to recapture what elevates journalism as a profession and challenge a redundant system. Journalists themselves have a clear and vested interest in this, since the rise of “citizen journalists” and the mass production of news threaten their survival and the quality of their work.

Beyond Consumerism: Media Studies Reborn

The basis of my argument is that consumer capitalism has run its course: as a model for human progress it has become deeply dysfunctional. Unfortunately, any prospect that we might evolve to a more fulfilling, sustainable system is hampered by the way in which consumer capitalism has shaped the media and cultural industries. These industries both encapsulate and extol the wasteful and empty proliferation of commodities.

At the same time, they offer the potential to imagine a different model of human progress. A genre like news, for example, retains a commitment to criticism and debate in spite of its commercial genealogy. And while most cultural genres, from pop music to film, are now deeply tied to the selling of commodities, they remain more open to the political imagination than the advertising that often funds or promotes them. If we are to progress, we might begin by rethinking the way we pay for and regulate our cultural environment. We have created sufficient wealth to do almost anything we want; we should stop and think about how best to use it. And to do that, we need a different set of stories.

Those of us in media, communication, and cultural studies are well placed to scope out these possibilities. This will, however, be neither easy nor straightforward. It means adopting a more critical attitude to production practices that create the beguiling array of media technologies we often use and whose potential we may find exhilarating. It means taking the ideological consequences of dominant media discourses like advertising seriously, rather than adopting the lazier course of critiquing any attempts to demonstrate the influence of our cultural industries (it is always easier to question power and influence than establish it) (Lewis, 2008). And it means embracing a form of journalism education that takes nothing for granted about the nature of news, while refusing to apologize for an ideal based on democracy rather than on commerce.

NOTES

1 ICM Climate Change Survey Results (2007). Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/east/docs/OmClimateChange.pdf.

2 Pew Research Center (2010, January 25). Public's priorities for 2010: Economy, jobs, terrorism. Retrieved from http://people-press.org/report/584/policy-priorities-2010.

3 We should be careful about the word “happiness” here: happiness is an important aspect of human experience, but it is only part of what constitutes quality of life. Fulfillment is not the same as happiness but is a highly valued part of human experience. Since the data refer to a much broader set of human emotions and experience, we can substitute Layard's (2003) use of the word “happiness” with “quality of life.”

4 In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman (1985) has argued that modern media, especially television, provide pleasures that are inherently banal. Much of his analysis, however, is predicated on a particular version of television – i.e., highly commercial television in the United States.

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