Modern Society Is Completely Dependent on the Consumption of Commodities and How They Are Mostly They Are Used to Help Shape Modern Peoples Identities.

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This essay is arguing that modern society is completely dependent on the consumption of commodities and how they are mostly they are used to help shape modern peoples identities. “Consumption is a social, cultural and economic process of choosing goods, and this process reflects the opportunities and constraints of modernity” (Zukin and Maguire, 2004). Consumption is a more intense version of consumerism. Most people of the modern era are overly compulsent on buying products that help boost their identification in a certain way. Most of modern society today revolves around buying items to show off a certain image. In modern society it’s easy to see that people “make” the world through using material objects. “That humans shape, change, and manipulate the material world is readily apparent and uncontroversial. Less obvious are the ways in which objects in turn shape human existence” (Appadurai, 1986). The time when major consumption began cannot be pin pointed exactly but many people believe it began around the Industrial Revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution the working classes worked long hours for low wages, which left little time or money for consumerist activities but after the Industrial Revolution they had more free time to do what they wished and they decided to turn their attention towards the growing number of mass produced, cheap commodities. Henry Ford had a brilliant idea that “mass production would most probably lead to mass consumption” (Ford). Frederick Winslow Taylor brought this theory to other industries and from his jumpstarted mass productivity and the availability of goods that were previously unavailable to the lower classes. This put forward the whole idea of buying goods to make the lower classes lives easier and from that branched the whole concept of a middle class society. The main thing that can really be gotten from the end of the

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