Consumer and Media Culture Flashcards

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering consumer shifts, branding strategies, and media culture theories from Class 7 of ENGL 361.

Consumer Society Shifts

The transition into a consumer society characterized by shifts in the mode of production, values, financing, and retail.

Therapeutic Ethos

A concept described by historian T. J. Jackson Lears where commoditized objects serve as a substitute for emotional connection in late modernity.

Branding

A practice used to differentiate products through packaging and brand recognition, aimed at creating desire rather than just selling facts.

Susan Linn

Author of Consuming Kids and Who’s Raising the Kids? who critiques brand-licensed products and the marketing of media characters like Elmo or Spiderman to children.

Conspicuous Consumption

A term by Veblen referring to the purchase of excessive or wasted consumer goods, such as a Canada Goose jacket, as a means of social distinction.

Pseudoindividuality

The process where cultural forms interpellate consumers as individuals while actually selling homogeneous experiences and brand identity.

Greenwashing

Advertising that equates a company with environmental activism to obfuscate the truth about its negative environmental impact.

Commodity Fetishism

The process by which mass-produced goods are emptied of the meanings of their production and filled with new, mystified meanings.

Communicative Capitalism

A system fueled by social media’s spirit of access and interactivity that is harnessed by corporations for consumer engagement.

Media Convergence

The merging of different media forms and industries through computing technology in the modern landscape.

Graphic Design

A term first used by typographers in the 1920s as typography evolved into a visual art form with unique aesthetics and design history.

Mass Ornament

Siegfried Kracauer’s term for clusters of people, like the Tiller Girls, whose mathematical movements serve as an aesthetic end in itself.

Propaganda

The use of media systems by authoritarian regimes or governments as a means of exerting control, such as Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film Triumph of the Will.

Culture Industry

A Frankfurt School concept referring to the embeddedness of cultural producers within capitalist industrial production.

Counterhegemony

Forces within a society that work against dominant power systems, such as the editors of the magazine The Masses.