Tag: Consumerism
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Changes to the ONS’ CPI Basket of Goods and Lifestyle Changes in the UK
The Office for National Statistics monitors inflation by using the Consumer Price Index, which uses a representative sample of consumer goods and services purchased by households. The easiest way to think about this is to imagine a very large shopping basket full of goods and services which the ‘typical household’ buys on a regular basis…
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Fyre… the biggest festival that never happened
The Fyre Festival of 2017 is a great example of a ‘postmodern’ event…. an unfortunate coming together of consumerism, hyperreality, and hyper-individualised identity-obsessed millennials. In case you missed the furore, you can get a feel for what happened just by watching this trailer on Netflix – which describes the event as a being billed as…
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Bauman’s Consuming Life A Summary – Chapter 2 – The Society of Consumers
Summary of chapter One A fairly lengthy, paraphrased summary with a few comments in italics In consumer culture people behave ‘unreflexivly’ – without thinking about what they consider to be their life purpose and what they believe to be the right means of reaching it, without thinking about about what prompts them into action or…
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Merry Debtmass…
A 2016 poll by Nationwide found that the average Brit spends £645 on Christmas. On average, people in the UK spend… £117 on Christmas presents for their partner, £145 on presents for their children, £20 on their pet (lucky pets!). This broadly corresponds with the Bank of England’s findings on Christmas spending which found that…
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A Summary of Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘The Individualised Society’, Part Two – The Way We Think
Part Two – The Way We Think Chapter Seven – Critique – Privatised and Disarmed More than anything else so far this chapter represents a good summary of some of Bauman’s major ideas. What is wrong with our society is that it has stopped questioning itself? We are reflexive but it is a limited reflexivity…
