A whimsical and wise take on American consumption of luxurious goods.
6/17/2002
Never outright judgmental, though with an eyebrow clearly cocked, James B. Twitchell offers a long look at the American passion for ever more luxurious goods, from dishwashers (in the old days) through designer togs, baubles, and bags. As a professor of both English and advertising at the University of Florida, he contemplates the influence of advertising on the shaping and stoking of American tastes, and speculates on whether shopping is our most unifying form of religion. "Whatever it becomes, the mass-mediated and mass-marketed world of the increasingly powerful information age is drawing us ever closer together," he writes. That even unnecessary consumption can be liberating and democratic is an unsettling observation of its power.