DIGITAL BOVARISM: ADVERTISING, RHETORIC, AND IDENTITY

Abstract

This paper aims to show how the consumers shape their identities via advertising rhetoric. The contemporary advertising industry is defining and cultivating customers identity, using tactics such as mental simulation and narrative transportation, based on data-driven social profiling. The consumers are lured in constructing the types of persona which marketers strive to establish, engaging in what I call digital bovarism: an idealized, glamorized and, ultimately, fictional representation of themselves, developed through alienating rhetorical visions. This rhetorical process can be understood using symbolic convergence theory and fantasy-theme analysis, as the individual’s efforts to be unique result in more similarity via mimetic practices of consumption.