The Consumer's World: Place as Context

Abstract

Abstract The mass-produced products we consume embody elements from the realms of nature, meaning, and social relations. These realms are difficult to integrate on a theoretical plane, but as consumers of these products, we draw these elements together in everyday life and transform them to create places as contexts. These places, which are the basis of our built environments, are also loci for constituting modern—and some would say post-modern—paradoxes and contradictions. They become foils to social theory. Through our actions as consumers and through the language of consumption, modern paradoxes and modern places become inextricably interwined. I will examine these processes through the rhetoric of advertisements in general and in the structure of real geographical “places of consumption” and places consumed “en masse.” This analysis will assist us in understanding the qualities of modern place, the characteristics of modern theory, and how our everyday acts as consumers mediate between them.