International Environment Forum

Consumption is a significant part of the circulation of our shared and unshared, harmonious and conflicting, significant and insignificant meanings.  Meanings in their various shades and intensities are, it hardly needs saying, at the core of what we call culture.  We communicate through what we consume and we consume, in one way or another, an immense variety of material products.  Consumption is arguably the most visible way in which we stage and perform the drama of self-formation. Of course, self-formation involves much else, but consumption is a quintessential part of this mysterious process by which we all define and understand who we are. In this sense, then, consumption is also a form of production, the production of self.¹ 

This is a position taken by John Storey, Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland in the U.K.  As a writer and editor, publihser and poet, researcher and scholar, I consume and produce ideas on a daily basis.

The primary activity of some social spaces and places is interaction, and the contrast with places where communication is actually discouraged could hardly be more extreme.  Disneyworld and Disneyland, as well as American shopping malls, are designed to encourage consumption but, as Ray Oldenburg Professor Emeritus at the Department of Sociology at the University of West Florida in Pensacola emphasizes, they discourage interaction between customers.  Marketplaces, clubs and sports stadiums have some social as well as monetary value, but shopping malls have no social value, according to Oldenburg.  I would not go with him all the way in this, but I get his point.² 

“The imaginative hedonism of the urban setting in its theatricality is employed as a way to stage-manage oneself.  Most urban places and spaces, like the markets and clubs I refer to above, serve less as places of communication than as stages for cultivating one’s image.”-Ron Price with thanks to (1) John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization, Oxford, 2003; (2)Ray/Rothauer Oldenburg and Doris  Rothauer, “Third Places. An Email Conversation”, Doris Rothauer (ed.): Third Places: Fußball, Videospiele, Musikvideos in Graz-West, Frankfurt/M. and (3)Sonke Gau, “Die Theatralisierung des Städtischen“, Doris Rothauer (ed): Third Places: Fußball, Videospiele, Musikvideos in Graz-West, Frankfurt/M., 2004.

If I look back on seven decades

of my consumption-production,

communication….dramaturgical

stage-management....I can see

there have been so many places

which discourage communication

of any kind and in retrospect that

was okay since they gave balance

to those other places in life where

words, endless words filled spaces

and places of my heart and mind

giving me the feeling that perhaps

I experienced an excess of speech,

what often insinuated itself into my

psyche unbeknownst: deadly poison.

Ron Price

Tasmania