Living in a metropolis like London has a lot of benefits, like having free information, entertainment, and more job opportunities.
You can also shop more effectively because of the big shopping streets, the vast choice of products and the latest trends.
The longest shopping street in Europe is Oxford Street and it’s the most desirable retail location in the world with more than 300 shops.
In public spaces in the metropolitan area, we tend to buy what we see. However, advertisements and slogans cross our path continuously and our mind assimilates it as something familiar, that we might need in the future. Each shop introduces sounds, smells, and visual props in the public space that attempt to manipulate our choices and moods. Everyday we are overwhelmed with brands names and products that differ from each other very slightly, in combination with a lot of unnecessary supplies that we might also think to buy.
Consumerism is to make indispensable the unnecessary. Metropolitan public spaces is the best platform to influence people.
Within this projectI will show the raw reality of the ‘materialistic’ part of London, focusing on the manipulation that the advertising in public space has on us when we tend to accept any suggestion offered to us, even without realising it’s happening.
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The Metaphor of Consumerism
The very existence of human beings is no longer determined by the presence of another human being, but by the presence of certain commercial products in possession.
view contentWays o f seeing.
BARTHES, ROLAND
Berger goes on to say that “publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.”
This book sets out not simply to criticize advertisements on the grounds of dishonesty and exploitation, but to examine in detail, through over a hundred illustrations, their undoubted attractiveness and appeal. The overt economic function of this appeal is to make us buy things. Its ideological function, however, is to involve us as 'individuals' in perpetuating the ideas which endorse the economic basis of our society. If it is economic conditions which make ideology necessary, it is ideology which makes those conditions seem necessary.
If society is to be changed, this vicious circle of "necessity" and ideas must be broken. Decoding Advertisements is an attempt to undo one link in the chain which we ourselves help to forge, in our acceptance not only of the images and values of advertising, but of the 'transparent' forms and structures in which they are embodied. It provides not an "answer," but a "set of tools" which we can use to alter our own perceptions of one of society's subtlest and most complex forms of propaganda.
THE RISE OF CONSUMERISM
in London
Mythologies.
BARTHES, ROLAND.
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