In recent years, the landscape and the discourse of consumer society to mass production in various media, many television advertisements, fashion magazines, fashion and film are people spare no effort to create a consumer society in the fantasy, it not only with its bright attractive appearance, but also to a set of quite soothing calls upon every philosophy of life a member of society to join.
For us, the consumer society is actually a vivid reality, or a like a mirage and insubstantial objects illusion? When many people are still hesitant about this problem, a new social group -- the new poor -- has been qualified as a qualified member of the consumer society in its own way of life.
The so-called "new poor", is the location of current urban identity of a group of young white-collar workers, from deposits, they are worthy of the name of the poor, some people even often rely on credit card borrowing to sustain life; but from the revenue perspective, they paid, completely different from the old style of the poor live in destitution.
That is to say, they earn a lot of money, but spend more. They are the most competent and the most active members of the consumer society at the expense of the fashionable lifestyles and fashionable consumer goods. The new poor not only chose a completely different life style from their parents, but also completely rewritten the meaning of the old social stratification of the poor, giving it a new aesthetic sense of Bohemia.
So, why is the "new poor" so keen on spending? Through their consumption we can be very pleased with oneself aesthetics, detect how the consumer society deeper message?
From a specific point of view, the so-called consumer society is a society that pays more attention to the value of commodity symbols than its practical value, and the so-called symbolic value refers to the identification and rhetorical significance of a commodity to personal identity. Therefore, we can say that some people's hunger and thirst for symbolic goods are closely related to their uncertainty and anxiety about self identity.
Therefore, although the consumerism ideology equally to every member of society have issued a call, but for those who have strong social identity, class and group and they have a clear cognition, they are almost not affected, such as your family and the bottom. On the contrary, for those middle class with ambiguous social status, the influence of consumerism ideology is particularly huge, and their consumption desire is also very strong.
On the other hand, it is because the "new poor" getting tired and bored at work, to make them more willing to seek mental compensation through consumption, they do not stop shopping, tourism, entertainment, like at a straw like hold consumption, stubbornly expected to find meaning and pleasure the lack of work on the consumer's help, but this is doomed to be a hopeless swimming. Because there is a deep consistency between human consumption and other kinds of leisure activities and work, rather than many people think they are mutually exclusive.
It seems not to have, improvement in the working conditions of the premise, even worse under the "new poor" crush consumption also does not show any magical power, it can not resolve the identity anxiety. They cannot offset the misfortune of them feel in the work of the. On the contrary, consumer goods more and more accelerate the upgrading driven by the "new poor" can only be more and more to speed up the pace of work, and vice versa, to break this vicious spiral, perhaps can only hope that consumerism fade eventually disappeared and the boundaries between work and leisure.