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Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture
A study of the emergence of mass consumption and modern advertising in the early twentieth century and of the capitalistic use of advertising as a mechanism to define and control social values and the character of daily life
261 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
May 2, 2010
'Captains of Consciousness, originally published in the mid-70's but just as relevant today, is an interesting book on the role of advertising in the development of the new world. It's only been a hundred years since the invention of mass production, which eventually required a culture of mass consumption to go along with it. What good is it to produce a billion widgets a day if there is no one to buy them? The result was the creation of the middle class, at least in America and Europe. Globalization is another matter - the growth of a middle class throughout the world is inevitable but lagging.
The cultural implications are also interesting. Previously, people in our culture were raised to value craftsmanship, quality, and thrift. These values became unsuitable, and had to be replaced with acceptance of disposability and debt. Tradition was replaced by trends. Also, people had to be made perpetually dissatisfied with themselves and everything around them, so they could be made to buy things which promised fleeting satisfactions.
The transformation has been so complete we are almost unaware of it. We take consumer culture so much for granted. Consider: Cultures used to have one book or central legend that lasted them for hundreds of years. Now every single day brings a new "Most Viewed" item on YouTube. Movies that lead the box office two weeks in a row are uncommon. A number one bestselling book or album spends only days at the top of the charts. This is clearly no sustainable economy!
The acceleration of this process seems almost asymptotic. The most significant event in the future history of the world may not even be perceived by anyone, because it will only last for a fraction of a second.
The cultural implications are also interesting. Previously, people in our culture were raised to value craftsmanship, quality, and thrift. These values became unsuitable, and had to be replaced with acceptance of disposability and debt. Tradition was replaced by trends. Also, people had to be made perpetually dissatisfied with themselves and everything around them, so they could be made to buy things which promised fleeting satisfactions.
The transformation has been so complete we are almost unaware of it. We take consumer culture so much for granted. Consider: Cultures used to have one book or central legend that lasted them for hundreds of years. Now every single day brings a new "Most Viewed" item on YouTube. Movies that lead the box office two weeks in a row are uncommon. A number one bestselling book or album spends only days at the top of the charts. This is clearly no sustainable economy!
The acceleration of this process seems almost asymptotic. The most significant event in the future history of the world may not even be perceived by anyone, because it will only last for a fraction of a second.
April 29, 2009
If I had to pick one book and call it "my college education" this would be the one.
March 20, 2009
This book has so many approaches to comprehending the "consumer culture" that it is an education, for me, unto itself.Is it a history book, a social commentary, a philosophical query,a psychological thesis? It is this and much more.This is what excites me - it makes more sense of the universe I am in. It is actually meant to be used academically, but is absolutely readable for the lay person. As part of his journey toward a PhD in the early 70's, Prof Ewen uncovers a missing area in the field of communications and media studies; his inquiry into the phenomenon of "consumerism" unearths many interesting historical pieces, including the Committee on Public Information, which was created during WWI as a tool for manipulating the public.Persuasion this is called in communications theory. All the distastefulness that one can suspect behind advertising and our "consumer culture" is explained herein. I am crazy about this book. He is brilliant, in my opinion.
February 6, 2011
This sociological study is now a bit of a historical study as well, since it was written in the seventies and is greatly about the 20's-30's, but that in no way makes it less important today. If anything it's more important today since we modern readers were born into the consumer culture and know nothing else. The insight to the pre-industrial world and the illustration of sprouting consumerism creates a vivid picture of a world can never know. It's important to understand these backgrounds to gain understanding to the "social roots of consumer culture" and how the "captains of consciousness" continue to manipulate the playing field today. The game hasn't changed a bit it seems, the masses are still pushed and pulled through fear, although today the "captains" are faced with very little resistance from the public sector. A vital aspect of the study is the way children were targeted in the consumerization process. The examples supply a firm grip on how consumerism permeated the generations, how we got to today, where it's first nature to buy buy buy and never ask any questions. A very useful read for anybody. Before I read it I remember one reviewer saying that this book is enough to constitute a full education, and I can't say that I disagree. Retrain your Brain.
June 16, 2024
Starts off in a academic tone which lessens as it progresses.
Basically it charts the development of the almost total control of the social realm by corporate interests, mainly concentrating on post ww1 America.
It's relevance today, is in the exposure of the general principles of the marketing industry at it's conception,and the dictates that aim at ideological pacification within the consumer population.
Basically it charts the development of the almost total control of the social realm by corporate interests, mainly concentrating on post ww1 America.
It's relevance today, is in the exposure of the general principles of the marketing industry at it's conception,and the dictates that aim at ideological pacification within the consumer population.
January 15, 2020
I cannot write an adequate review for this book. I will recommend it to EVERYONE. I loved it when I read it for my senior colloquium in college, but I love it so much more as a homemaker/wife/mother with a giant target on my back in the consumerist society we live in. It has helped me understand SO MUCH of the context of our family’s social pressures, as individuals, and especially the patterns of behavior through several generations of people I love. If I was teaching a class on the Industrial Age, this book and The Dollmaker would be the perfect pairing of content. READ IT :)
October 4, 2023
8/10
So so good. Very dense stuff on how consumerism has become so intertwined with American life. Great analysis and the things start to make some more sense when knowing their history. Excited to go through this more thoroughly later.
So so good. Very dense stuff on how consumerism has become so intertwined with American life. Great analysis and the things start to make some more sense when knowing their history. Excited to go through this more thoroughly later.
August 14, 2020
Helen Woodward, the leading woman copywriter writer of the 1920s, added that in order to write effective copy, the writer should avoid the productive arena religiously. “If you are advertising any product,” she warned, “never see the factory in which it was made...Don’t watch the people at work...Because, you see, when you know the truth about anything, the real, inner truth it is very hard to write the surface fluff which sells it.”
October 12, 2023
This is a great analysis of the development of consumer culture in the United States. It traces the histories of early advertising, the ideologies that arose from them, and how they functioned as a way to socially control and constrain the energies, desires, and dreams of the post-WW1 generation.
The book argues that the US’ post-WW1 successes created a new class of workers across sexes whose surplus wealth allowed them to redirect their profits to consumer goods. The worker and the consumer became the same person. And so there was a need to develop within the population a culture of consumerism that would allow the continuing of these capitalist systems of production. In a sense, there arose a market of dreams and desires that corporations could consciously develop and then continuously tap into. The leading advertisers during the 1920s learned from the writings of early psychologists like Sigmund Freud (through his nephew Edward Bernays) how to manipulate popular desires through our insecurities and fears. The broader aim was to develop a new American culture in which one’s identity is defined by the products one purchases and beholds as opposed to anything intrinsic to one’s ideas. This would become an all-encompassing consumerist culture.
The contours of these top-down imaginations turned into the realities of American consumerist life that flourished most prominently after WW2 during the 1950s. The nuclear family was defined by their roles as consumers of different goods. The husband works hard to make the money that the wife uses to “manage the household” through the purchase of new goods. The children are educated in the consumerist mindset from the get-go and participate in the market through their manufactured desires for toys. TV shows reflect back on the household these same values in order to normalize these new mentalities. The book argues that through the construction of consumerist identities, they also functioned as a way to constrain the ability to meaningfully define oneself in opposition to the dominant strains of culture. In the 50s, for example, any deviation from the enforced norms, such as wearing different types of clothes or talking about alternative ways of life were demonized into the bins of “communist,” “beatnik,” or “hippie”.
Consumerism was valorized through the advertising industry but silently lying underneath it was the desire for mass social control. That’s what the book argues, anyway. It was written in the ‘70s soon after some of these structures were more actively denounced (during the Vietnam war), but reading the book today, it’s still extremely relevant. Overall it’s pretty thought provoking and definitely worth the read. Reading Edward Bernays’ Propaganda from the ‘20s goes well with it.
The book argues that the US’ post-WW1 successes created a new class of workers across sexes whose surplus wealth allowed them to redirect their profits to consumer goods. The worker and the consumer became the same person. And so there was a need to develop within the population a culture of consumerism that would allow the continuing of these capitalist systems of production. In a sense, there arose a market of dreams and desires that corporations could consciously develop and then continuously tap into. The leading advertisers during the 1920s learned from the writings of early psychologists like Sigmund Freud (through his nephew Edward Bernays) how to manipulate popular desires through our insecurities and fears. The broader aim was to develop a new American culture in which one’s identity is defined by the products one purchases and beholds as opposed to anything intrinsic to one’s ideas. This would become an all-encompassing consumerist culture.
The contours of these top-down imaginations turned into the realities of American consumerist life that flourished most prominently after WW2 during the 1950s. The nuclear family was defined by their roles as consumers of different goods. The husband works hard to make the money that the wife uses to “manage the household” through the purchase of new goods. The children are educated in the consumerist mindset from the get-go and participate in the market through their manufactured desires for toys. TV shows reflect back on the household these same values in order to normalize these new mentalities. The book argues that through the construction of consumerist identities, they also functioned as a way to constrain the ability to meaningfully define oneself in opposition to the dominant strains of culture. In the 50s, for example, any deviation from the enforced norms, such as wearing different types of clothes or talking about alternative ways of life were demonized into the bins of “communist,” “beatnik,” or “hippie”.
Consumerism was valorized through the advertising industry but silently lying underneath it was the desire for mass social control. That’s what the book argues, anyway. It was written in the ‘70s soon after some of these structures were more actively denounced (during the Vietnam war), but reading the book today, it’s still extremely relevant. Overall it’s pretty thought provoking and definitely worth the read. Reading Edward Bernays’ Propaganda from the ‘20s goes well with it.
December 1, 2020
A great read on the history of American ad culture: it’s meteoric rise with the rise in industrialization & it’s continuous evolution to fit and determine the prevailing narratives around American social life. The more you get into it, the more you realize how many aspects of life/culture in the US in inundated with advertisements. Every new (& no so new) social movement has been and will be co-opted by corporate entities to tell consumers that the path to happiness and acceptance in society is based in buying the right products. I went into this with an idea of what it was about, and it has encouraged me to be more cognizant about the messages I get from the media I consume. Definitely recommend.
November 6, 2018
An excellent book. It is a real eye-opener with regard to the advertising industry, and how it presented itself as the ideal response to the problems that mass production had (generally the lack of market to sell their goods to). I didn't particularly rate the introduction, but once past that part, it was full of excellent detail, well-researched and supported and easily-digestible for the common person, like me. I'd happily read it again.
December 23, 2020
Oof!
Readable and chilling, this history of advertising weaves a persuasive narrative of 'great' minds from the 20th (and 19th!) century using communication, not just to change behaviors, but to replace the very value system of their audience. Incites powerful reflection on self and society.
Readable and chilling, this history of advertising weaves a persuasive narrative of 'great' minds from the 20th (and 19th!) century using communication, not just to change behaviors, but to replace the very value system of their audience. Incites powerful reflection on self and society.
November 5, 2018
One of the first academic books to present the origins of consumer culture. Pretty neat that it does not feel dated.
December 29, 2021
A social commentary and philosophical query in one dramatic outline of consumer culture.
April 8, 2024
Such an important book.
February 19, 2015
Stuart Ewen is another New Left historian, along with the likes of Gabriel Kolko and David Noble, who made his impact largely by looking up what the surprisingly frank corporate magnates of the late 19th and early 20th century were saying about what they were doing. Asserting that advertising was intended to remold the American people into the kind of consumer that the new mass-production industries needed sounds like a crazy left-wing conspiracy theory, but the quotes that Ewen has found to this effect are from prominent businessmen like Edward Filene or sources such as the advertising trade journal Printers Ink. Similarly, the idea of mass consumption as an ideology that could safely absorb and redirect the liberatory impulses of socialism and feminism sounds a lot less like paranoid raving when it's being argued by some of the people who invented modern advertising. Ewen is also good on the ways that advertising changed the media business, especially newspapers (and especially the foreign-language press), and he draws the obvious connections to political propaganda, especially via Edward Bernays. The final section, on advertising and the family, was also interesting, if slightly less persuasive: it could have stood to be longer, probably. In fact, the whole book gives the impression of being a short introduction to a deeper topic, and could probably have been at least half again as long as it is without damage. Ewen finishes with an impassioned denunciation of advertising's promotion of conformity and a call to free ourselves from corporate propaganda, lest it become the only source of social change. His most prescient criticism was perhaps of the way that various forms of resistance to the powers that be were already (in the mid-70s) being appropriated by advertising: "we are offered the idiom of our own criticism as well as its negation -- corporate solutions to corporate problems." As it happens, though, he may not have been sufficiently cynical about the ways that resistance to corporate control could be used to sell corporate products. In an earlier passage, he writes that in the 50s, advertising was making it unacceptable "[t]o look different, to act different, to think different . . . ." There's no evidence that Apple's advertisers had this passage in mind when they created the "think different" slogan, but if they did, that would just about kill irony.
February 12, 2009
In this book, Ewen makes the argument that advertising has more power in our collective "consciousness" than we give it credit for. He starts with the industrialization of America, and how that influenced advertising. He speaks of how the image of the woman, the man, and the family was altered in this consciousness by the ubiquity of ads.
Though I don't know if I agree with every point that he made, I appreciate his motivations in writing the book. In summary, he wants us to realize that ads aren't just there to be there. They have been carefully constructed by advertisers to perpetuate their agendas. It certainly altered my own consciousness about how I understand ads.
Though I don't know if I agree with every point that he made, I appreciate his motivations in writing the book. In summary, he wants us to realize that ads aren't just there to be there. They have been carefully constructed by advertisers to perpetuate their agendas. It certainly altered my own consciousness about how I understand ads.
Want to read
September 23, 2013While ads continually painted a picture in which people could trust no one (not even themselves) in their immediate surroundings, the corporations were presented as an alternative for communities which were pictured as being eroded by mistrust: people fragmented from one another by such privatized problems as "sneaker smell," "paralyzed pores," "vacation knees," "spoon-food face," "office hips," "underarm offense," and "ashtray breath." The immediate world of the "consumer" was in fact presented as one in which fear justifiably reigned. (97)
July 29, 2014
This is an important book that needed to be written, I just wish it had been written better. The sentence structure being what it is, it's hard to hold on to the ideas being expressed. Also, a book like this should be jam-packed with damning quotes and yet I find it difficult to find something to share on Facebook or elsewhere. A worthwhile book, but I have to believe that there is something out there that does what this one does, only better.
September 24, 2016
This is a sassy little book. I enjoyed every word of it. It strikes right at the heart of consumer culture, leaving no uncertainty about the health and crisis of Capitalism. Ewen delivers crucial context to the advertising and marketing strategies of the early 20th century, leaving you with several frames of reference to add to your analytical toolkit. His use of critique of the nuclear/industrial family is spot on.
May 2, 2007
Coming out of a course in liberal democratic ideals, reading this book, and then going to work in a factory for two months drastically reshaped my view of our world and American society. Ewen offers an understanding of the societal changes that took place in capitalist industrialized societies 1910-1940 that will shake the foundations of your relationship to consumerism.
May 1, 2007
how the world works - finally revealed!
April 23, 2008
Great history of advertising and the shaping of new "needs" of the modern individual.
November 11, 2015
Very interesting history of the shift in advertisement and its role in the shaping of American society. Not sure I was in the right mood for this type of study though...hence the 3 stars.
October 6, 2016
Fantastic book, a little repetitive in parts but all together very informative.
April 27, 2022
I read this book during my undergraduate. I'm glad I did, it helped me to become aware of various strings that control our modern society.
November 18, 2007
fascinating and informative review of early advertising and consumption in the US...a must-read...
Read
December 1, 2017Intro to the start of marketing in 1920s to 50s. Excellent read
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews