Too Cool for School: an Examination of Consumer Culture on Identity

Too Cool For School: An Examination of Consumer Culture on Identity

The term cool is socially acceptable slang by modern culture to mean stylish and popular. The ideal of cool in today’s society is largely set forth by corporate agenda. They produce cool for profit; the reality of these goods impacts identity on a multitude of levels from the individual to the community. Cool is attainable by the latest and trendiest merchandise. Together, the individual and the community boast an increasing consumption of goods that is economically desirable. The relationship of cool to its culture invokes insight not just on the culture that produced the trend but also on what the culture is saying about certain belief systems. Hence, identity-formation is the product of industrial capitalism, in which the ambiguousness and complexities of identity are simplified by the dominant culture into a neat package called “cool”.

According to theorist Iain Chambers, in Popular Culture, identity is “a labour of the imagination, a fiction, and a particular story that makes sense” (181). Identity as fiction is the pursuit of organizing the world around us through our imagination and fitting one’s identity into the realm of social context. Consequently, this pursuit presents the opportunity for prevailing interests to shape the ideas of our identity by allowing room for the corporate money machines to fit one’s identity into a story for them through mass media. Chrys Ingraham, in The Wedding-Industrial Complex, best describes the influence of mass media as a task to “provide the public with information and materials that help shape how we view the world, ourselves, and the values we live by. They provide the symbols, myths, images, and ideas by which we constitute dominant culture” (67). It is not a hard notion to concede that it is the mass media, driven by dominant culture, which benefit from shaping the world for the lesser groups within society. Media has the ability to influence...