Consumer Labor

This post is more of a follow up on my previous post, but since it focuses on a different subject I decided to give it a separate space.

Here I want to focus on the labor consumers do. It is probably clear that people usually do the labor even without thinking about it. If I grew up in a particular society with its specific consumer patterns then I am most probably familiar with the environment without having to do any research or some actual work. TV, advertising, interactions with other people and so on put the information about the whats and hows of the particular consumer culture into my head. This information helps me with surviving and finding my place in the society and also helps me interact with other members of it.

I am an international student and I had trouble with interacting with my American classmates here from the very start. This might mostly be because of my antisocial nature but what I used to tell for example my parents as an explanation of this was not knowing what the American students talk about. I did not and still don’t understand the references towards many different cultural particularities. I think now I can safely call most of the particularities consumerism products. What I observed was some other international students having little problem with adjusting to the situation and the main thing they had to change was start talking the same way as the American students. Or in other words get to know what was in fashion, get to know the names of places, people, TV shows, brands, slang and so on and later use the information as a bridge to connect and make more friends. And somehow reading about the consumer labor was like a revelation. It turns out that those who are outsiders and thus do not have their portion of labor done, in order to become normal members of the society have to almost necessarily consciously work for getting that labor done.

The interesting thing here is in something elsethough. I used to think that if I wanted to be able to interact with the American students as they do among themselves I would have to assimilate or become American. I thought of this process as getting to know the culture. Now it turns out that a big part of this learning of particularly American culture includes the learning about different consumer products, their use and exchange values and more importantly their sign value. The main question or concern that I have here is whether one can learn about the sign value of various products and don’t actually start believing it’s true. I personally think it is not possible, which is probably why I thought about the necessity of assimilation. But if it is actually not possible to be immune to sign value while studying it then I would say that the problem of drawing a line between the needs and luxuries is its result.