Everyone in the world in the world seems to know who the Kardashians are, wherever you look they seem to appear, on billboards, magazines, in salons, on the internet, pictures of them are plastered everywhere. The Kardashian family is popular culture. In this essay I will be discussing consumerism, the role of technology in consumer culture and materialism in accordance to the show Keeping Up With The Kardashians and the Kardashian family, and explaining it through conflict theory.
Conflict theory dictates ideas coined by Karl Marx (1818-1833) who has divided the social groups into two classes, the bougeousie and the proliteriate. He states that because of the inequality in the power balance and the bourgeousie having a capitalist hold over the proletariates, they abuse their power over the proletariates. (Marx, 1970) In this case, The Kardashians are the bourgeoisie, the rich and the wealthy
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The show engages in hyperconsumption as a spectacle, showcasing the family members flying in their own private jets just because they felt like going to get macarons in Paris. This further amplifies the social structure between themselves and the working class. For Kim Kardashian’s wedding, which was also aired on Keeping Up With The Kardashians, the wedding cost approximately $30 million. (International Business Times, 2014) Kim’s wedding venue was elegant, her gown cost half a million dollars, and thus the viewers of the show are seeing something unattainable and it’s for spectatorship. The unattaintability of these luxurious settings are what draws viewers, however, this also shows the inequality between the working class and the bourgeousie as after watching the shower, viewers will go back to their normal lives of working jobs and not living multi millionare lifestyles, while these viewers are also the reason Kim Kardashian could have such an extravangant
A capitalist society encourages exploitation of workers through consumerism. This can be observed in Mardi Gras: Made in China (2005) by recognizing how use-value, exchange-value and surplus-value in our society promotes exploitation. The documentary provides insight that the usefulness of a thing, or the use-value, is often disregarded when people purchase commodities to keep up with trends rather than for its use. Exchange-value exists within capitalism, where consumers are not as interested at an item’s usefulness. Rather, they are more interested in its monetary value and what they can obtain in exchange for the
Research Problem Disney Channel’s The Proud Family (or TPF for the duration of this paper), is an animated show about a middle class African American family that focuses mainly on fourteen-year old Penny Proud. Her family includes her father Oscar, mother Trudy, grandmother Suga Mama and baby siblings BeBe and CeCe. These characters all live under the same roof. Other main characters include Penny’s friends Dijonay, LaCienega, Zoey and Sticky.
Sociology is the study of the development, structure and functioning society. Sociology is all around us, it 's what we say, what we do, what we watch on TV, and what we see in our everyday lives. Sociology is a broad term, because there are many different words that associate with Sociology including family, relationships, media, gender, and crime. While sociology is all around us, a common place where we might witness ideas that come from sociology is right at home on our televisions. A popular show that displays a perfect example of sociology right now is Keeping up with the Kardashians.
Popular Culture I Öğr. Gör. Gülbin Kıranoğlu The Capitalist and Patriarchal Elements in the Products of Popular Culture Betül Kılıç 110111077
The video: Consumerism! The Musical is the perfect example of encompassing all the ideas and concepts in the Marxist unit. The video has a man who is extremely wealthy, signifying the concept of the dominant elite and also shows how the dominant elite are shown in society. To begin, in the video, the main character shows the characteristics of the dominant elite.
Very few books in the history of economic thought still render an accurate portrayal of society today. Written 115 years ago, Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Social Class (1899) describes a materialistic society obsessed with reputation and social status, echoing a portrayal of the modern capitalistic consumer culture that defines us today. As Roger Mason (1998), professor of consumer theory states: “Consuming for status has, in fact, become a defining element of the new consumer societies” (p.vii). In his treatise, Veblen’s discusses such a society, in order to portray the ‘leisure class’, the 19th century society that characterized the upper class that formed as a consequence of the Second Industrial Revolution. Such a society uses the consumption of goods and leisure as means of climbing up the social ladder.
The central conflict in the production is the struggle between the workers and the upper class. The upper class is attempting to control the country’s resources through the control of the economy. The resulting effect is that the working class loses their way of living that includes their
The Consumption of the Kardashians Carling Hunt 500561747 Professor Jamin Pelkey TA: Michael ACS100-101 28 November 2015 The 20th century was an era of great transformation. It was the birth of department stores, automobiles and consumption durables. Advertising became a popular and effective means of promoting goods to the consumer through billboards, television, and print media. In turn, this revolutionized a modest, minimalistic way of life into a new culture of a consumeristic society (Mooers “Constructing the Consumer”). It was this revelation that sparked the gluttonous need for the ever new.
Robot or Stepford? By: Hiba Tabbara Imagine living in gated town, grass on every lawn, mansion-like houses, and big busted women who follow their husbands’ orders. Now, imagine that a place like this is controlling the citizens’ lives.
“Totalitarian” decline of socialism and social norm, in this result from the centralized control on society. People think that if they are belongs to totality, this means they have good social position in the society. “To Adorno, Capitalism uses “culture industry” and “commodity fetishism” this way it can trick easy to people. Dressing same things, eating same thing or think similarly are good for modern people. According to Adorno, “commodity fetishism is the real secret of success, since it can show how exchange value exerts its power in a special way in the realm of cultural goods” ( 34).Firstly, For example, In the “Mr. Muscle advertisement”, if you can take it you can clean easy against the stubborn dirt or in the car advertisement, if you take this mark car, you can influence woman or other people.
In the excerpt from Anti-Duhring titled “Theoretical,” Engels approaches the idea of social order and production through a historical materialistic standpoint. Engels identifies the fundamental contradiction in the capitalist mode of production and utilizes it to flow a series of other conflicts and a possible solution through collective action. Engels attempts to uncover the conflict between the mode of production and mode of exchange and how the proletariat's can leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom (310) while still integrated in the capitalist mode of production. In this essay I will display the key concept of the historical materialism approach, the fundamental contradiction that arises in capitalism, and what Engels
Capitalism is understood to be the “economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.” In modern society, capitalism has become the dominant economic system and has become so integrated that it has resulted in a change in the relationships individuals have with other members of society and the materials within society. As a society, we have become alienated from other members of society and the materials that have become necessary to regulate ourselves within it, often materials that we ourselves, play a role in producing. Capitalism has resulted in a re-organization of societies, a more specialized and highly segmented division of labour one which maintains the status quo in society by alienating the individual. Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim theorize on how power is embodied within society and how it affects the individuals of society.
This sociological study will analyze the problem of commodity fetishism in American consumer culture. Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is a major problem in the United States due to the inability of consumers to see the intrinsic value of a commodity. American consumer culture tends to become trapped in the “magical qualities” of a product, which makes them unable to understand the object as it was made by a laborer. This abstraction of the commodity is part of Marx’s analysis of capitalist products that is separated from the labor and become valuable objects in and of themselves. This is an important sociological perspective on commodities, which creates an irrational consumer culture in the American marketplace.
As in Marx’s analysis of capitalist society, in the film we can clearly see how the bourgeois classes maintain their lifestyle by exploiting and mistreating the workers. The workers cannot be distinguished, they don't have an identity and a individuality, they are identified only by numbers. The capitalists live in luxurious spaces above ground, while the workers live beneath the surface of the ground, in miserable houses. Those factors point out the dissimilarities of the two classes, which bring us to the conclusion that there will always be an inevitable conflict between them.
Bourgeoisie, which gains the power, defines superstructure “including all social and legal institution, all political and educational systems, all religions and all art” (Bressler, 162), and articulate the ideology which is based on profits of bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie ideology leads to alienation of individuals, especially proletariats. This bourgeoisie ideology creates the clash between the two classes. Marx supported the working class and their victory over dominant class. Marxism believes in providing equal opportunity to the working class as that are available to the