Tag Archive for 'consumption'

“Great new tax on everything”

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Climate change, Economics, Elections, Federal Elections, Howardia, Politics and Polls
. 54 Comments

The government has released modelling showing the effects of the CPRS on household incomes, demonstrating that many low income earners will, on average, be better off financially.

Predictably, this disclosure has added fuel to the fire of complaints from the right about its evils.

In the circles Tony Abbott moves in, redistribution is a dirty word.

That, of course, ignores the fact that everything governments do in tax, benefits, and allowances of whatever kind is redistributive. That includes all the Howard era tax/welfare transfers. It’s not as though Labor has some sort of evil socialist agenda and Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard are socialist wolves in sheep’s clothing, much as some might like to entertain such fantasies.

It’s no doubt right to say, as Andrew Norton does, that Abbott’s shift in the Coalition’s position to opposition to the CPRS (matched with vague promises of costless emissions savings) exposes the detail of the ETS to more debate. That may not be a bad thing, though it would also be a good thing if its ineffectiveness in achieving its ostensible aims were the focus of the debate. That’s not likely to be the case in the headline election year debate, as Abbott’s move switches attention to hip pockets.

However, anyone who followed the design of the CPRS from the start would be well aware that the government had already anticipated this line of attack. Continue reading ‘“Great new tax on everything”’

The Affluenza myth

Published
by
Mark
8 months, 3 weeks ago
in Consumerism, Culture, Politics and Sociology
. 122 Comments

Don Arthur wrote an excellent post at Troppo last week, which is an object lesson in how ideological positions collapse when confronted with careful empirical work:

Australia is in the midst of a flat-screen TV crisis, says Clive Hamilton. Driven by an insatiable desire for “stuff”, we spend more time chasing money and less doing the kinds of things that would really make us happier and more fulfilled — spending time with friends and family, getting involved in the local community, and developing our skills and creativity. Greed and materialism are making us miserable.

But there’s no evidence that people in affluent countries like Australia are greedier or more materialistic than in the past. The major reason we buy more stuff is because stuff has become cheaper. The increase in working hours is not being driven by an increasing desire for stuff but by increases in the cost of things like housing and services.

Hamilton, to put it mildly, has some questions to answer around the basis for his “Affluenza” claims. It would also be interesting, also, to trace exactly why such claims seem to strike a chord.

I’ve long thought this sort of mindset is particularly politically pernicious, and so I’d completely endorse the conclusion to the post as well:

The affluenza myth is both self indulgent and dangerous. It’s self indulgent because it allows affluent, educated people to blame the world’s problems on the consumption habits and psychological weaknesses of less educated, households. And it’s dangerous because it distracts attention away from serious social problems such as the lack of affordable housing for low income earners and the problem of raising taxes to fund redistributive policies in the future.

Weightless capitalism

Published
by
Mark
9 months ago
in Blogging, Consumerism, Culture, Ethics, Media, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 17 Comments

For quite some time, it’s been becoming easier to conceive of the commodity as something immaterial – a social relation – and indeed of economic value as a social construct. Indicative of the accentuation of such trends – and this is one of the truths of the “knowledge economy” – is the phenomenon of “weightless capitalism”, something discussed suggestively by Nathan Jurgenson at Sociology Compass. Taking Facebook as an example, and utilising Zygmunt Bauman’s theme of liquidity as his own compass, Jurgenson argues that the ‘prosumer’ increasingly eschews the accumulation of stuff and instead values a largely symbolic and lighter form of exchange. The sting in the tail or the tale, and this is applicable far beyond the domain of social media, is that we – the ‘content creators’ – are the unremunerated producers of value for the very media which we use as forms of expression and creativity.

To cut a long story short, there is a real sense in which the concept of the ‘prosumer’ gestures towards a hypostasised economic (and social) relation as well as a blurring of borders between consumption and production of content and knowledge.

Elsewhere: SocProf at The Global Sociology Blog.

Gerry Harvey as leading indicator?

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 1 month ago
in Consumerism, Economics, Film, TV, Video etc and Markets
. 88 Comments

Anyone who’s worked in a large public sector organisation will know how “efficiency dividends” work. Or don’t work. Or work in unintended ways – by destroying the capacity to do what your actual main purpose is. There’s a bit of a parable about managerialism there, I suspect. But certainly one of the most egregious of the effects of the efficiency dividends of Lindsay Tanner’s first round of cross-cutting was reducing the sample size of the ABS’ labour market statistics. Not such a smart move at this stage of the game, I’d suggest. But presumably not having Peter Costello raving about Labor deficits trumps informed policy making.

This sort of thing only compounds the fog of economic war at a time of crisis. It is true that economic predictions are a dime a dozen and at best indicative the further they’re projected forward in time. Media savvy ex-Treasury boffins in Access Economics were warning of runaway inflation this time last year. This year, they’re worried that we’re “buggered”. (And they’ve always got some neato right wing policy prescription to go with the diagnosis.)

But at a time when the tectonic plates of the economy are shifting rapidly, it is essential to have access to good data. Nobody seems willing to credit Treasury modelling anymore, so with Rudd’s pre-Christmas stimulus package, we were treated to prediction by anecdote. And, all of a sudden, Gerry Norman, retailer Harvey Norman’s boss, was some sort of folk wisdom personified.

Continue reading ‘Gerry Harvey as leading indicator?’

Spend, spend, spend! It’s your patriotic duty… or something

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Disasters, Economics, Markets, Sociology and USA
. 90 Comments

The stock market has lost 51% of its value since its peak, a decline we’re told now exceeds the destruction of value seen in 1987. On the ABC News tonight, Alan Kohler grimly pointed to an index (tradeable, I think, but don’t quote me on that) of future sentiment which is apparently dire, and which apparently depressed that reified hive mind “the markets” even further. On Lateline Business, a British fellow in a very smart three piece pin stripe suit bemoaned the fact that all rationality in terms of valuation had departed from equities market, and what was left was “pure human sentiment” which apparently “isn’t pretty”. I think John Maynard Keynes might have had something to say about all that.

The stock market’s fall may also have had something to do with evidence of a growing deflation in consumer prices in America, or so opinionators opined. Well, I guess we don’t have the “inflation dragon” to kick around anymore.

And we’ve had another outpouring of deficit aversion, bipartisanship at last (!), in response to Glenn Steven’s expression of the belief that the government had a responsibility to “borrow to invest”.

And, yet, we’ve had a piece of prime silliness – to put alongside all these other signs of the times – in Crikey’s editorial:

There’s not a lot politicians can do. The Government handing money to low income earners who’ll have virtually no choice but to spend it makes sense, but there’s only a limited number of times a $10b heart-starter can be administered to the economy. Even the Opposition has been doing its bit lately, prefacing virtually every statement on the economy with the mantra that Australia is best-placed to weather these difficulties.

And there’s not much businesses can do without demand. It’s actually up to us consumers to realise Australia’s economic fate is in our hands, and act accordingly.

Righteo. Continue reading ‘Spend, spend, spend! It’s your patriotic duty… or something’

Bianca and Big Brother body politics

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 7 months ago
in Advertising, Australiana, Consumerism, Culture, Ethics, Fashion, Media, Politics, Sexuality, Sociology and Women
. 461 Comments

As a bit of a segue from my link to Eye on Big Brother’s last post, I was thinking a bit about Bianca and her body image issues, something I’ve discussed before. At one stage during Big Brother 2008, the narrative centred on Bianca’s breasts – her worries about her own body shape, her ambivalence about breast reduction surgery, and her displacement of her own troubled embodiment into criticism of Brigette and Rebecca and the other surgically enhanced FHM wannabes the show loved to cast over the last few years. She also had a bit of an awareness of how the womens’ bodies on the show functioned as signifiers of potential celebrity, and as objects to be scrutinised and traded among the men on the show – and implicitly the male viewers, though she didn’t really thematise this as such. Partly what was going on here was her own self-image and character work as “the smart chick”, but it’s also, when you reflect on it, I think, a classic example of how “society” is conceived in popular culture. I mentioned Rebecca Wilson’s comments on all the boob talk:

I think it was on the very first Big Brother Big Mouth this year that Rebecca Wilson asked whether it was normal for teenage and twenty-something women to talk so much about their breasts. She said that she couldn’t recall such discussions occurring when she was in her twenties.

Continue reading ‘Bianca and Big Brother body politics’

Disability and body image and reality tv

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 8 months ago
in Activism, Advertising, Consumerism, Culture, Disability, Ethics, Europe, Feminism, Film, TV, Video etc, International, Life, Media, Photography, Sexuality, Sociology and Women
. 129 Comments

I’m not sure if it’s in the BBC’s charter, but the venerable public broadcaster is allegedly trying to reach out to people with disabilities, and to increase social awareness of disability issues. Through such charming initiatives as their online Paris Hilton like trash celeb persona – “Disability Bitch”:

“Hi, I’m Disability Bitch. I’m disabled and I love it. Everyone should be disabled. Everyone should be like me.

“I own an extensive collection of colour-coordinated wigs and an even more extensive collection of colour-coordinated mobility aids, all of which complement my natural beauty…

Whatevs, darl. But there’s more. She’s not an all purpose disability bitch, but part of a reality tv franchise. In pursuit of its social inclusion agenda, the BBC is running a reality tv show – “Britain’s Missing Top Model” – the premise of which is that chicks missing limbs or in chairs can also be teh hotness and get to be in glossy fashion mags. It’s “Stylish, sassy, chic … disabled?”… The idea, I guess, is supposed to be that disability is no barrier to objectification. Continue reading ‘Disability and body image and reality tv’

Trolling, not just for the intertubes any more

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 8 months ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Consumerism, Culture, Ethics, Media, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 16 Comments

Jason Wilson picks up on the Burchell attack piece on bloggers I wrote about earlier today, and asks some pertinent questions. He also points to comments at Public Opinion:

He’s just trolling on an op-ed page.

Posted by: dj | June 23, 2008 10:33 AM

“He’s just trolling on an op-ed page.”

True. Baiting bloggers is the new tactic for attention seekers.

Posted by: Lyn | June 23, 2008 10:45 AM

Coincidentally, there’s a new post by danah boyd at apophenia about the diffusion of troll-like behaviour outside the intertubes:

Continue reading ‘Trolling, not just for the intertubes any more’

“Bianca hates Pretty Anglo Inc”

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 9 months ago
in Advertising and Consumerism
. 11 Comments

I love it! Best line of the season so far from Eye on Big Brother, who in a fascinating post, dissects what’s wrong with this year’s show – the rather ikky (in many ways) Terri has jumped to favouritism because she’s actually a – person. Not one of the identikit templates the producers have served up to the advertisers – the “FHM blonde”, the “funny dude”, the “good looking blokey bloke who works out”, the “brainy skinny guy”, the “overweight girl”, the “rural character” etc. What we’re witnessing, he argues, is commercial tv, reality style, eating itself because it’s too commercial for its own good.

Continue reading ‘“Bianca hates Pretty Anglo Inc”’

Privacy rights in Child Protection investigations: the need for the mass media to disguise identifying features on the minors in the Henson images

Published
by
tigtog
1 year, 9 months ago
in Art, Consumerism, Ethics, Law, Media, Parenting, Photography and Politics
. 59 Comments

crossposted

Author Note: The original title of this post was “Do the right thing, Mainstream Media: disguise the faces of the minors in your reproductions of the Henson images NOW”, deliberately imperative because I wanted it to grab attention in people’s feed readers and hopefully provoke an immediate reaction. That has happened, the faces are now being pixellated in the mass media (not that I’m claiming that this is a direct result of this post), so I’m changing the title to something that sounds a bit more like “me” speaking.

* * *
The Age has an article quoting the mother of the girl whose image is the most widely disseminated with respect to the investigation of complaints against artist Bill Henson’s nude studies of adolescents. The mother defends Henson against claims that he did anything unethical, and mentions in a statement given to The Age via an intermediary that he has been a friend of the family for over 10 years, that her daughter has “a keen interest in the arts” and that the whole family were well acquainted with Henson’s work before the photo-shoot.

The Age claims to have discovered that the pictures were taken last year, and that the girl is still 13 years of age. That contradicts earlier reports that the images were several years old, which would have made the girl perhaps now 16 or 18, i.e. possibly made her no longer a minor. If The Age is correct, then she is still very much under-age, and I’m pretty sure that that creates a problem for the media who have disseminated Henson’s images of her online and in the press, or at least it certainly should.

I only yesterday realised that the censored images of Henson’s work readily available online mostly lack one key ingredient that we usually see when images of minors are at the heart of a news cycle about alleged sexual exploitation/abuse – there has been no black bar or pixellation over the face to disguise the minor’s identity.

Why the hell not? Continue reading ‘Privacy rights in Child Protection investigations: the need for the mass media to disguise identifying features on the minors in the Henson images’

Questions on the Bill Henson “sexualisation of children” debate

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 9 months ago
in Art, Consumerism, Culture, Ethics, Masculinity, Media, Parenting, Photography, Politics, Sexuality and Women
. 251 Comments

Image by Bill Henson – sourced from DailyServing.com

I’ve made my interpretation of Bill Henson’s images of adolescents clear in a previous post, and I want to talk here about some of the issues raised by and about the “debate” on Henson’s photography and the subsequent charges laid against him and the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery owners.

The first point to make is that whatever the “debate” is now about, it’s not about Henson’s images as such. They literally disappeared from view on Thursday afternoon, and the interpretation of the image that’s attracted the most angst has been heavily slanted by its reproduction in numerous tabloid media outlets, with black bars over the subject’s breasts which have made it a sexualised image no matter what Henson’s (or the subject’s) intentions or its original context might have suggested. For what it’s worth, you can see the photo here at Junk for Code. The interpretive context for this image has been shifted, and violently reinscribed as the invisible or altered focus of a media circus where the battle lines have been drawn between “the arts community” (some of whose spokespeople have been doing the debate and themselves no favours, incidentally) and “society” – as represented in part by agents of vigilance such as Hetty Johnson and in part by the instigators of the talkback outrage, the Miranda Devines of this world. As soon as they get up and running, you’ve got zero chance in the so-called public sphere of making any sort of nuanced point, as nuance is immediately equated with “condoning pedophilia” or whatever heights of absurdity we’ve reached.

Continue reading ‘Questions on the Bill Henson “sexualisation of children” debate’

Class and Big Brother 2008

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 10 months ago
in Consumerism, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Politics, Relationships, Sociology and Women
. 107 Comments

You can’t talk about Big Brother without talking about class, it seems. Over at Troppo, Ken Parish, who should be familiar with the BB concept of the grenade lob, lobs one in comments:

Far from being careful, I’ll throw petrol on the fire. I think the phenomenon of people who should have more taste and intelligence professing to like BB is just a pretentious affectation, like ending a post with “just sayin’”. Then again, all these shows (including Ladettes to Ladies and the assorted Gordon Ramsey shows) have a certain macabre fascination, sort of like not being able to resist looking at a particularly gruesome car smash as you drive past.

The really vexing thing is that these shows are also a calculated cost-saving gambit by the free-to-air channels. It doesn’t cost all that much to make them because they don’t have to pay the actors. A truly principled lefty would boycott them (although, as Jen pointed out last night, you can make a similar point about the employment effects of blogging on professional journalists).

I don’t know about the logic of boycotting tv shows for political reasons – I suspect it’s only ever invoked in this sort of context, and one could counter with the fact that a lot of writers and other “creatives” get employed by these mega shows (which are actually far more expensive to produce, but also more lucrative, than a lot of the cut-price free to air drama that’s around). And Corey Delaney is Worth(ington) 10 grand a show apparently. Though there’d be an interesting angle in thinking about how “creatives”, anyway, are self-exploiting – freed of career paths, permanent employment, and all those other things that go with not being a contract for hire and an entrepreneurial micro-business. And the lack of reflexivity that comes with seeing one’s endeavours as a big quest for that one big break has uncanny parallels with the show’s refusal of any solidarity to its Housemates. But, whatever, Ken probably thinks I’m displaying an “affectation” – while I think that the BB hatin’ *and actually I don’t enjoy this season, I just find it interesting* is a classic “that’s for the Bogans” Distinction. Proper people, of course, go to the theatre, dahling.

In a way, though, it was ironic that John Howard was a BB hater, because the Inmates couldn’t be more aspirational and individualistic. Some might even drive utes, and you can bet they’re big alcopop drinkers. I’m sure Brendan probably feels their pain. (And I’m sure that he’d probably jump at the chance to be an intruder. Might be useful training for all those frontbench wars.) But class is at issue within the House too, as another excellent post from Eye on Big Brother shows. Continue reading ‘Class and Big Brother 2008′

Mysterons: the sequel

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 11 months ago
in Consumerism, History, Life and Music
. 17 Comments

Here’s an update to my previous post.

The new Portishead single:

Scott LeMee’s suggestions for naming the decade we live through…

“Did you smile a lot or laugh a lot yesterday?”

Published
by
dk.au
1 year, 11 months ago
in Consumerism, Culture, Economics, Levity and Life
. 5 Comments

Guy with ponytail/mullet has the low down on why it’s fantastic if you were asked this.

(via Joshua Gans)

Of plutocrats and Blingocrats

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 11 months ago
in Consumerism, Culture, Media, Politics and Sociology
. 21 Comments

Tony Blair hosts Oasis at a Number Ten reception. Sarko’s popularity slips as he jetsets around the Mediterranean in aviators. Carla Bruni wows the Brits and earns instant Jackie/Audrey cred. Hillary Clinton reveals that she and Bill have earned over a hundred mill since leaving office. Blair cops criticism for holidaying with Cliff Richard. A tv mogul becomes Italian PM. Peter Costello wines about his sacrificed earning power. Tony Abbott cries poor. Pollies queue up for photocalls with that Irish dude who saved the world and his sunnies. Kevin Rudd has Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman round to tea. Prince Phillip conspires. Vladimir Putin poses for topless military pr0n. Peter Garrett is a Minister. Oprah endorses Obama.

Snapshots of a decade or more of Blingocracy.

So what’s with the phenomenon of the Blingocracy that The Times tracks?

Continue reading ‘Of plutocrats and Blingocrats’