Teachings of the Catholic Church - Questions     

Questions to Guide Your Reading:

1. In his introduction, James Twitchell claims that we (in American culture) are "not too materialistic";  if anything, he says, "we are not materialistic enough."  What does he mean?

2. Twitchell continues:  "If we craved objects and knew what they meant, there would be no signifying systems like advertising, packaging, fashion, and branding to get in the way.  We would gather, use, toss out, or hoard based on some inner sense of value.  It is that inner sense of value that we don't have."  Do you agree or disagree?

3. Central to Twitchell's thesis is the following statement:  "Consumption of things and their meanings is how most Western young people cope in a world that science has pretty much bled of traditional religious meanings."  What do you think of this thesis?

4. This thesis is repeated throughout Twitchell's book.  On p. 23 (p. 70 in your Reader), he says:  "Paradoxically, buying stuff is not just our current popular culture, it is how we understand the world."  On p. 73 in your Reader, again he talks about consumption as the creation of meaning.  He says:  "[T]he act of shopping has very little to do with the necessities of life.  We shop to satisfy desires, not needs, and in this act we help produce meanings for objects and, by extension, for ourselves....Thanks to advertising, packaging, branding, and fashion, even the simplest of things have taken on meaning well in excess of their material life."  Later he claims:  "Meaning is added to objects by advertising, branding, packaging, and fashion because that meaning -- derisively called status -- is what we are after, what we need, especially when we are young."  Finally, on p. 75 in the Reader (p. 45 in Twitchell's text), he says:  "Social identity created via consumption may be summarized in the catchphrase, 'you are what you eat.'  So too you are what you wear, what you drive, where you holiday, where you live, and even what you decide to video-graze on....Tell me what you buy and I'll tell you who you are, and who you want to be."  Again, what do you think?  Are you what you buy?  And on a related note, is it the case, as Twitchell claims (p. 49) that "observing stuff is the way we understand each other"?

5. At the end of the section (p. 73 in Reader), Twitchell talks about why poverty is so crippling in the modern Western world.  What are the poor after, according to Twitchell, and what do they lack by being poor?  Can you think of ways of alleviating this problem?

6. On p. 44 in Twitchell's text, he talks about five families who described themselves as the happiest vs. five families who described themselves as dissatisfied.  What kind of objects did those from the happiest families cherish?

7. On p. 47, Twitchell says:  "What is being packaged is not the goods as much as the buyer of the goods."  What does he mean?

8. On the same page, Twitchell claims:  "No one wants to be middle class."  Why not?  What do people want?

9. Twitchell finds the notion of "sublminal" advertising ludicrous.  Why?  (Hint:  He says on his p. 73, for example, that the goal of advertisers isn't to make you buy crackers, or beers, or cars.  What is the goal?)

10. On his p. 75, Twitchell talks about "the creation of mass stereotypes."  From what you've read so far, do you think this is healthy for our society?  Have you seen examples of it?

11. Why do advertisers (and thus TV programmers who make money selling to advertisers) lose interest in people after they reach the age of thirty?  They have money, don't they?  They buy things, don't they?  Why the loss of interest?

12. On pp. 77 through 79, Twitchell describes eight groups into which people are classified by the Stanford Research Institute in their "Values and Lifestyles System."  Look at them closely.  Read each of the descriptions.  If you were an advertising executive, into which category would you place your own family?  Does that make you uncomfortable to classify yourself in that way?  Does it make you uncomfortable to know that the society does classify you in that way?

13. Why has celebrity become so important and so valuable in contemporary consumer culture?

14. To illustrate his thesis, "You are what you buy," Twitchell uses the example of a series of American Express card ads.  How does this help to illustrate his point?  Read his description of the TV show Seinfeld.  Do you agree with his assertion that, "Seinfeld repeatedly plays off against our knowledge of specific commercials and products"?

15. On his p. 93, Twitchell claims that, "we don't consume the individual products as much as we consume the advertising."  What does he mean?  He then asks this question:  "Why do we waste our energy (and billions of dollars) entertaining fraudulent choice?"  His answer is:  "I don't know."  What's your answer?

16. On his p. 197, Twitchell says:  "One of the dominant myths of consumer culture is that we are each separate individuals and we express this separateness by what we choose to buy.  We treasure freedom of choice no matter how inappropriate or how mythic."  He says modern culture refutes that notion.  What do you think?

17. One of Twitchell's theses is that it is not only important to know which brands to buy, but just as important to know which brands to stay well away from -- indeed, to disdain.  Do you agree, or disagree?

18. On his p. 202, Twitchell asks his reader to "take a trip into your closet";  there you will "soon realize that this is where you have lived through various lives."  Think of your closet at home.  What would we find if we were to search there?

19. Twitchell thinks he knows why tatoos and body piercing have become so popular these days.  What's his thesis?

20. Does it seem strange to you that Tommy Hilfiger's name should be showing up in rap songs that come out of inner city neighborhoods, but that he actually lives in a British Tudor mansion with his wife, four kids, eight servants, and three groundskeepers?  Do you own any Tommy Hilfiger stuff?

21. On pp. 230 and 231, Twitchell lists the five subculture groups "churning at the edge of Alternative Generation" listed by the advertising consulting firm Sputnik.  Do you fit into any of these groups?  Do you think anyone else would think you fit into any of these groups?  Would it make you angry if you thought that Sputnik had a person on this campus checking the students out in order to give companies advice on how to create an aura that you'd buy into?  Or would you be insulted if you found out that they didn't have a person here, but that they did have agents at, say, Stanford and Harvard?

22. The title of chapter 6 of Mr. Twitchell's book is "The Function of Fashion in an Age of Individualism."  What is the function of fashion in an age of individualism?  [Keep in mind what Mr. Twitchell calls "fashion's first rule" (see p. 222).]
 
 

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