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Alice and Jean: Instagram and consumerism

2022; Wiley; Volume: 110; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tyr.2022.0017

1467-9736

Jennifer Stock,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Alice and JeanInstagram and consumerism Jennifer Stock (bio) 1 i start following alice on Instagram in 2011. Alice photographs her cat curled up in an Eames chair, her Chemex transfigured by the sun. She scatters peonies and garden roses across her kitchen table. She paints her walls a moody slate. She illuminates her collection of succulents and her morning waffles like Caravaggio crucifixions. Over time I conclude that Alice lives—like I do—in a small apartment somewhere in New York: light from an unseen window bathes her still lifes in high-floor isolation. She's Vermeer Lite, with a schmear of West Elm catalogue. I punctuate odd moments of my day—shuffling in lines, waiting for the subway, lingering on the toilet—with hits of Alice's feed, her iterations of cats, flowers, and coffee. [End Page 113] One day in 2014, Alice posts a picture of a Lincoln SUV. It's like a strange insect suddenly burst into my field of vision; I'm confused and repelled. I continue to scroll. The next day the car is back, this time presented frontally, its lacquered hood next to a galvanized steel guardrail and pond. Alice is on a road trip, I think, but why is she taking pictures of her rental car? I study the composition. A small tree to the left of the car, a shock of dead branches at its crown. A claustrophobic strip of forest slashed across a pressurized sky. A pond with a metallic sheen. The agnosticism of a depleted landscape? I wonder. My eyes drift in befuddlement to the caption, and then I spot it, sponsored. Alice writes, "Today we're exploring Jackson, MS with @lincolnmotorco then heading to New Orleans." I unfollow Alice, but every once in a while I sneak back to see what she's posting. 2 in the consumer society, Jean Baudrillard creates an ontology of consumption, considering the ways in which it dominates affluent societies. When I first read The Consumer Society, I feel like a child sent to detention, forced to write some sentence out a hundred times: I must stop buying so much shit. The StuffFest of my childhood in suburban Indianapolis in the 1990s flashes with disturbing immediacy before my eyes. I suffer from the latter-day guilt of someone who has lived in a dream, her life a carefree siphoning off of biophysical resources. Once woken up, she sometimes just wants to go back to sleep. I read in fits and spurts, occasionally casting The Consumer Society aside to jump online and buy refills of K-beauty cream. Still, Baudrillard is hard to ignore. Consumption, according to Baudrillard, traps consumers in cycles of acquisition and calculus. Calculus is his term for the near-debilitating level of choice available to a consumer. It's the word for the twenty hours one spends differentiating gimcracks on a new washer before purchasing (steam cycle? Wi-Fi control? lingerie drawer?). Perhaps Baudrillard's key contribution, though, is an argument for why so many people become ensnared by [End Page 114] consumption. Broadly construed to include travel, entertainment, and media as well as objects, consumption acts as a social language, conveying social messaging. Baudrillard overlays the Marxist concepts of use value and exchange value with the more numinous sign value. Consumers continuously signal status and taste via the acquisition of objects and experiences; sign value can be thought of as a capitalist narrative of self. Regarding shopping as language helps elucidate one aspect of capitalism's relentless growth drive: language is infinite. Capital glues itself to a social language—signing contributes to its moto perpetuo. The Consumer Society was first published in 1970. If Baudrillard considered consumption a "jungle of ugliness" then, imagine what he would make of the scale of consumption today. According to Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College (whom I think of as an Elizabeth Warren-style remake of Baudrillard), "In 1960 the average person consumed just a third of what he or she did in late 2008.… What transpired in the late years of the bubble was an almost manic speedup in the flow of goods through households and the larger economy." Looking at...