Brand, Identity, and Belonging

I read an interesting bit about the (poor) state of individual and cultural identity in the present age.   The author asserted that the mass media, and particularly the Internet, creates a disjointed sense o culture that causes people to be “virtually connected but emotionally detached” from the rest of the world.

The premise is that individuals identify themselves in reference to a common culture to which they conform in some ways and deviate in others, but a culture is created by the isolation of one group of people from another: because rivers and mountains separate two tribes from one another, they develop independent cultures – and because these barriers have been overcome by technology, there is no way for a people to be isolated enough to form a distinctive set of beliefs.

Moreover, culture is intentionally cultivated.  In pre-modern societies, there was always a group of people (the ruling class and the clergy, generally) who made cultural decisions for all their people – they encouraged conformity and punished transgression against a set of cultural norms.   And while this notion is objectionable to the modern individualist mentality, it served its purpose: without a guide, people do not know where to go, culturally speaking, and fail to develop a common core of cultural standards.

It is not that no-one is attempting to control culture – politicians and religious figures are still attempting to tell people how they ought to live and using carrots and sticks to cajole and threaten them.  But there is no longer unity – an individual is assaulted by several ideologies that pull him in different directions.   He must make a choice, but is ill-equipped to make that choice.

The author then turned on the commercial sector, suggesting that advertising and marketing is a relatively new voice that attempts to tell people how to live their lives.  While their intent is to sell a good or a service, the consumption of that product is dependent on the consumer’s lifestyle, which is to say their culture.  So in an indirect way, brands attempt to control culture.

But if there are a few dozen political and religious ideologies attempting to control and direct our lives, there are tens of thousands of brands attempting to do the same.   And the result is again that those who attempt to control culture have no control at all: people must choose which brands they adopt, in the same way they choose their political and religious beliefs.  There is no ability to “force” a person to accept one rather than another.

So the result is a cultural chaos in which, rather than being constrained by an individual or collective that determines what choices people make, we are left instead with many that suggest what choices we might make, but are left without clear guidance as to which choices we ought to make.   Each person makes his own decisions about what to believe, and what culture to adopt for himself, creating a cultural chaos.   

The dystopians got it wrong: the horror of the present age is not invasion of private life by centralized control and constraint, but an abandonment of control that results in an overwhelming and directionless freedom of choice.

The plethora of choices of products that have the ability to solve our functional and psychological needs is mind-boggling.   And once a product decision has been made, tenuously and with great anxiety, there is then the choice of brand.   Naturally, every brand wants us to believe that it is the right choice, but has mercenary motives and is unreliable and lacks credibility.   And those who would help sort out the mess are often guided by their own agendas, and are no less trustworthy.

Neither are the independent voices particularly authentic.   We hail social media as the democratization of opinion, and suggest that people trust their peers more than those who claim to have authority.  But it’s been found that most participants in social media have nothing original to say, and are merely parroting what they have heard in the mass media.

Now more than ever, culture requires an individual to think carefully and to make choices.   And now more than ever, individuals show a stunning inability and unwillingness to do so.   And this is the tragedy of the modern age, for consumers and brands alike.