TABLE OF CONTENTS Donald Sloan
There exists a popular assumption that our taste, expressed through the clothes we wear, the music we listen to and of course the restaurants in which we dine, is reflective of our truly individual personalities. This chapter evaluates whether that is indeed the case. Are we free to construct our own selfidentities that we display through our consumer behaviour, or alternatively, are we essentially the products of our social environments?
The term postmodernism is now ubiquitous. It is commonly used within and beyond academic discourse and its scope of application seems almost limitless. Despite a recurring suggestion that the term is actually meaningless, that it is a false construct perpetuated by self-serving intellectuals, it does seem that commentary on postmodernism has helped us to articulate the nature of contemporary cultural developments (Featherstone, 1991, p. 1).
The task of defining postmodernism as an identifiable social phenomenon is disrupted by the implication inherent within the prefix post . As Featherstone notes:
The problem with the term [postmodernism] revolves around the question of when does a term defined oppositionally to, and feeding off an established term start to signify something substantially different. (Featherstone, 1991, p. 7)
An understanding of the term can, it would seem, only come from being able to identify aspects of contemporary society that are discernibly different from that which went before, and from observing the processes of societal change.
The modern era is usually identified as the period during which mass industrialization occurred, as did...
