From the Commodity Self to the Personal Brand

Not long ago I read Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson’s “Advertising in the Age of Accelerated Meaning” (pdf), a classic piece of 1990s advertising criticism. (Not everything academics did in the 1990s was superficial junk, notwithstanding this diatribe at Dissent‘s website about how vapid cultural-studies scholars supposedly were.)

The key point I took away from the article: ad discourse dissolves reality into free-floating signifiers and prompts us to adopt them as the language of self, replacing the identity-making role of tradition in a capitalist world that has eroded all traditional ways and demanded flexibility from its subjects. Design ideology makes that shift more palatable, and social media coincides with our taking a more active role circulating signs the way ads do. With social media we can readily represent ourselves as personal brands, and we shape our identity with that inescapable structuring metaphor in mind. We take the way ads may once have seemed to force us into a particular sort of cobbled-together self out of products and their associated signs and turn it into a positive active procedure, in which we build our personal brand and use our consumption as productive labor building our brand equity.