Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright

This chapter explores the role of visual images, and the different ways in which the audience consumes them. it is stated that advertising is a central component of consumer studies and capitalism, where our society is dependent on society consuming goods beyond our needs.

They also discuss commodity culture and commodity fetishism, which, in short means we 'construct' our identities through what we consume, and what we surround ourselves with. There are differences between exchange value and use value, the example used to explain the variation is rice would be an exchange value because it's worth is equal to it's use value, with regards to price. Whereas perfume does not really have a value in society as we could function without it - so therefore has a very high exchange value.

Images are always designed with the consumer in mind, with implications that the product being sold will make us unique and special, and different to others, even if more than one person buys the same product. The Frankfurt School call this concept 'pseudoindividuality' (a false idea of individuality!).

Text aswell as image is designed to have a powerful effect and meaning - some advertisement campaigns are known simply by the text used, and in some cases remain more memorable.

In the envy and desire section, it claims all adverts speak the language of transformation, which actively speaks to the consumer about their identity. Furthermore, products that are sold to us, with all their shiny promises, can never fully deliver their fulfillment offer, even though all consumers have the potential to reconfigure the meanings of the commodities that they purchase and own.

Anti-ads also subject themselves into our advertisment service, an example used is the smoking advert where the text protests 'I'm really sick, I only smoke facts'. Which allows us to get the idea of an anti-ad.

The chapter concludes that in late capitalism, the boundary between the mainstream and the margins is always in the process of being renegotiated.