In preparing a series of posts about advertising, surveillance, privacy, and consumer culture, I tried to find a picture to visually represent "shopping addiction"; thinking maybe it's an example of the harms that could come from an economy founded on consumer behavior. Anyway, it's hard to find a good picture of "shopping addiction". Mostly it's hard because it doesn't communicate well, in a visual form. For some reason, you can't say "shopping" and "personal problem" at the same time. But for another reason, maybe our culture is supported by an economy that would collapse if we got too good at connecting shopping with anything bad.
(For those that don't remember, the President of the United States, in his first words to the American people following the 9/11 attack, was to go shopping. If that doesn't tell you how important it is to the survival of a nation, well I'm sure there are other examples.)
Moving on, I uncontrollably fell into one of my favorite past times, pretending like I can glean prescient knowledge about contemporary culture by comparing keyword image search results. I listen to muzak on purpose, and have located and downloaded songs to my playlist. It's the anti-music, or the ur-music, because it cross-cancels all to differences to make the most representative sample. It's the same reason I like to look at stock photography -- to see how people want to see things. Or at least to see how artists and photographers think we want to see things.
How do I set up a shot for "shopping addiction"? Lots of shopping bags, usually a woman. The problem is, they're always smiling. Either articles about shopping addiction can't find enough stock photos, so they use "shopping" instead (without the "addiction"), or they go with a picture of a woman with her head in her hands, surrounding by shopping bags, which just doesn't seem to communicate very well what they want to say.
In case you're wondering what other addictions look like, I've already done the work for you. Make your own interpretations.
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| shopping addiction |
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| gambling addiction |
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| drug addiction |
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| video game addiction |
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| alcohol addiction |
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| nicotine addiction |
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| porn addiction |
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| eating addiction |
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| yoga addiction |
Bonus:
"Google Addiction"
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| Cherelle vs Google - Rob Browne Wales Online - 2021 |
'I had a life-destroying addiction but it wasn't to alcohol, drugs, or gambling - it was to Google'
Apr 2021, Wales Online
"For Cherelle, her obsession with Google coincided with the birth of her daughter ... As time passed, Cherelle's obsession with one disease moved on to another, and then another. In that time, however, one thing didn't change - her ability to reach into her pocket and search not only the illness itself but treatment, survival rates any other relevant piece of information until there was nothing else to do apart from re-read those same links over and over again."
As you would expect -- first time mothers are the most heavily targeted demographic on Earth (which is a problem for all of us)
"Specifically, we show how mainstream parenting communities on Facebook have been subject to a powerful, two-pronged misinformation machinery during the pandemic, that has pulled them closer to extreme communities and their misinformation."
-How Social Media Machinery Pulled Mainstream Parenting Communities Closer to Extremes and Their Misinformation During Covid-19, N. J. Restrepo, et. al., in IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 2330-2344, 2022, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3138982. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9663381
This study examined 3218 advertisements from the two parenting magazines...Nearly one in six (15.7%) of the advertisements contained example(s) of non-adherence to American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations, ... Categories ranked by overall share from most to least include: non-Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved medical treatments, ...
-Compliance of Parenting Magazines Advertisements with American Academy of Pediatrics Recommendations. Pitt, Michael B et al. Children (Basel, Switzerland) vol. 3,4 23. 1 Nov. 2016, doi:10.3390/children3040023. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5184798/
Post Script:
No Resluts
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