Author(s): Saadet Zeynep VARLI GÃRER, Mert GÃRER
The notion of consumption is a vital mechanism that keeps industrial society functioning. While the fact that products and services are producable is an important stage, it is even more important today that such products are prefered and bought by the consumers. The choice of preferences brought forward causes the necessity to bring forward the characteristics to differ from the competitors. The characteristics like happiness, pleasure, status, becoming different from the others, standing out in the society due to using the product rather than the benefits of the same product is being imposed to the society via mass communication devices. In today’s world, consumption has become a way of self expression of the ever getting lonelier individual to the outside world. Seeming like one’s self is being replaced by seeming like how one desires to live in a wider scale in society. Working and isolated individual becomes more vulnerable to mass communaction devices’ broadcasts and endavours to shape his/her life in concordance to the images displayed there. The TV series are especially the most significant programmes affecting the audience. Such productions claiming to present insight from the real life are shaping our reception of material and spiritual world and intervenes our judgement about life. The images displayed there give us what must be beautiful-ugly, good-bad, rich-poor, respectable-disrespectable, succesful- unsuccesful in a series of oppositions. The activities to look and live like the stereotypes in display begins with consumption. Nowadays the apearances of main characters in TV series are supported by sponsors and actors are functioning as models presenting such products. Product placing and products blended in the story look like a part of natural flow and condition the consumers. Lives to envy are based and presented on especially lives of the rich people. In this context TV series and concept of consumption intersect on story telling. The purpose of the study is to determine how the pretentious notion of consumption is presented over lives displayed in TV series based on rich families. Therefore the soap opera The Bold and The Beautiful has been examined by way of content analysis in order to determine how frequent indicators of pretentious consumption take place.
The Journal of International Social Research received 7760 citations as per Google Scholar report
