Consumption history serves as shorthand for personal identity and biography

Evidence

Members relied on taste to say a great deal about themselves. Twice, Ray told me about the music he listened to as a teenager: the Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Santana. Now he listens to country. This capsule description of what he consumed was his succinct way of telling me who he was: not as old as he looked; used to like to party; once was into drugs and the counterculture; recently gone straight. The fact that he told me the same story twice says that this form of self-presentation was no accident. Commercial culture provided a set of reference points to a wider world, but it would be hard to trust commercial institutions and take attachment to them seriously. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 864

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The influencer’s identity itself is the commodity presented for consumption; Personal branding reduces identity to a predictable pattern of consumer preferences — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 472; Personal identity theory parallels the language of property and ownership — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 444 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Personal branding reduces identity to a predictable pattern of consumer preferences #expands (0.88) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 472
• Social media reframed self-identity as a personal brand selling attention #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1031
• Corporate brand logic imposes a forced timeless consistency on personal identity #expands (0.82) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 552
• A defining habit can characterize a person economically #expands (0.80) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 372
• Digital-era capitalism shifted the focus of consumption from the mass to the individual #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 95
• The influencer’s identity itself is the commodity presented for consumption #expands (0.75)
• Personal identity theory parallels the language of property and ownership #exemplifies (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 444
• Consumption practices have replaced political conviction as ideology #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 853
• Personal identity depends on language’s temporal unification of past, present, and future #complicates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 98