The Individuality of Mass Production

Advertising invites you to express your uniqueness with a product that is simultaneously being sold to millions of people.

There is an obvious contradiction in this, but not complete nonsense.

Clothes, music, a car and the objects in a home really do take part in self-expression. Language is also made of shared words, yet people assemble different sentences from them.

The problem is not that the product is mass-produced. It starts when identity is reduced to buying a ready-made symbol.

A person buys not just shoes but an image of independence, or environmental virtue, or success, or belonging to a particular group. The company has already done the hard work: invented the personality, shot the advertising, and left the buyer to choose a size.

This can be a pleasant game. The danger appears when, without the object, a person feels less real.

A useful question:

What exactly does this thing say about me — and to whom?

The answer may well be functional. Business clothes show respect for the context. A group’s symbol helps you recognise your own. A rare object connects you to a hobby or a history.

If the main value of a thing lies in someone else’s gaze, the purchase requires a permanent audience.

Individuality shows better in what a person chooses, does, keeps and calmly gives up than in what he has bought.

Who a thing is addressed to is visible from where it gets used. An off-roader that has never left tarmac, heavy trekking boots in an office, a professional camera that only shoots school nativity plays — this is not a deception but a message. It is even an accurate one: the person is telling you not what he does but which life he counts himself part of. The question is what the subscription to that message costs and who reads it.

There are usually fewer readers than it seems. Colleagues notice the boots once, a neighbour notices the car twice, and after that the message is addressed mainly to the owner. He pays for it too, and often in instalments.