Introduction Weapons of Mass Distraction

Abstract

The Consumption of Inequality: Weapons of Mass Distraction is an elaboration on and extension of earlier published work on an array of fads, fashions, and media that make stylish, recreational, and often expensive “fun” of lower class symbols. “Poor Chic: The Rational Consumption of Poverty,”¹ provided a sociological and psychological account of how middle-class consumers quelled fears of downward mobility through objectifying tourist travels to and through commoditized symbols of lower-class statuses. Applied therein were British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “tourists and vagabonds”² and sociological theoretician George Ritzer’s McDonaldization categories: efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control.³ Another publication, “Muscles, Motorcycles and Tattoos: Gentrification in a New Frontier,”⁴ applied gentrification theories and French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s multifaceted conceptualization of “cultural capital”⁵ to muscle-building, motorcycling, and tattooing to illustrate how they are consecrated with middle-class distinction via investment, invasion, transformation, and displacement. These works demonstrated some of the status-consecrating and class-demarcating dynamics operative in the Poor Chic phenomenon and pointed toward its strategic character. One important connecting bridge between these prior works and this book is an in-depth exploration of what British sociologist Mike Feather-stone has theorized with some detail.