Practices and Rituals of Today’s Consumerism. The Particular Case of the Mobile Phone: Cultural, Biographical and Identity Object
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47451/cul2022-09-02Keywords:
consumerism, design, identity, mobile phone, objectAbstract
This article focuses on a very relevant topic: current consumption patterns. It mentions the role of the designer involved in the design interaction process according to principles of communication, visual form, economy, technology and logistics. The object of study is a world of users seen as active creators of experience and the main point of research is the object as creator of identity. To exemplify the theoretical aspects, we will take the case of the mobile phone, an omnipresent device, considered as a cultural object. The mobile phone is an element, somewhat hybrid, essential in our immediate environment, which makes our lives easier, more mobile, more complete. It is much more than a sophisticated device. It is a cultural object, not only because of its social implantation, but because, in a fully biographical and identity related sense, it is part of our daily life and of the daily rites in which we build ourselves as individuals and as societies. The mobile phone appears today as a meeting ground between the public and the private, between the market and the social rituals of interaction, between interpersonal communication and cultural consumption, between the symbolic (identity) and the practical (use), between the promise (the world in your pocket) and the reality that mark the new mobile cultures (text and multimedia messages, social networks, nomadic individual leisure and social leisure, image and file sharing, personalization, mobile blogs, etc.). References are made to well-known authors in the field of communication design, e.g., J. Frascara, D. Norman, and B. Bürdek, and mobile technology, e.g., L. Haddon, D. Quarante, and L. Fortunati, through a theoretical monographic methodology, establishing lines of research on the basis of which other studies with technological references can be developed (use of certain objects and technological objects of the future).
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