Fine lines
I had a revelation the other day. Probably I’m being really slow, but I thought it was a distinction that was pretty important and frequently muddled so I’ll share if only to just record my own thoughts…and blog about something that isn’t Soulja Boy.
There are two different reasons for customizing your stuff! And they are actually pretty fundamentally different!
First, you have the bedroom model, which is the more dominant one. You customize your dorm room and everything in it because you are expressing yourself and surrounding yourself with things you like makes you happier. Simple. This reason is all over the marketing for personal goods with annoying phrases like “EXPRESS yourself!” “Be UNIQUE!” etc.
But there’s actually a second, much less terrifyingly imperialistic reason to want to customize yourself. It’s the toothbrush model. You get your own color so that you can find it in the crowd. And because this is a fundamentally different (more practical? less bratty?) desire, I find it pretty weird that a lot of marketing for products that are trying to do this end up appealing to self-expression instead.
For example: customized credit cards. Here in Cambridge, like 80% of the people I dine out with have the same Bank of America debit card, and finding yours in the pile after paying the bill is pretty annoying. But in the ads, it’s always “show what cause YOU support” or “get your favorite picture on your card,” approaches that totally don’t address the pragmatic reason why one might want a different colored card. Same for cellphones. These days, so many people I know have a Razr, so when I dropped mine at a party last month, it was only because of the ridiculous dragon etching on it that it was instantly recognized as mine and returned.
Or am I just justifying self-centered consumer silliness? You decide.
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Tags: advertisement, marketing, personalization
2 Responses to “Fine lines”
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Well, I’m sure you were expecting as much from me, but I can’t agree that customization of surroundings and possessions is at its base a self-centered activity.
I know that the customization of my space has always been a subtle yet powerful communication to those around me of what kind of activity / interaction I was looking for from them. It was more of a communication to others than an indulgence of self.
Indeed I would also interpret your dragon logo as one such communicative personalization, but I think that the communication possibilities are much broader than simply identification — sure, my hair makes me stand out in a crowd, but it also tells you that I’m fucking insane: important information.
Sure, I love my t-shirts because I think they’re beautiful, but they tell you what state of consciousness you should expect from me. Also I hope that you will find them beautiful; that you will gain as much as I do from being around them.
I run into people that wear the same shirts every once in a while, I run into people that have the same hair rarely, but you’re only truly an individual when taken as a whole — as a collection of possessions and bodily features and mental processes that communicate your self to others.
You say a lot about yourself (for better or worse) when you decide to wear makeup, or to cut your hair, or to wear certain earrings, or to match colors in your outfit, and on and on.
They say that a large percentage of communication is non-verbal. Well I say that a large percentage of non-verbal communication is environmental, and is dependent on the decisions you put into your surroundings and your appearance.
Personally, of course, I see a lot of these things as overly self-conscious, as indicative of a need for traditional societal approval due to preparation. So they are self-indulgent in the sense that they are attempting to fill a lack of self-confidence. This tells you a lot about a person. Many people are more comfortable around such people, for whatever reason. I think it’s a waste of time, and it usually worries me when someone spends a lot of time preparing for me.
But when they have a unique phone, or unique clothes, or something that stands out, I don’t see it at all as a need to fill their world with perceived uniqueness; I see it as an attempt to communicate to those around them: whether it be novelty or otherwise.
All in all, I think it’s hard to generalize, but it seems pretty certain that these things end up all falling into the communication category after sufficient time. When you buy something just to make yourself feel unique, the sensation fades. You’re addicted — you need to keep buying new things, and the majority of the time, the majority of the things you own are just going to be communicating something to those around you, be it through practical unique identification, or through some other means. I think the self-indulgence fades, and thus cannot rationally be taken as a significant long term reason for customization.
Hm…I definitely wasn’t trying to characterize customization as totally selfish, although I can see how one would think that based on my post. I think you are very right that self-expression is a primarily social activity, so thanks for clarifying!