The rise of consumerism has broadened the conceptualisation of identity around individual choice, self-presentation, and market-based values. According to Goffman’s theory of impression management (1959), the front stage in consumerist societies for the performance of identity has intensified. This is because individuals constantly curate their image to align with socially valued traits. In the context of consumerist societies, these values were linked to material success, aesthetic appeal, and cultural capital.
This is further substantiated by Bourdieu’s concept of distinction (1984), which explores how consumers' choices are symbolic acts that are used to communicate status within a stratified social world. Social interaction is then redefined to a space of performance, comparison, and validation. This is being increasingly shaped by consumption practices, which will be explored further.
It also holds a bearing on the self-evaluation of an individual, as can be seen through social comparison theory, particularly within the context of curated social media and marketing content. Here, upward comparisons are constant and generally damaging. This eventually leads to an internalisation of marketing-based values. This leads to equating a person's worth with productivity, wealth, and desirability. Thus, competitive individualism undermines and replaces collective identities.
Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) concept of emotional labor highlights how even interpersonal emotions have become commodified in service-oriented economies. Workers must perform specific emotional expressions to satisfy customer expectations, leading to emotional dissonance and identity strain.
Miller (2013) further explains how the goods one purchases become part of a social language. However, a consumeristic society can constrain autonomy and intensify inequality. This is because people’s choices are shaped not only by their desires and identity but also by what they are able to afford and what is culturally valued.
Lastly, a broader socio-cognitive lens stemming from Moscovici’s (1988) theory of social representations helps explain how consumerist values become normalized in everyday thought and practice. According to Moscovici, social representations are shared systems of meaning that make these complex phenomena more familiar or commonsensical. This is accomplished through repeated exposures to these values within media, advertising, and social discourse. Through repetitive exposure, these become taken-for-granted truths. It is Moscovici’s lens that helps us understand how buying certain products, for example, may equate to self-care. The adoption of these values across society then actively constructs and stabilises the cultural framework at large. Thus, consumerism seeps its way through from our economies to our culture, to our lives, and ultimately to our collective consciousness without our awareness.
The architecture of digital consumerism represents a sophisticated exploitation of social psychological principles. Social media algorithms are designed with the primary objective of maximising user engagement time, fundamentally altering how individuals encounter and process social information. These algorithms function as invisible curators, filtering content to maintain attention while simultaneously quantifying social approval through metrics like "likes," "shares," and "views" (Lotan, 2018). This quantification transforms social validation into measurable data points, intensifying social comparison processes beyond Festinger's (1954) original conceptualization of reference group behavior.
The attention economy underlying digital platforms reveals the systematic commodification of human psychological processes. Social media companies generate revenue not through direct user fees but by converting user attention into advertising opportunities. This business model creates a fundamental conflict between user well-being and platform profitability, as algorithms are optimized to exploit psychological vulnerabilities rather than promote healthy social interaction. The seamless integration of advertisements within social feeds demonstrates how consumer messaging penetrates previously protected social spaces, making commercial influence nearly indistinguishable from peer communication.
Beyond social media, the proliferation of on-demand service platforms has fundamentally restructured daily social interactions around consumer transactions. Applications like Swiggy, Zomato, and Zepto lead to hyper-commercialised consumer experiences optimized for convenience and speed.
These platforms employ sophisticated behavioral design principles to encourage frequent usage and impulse purchasing. Features like real-time tracking, gamified reward systems, and personalized recommendations create what behavioral economists term "choice architecture", an environmental design that subtly influences decision-making without explicit coercion (Hettler et al., 2025). The psychological effect is to transform routine decisions about food and household needs into continuous consumer choices, each reinforcing the individual's identity as a consumer, but more so, their reliance on these applications.
At present, social media platforms are primarily being examined through the narrow lens of their alleged impact on individual mental health. However, this discourse often overlooks the deeper structural architecture of the platforms themselves, particularly the underlying attention economy that drives their design and business models. Current policy efforts tend to focus on content moderation, access, and audience protection rather than critically regulating platform infrastructure or corporate accountability.
There is a pressing need for research, legislation, and ethical innovation that acknowledges how behavioral science is being used to commodify attention and manipulate user engagement.
As danah boyd (2014) argues, the internet acts as a mirror to society, amplifying existing inequalities, anxieties, and ideologies through algorithmically curated experiences. We risk normalizing a system where emotional experiences are continuously mined, analyzed, and monetized.
The future must therefore involve a shift away from individual-level pathology and toward critical engagement with the political economy of digital life. This includes addressing how cognitive biases, emotional vulnerability, and social identity formation are engineered into platform design, and imagining alternative technological futures grounded in human dignity, collective well-being, and ethical design.
In lieu of a conclusion, I offer Fukuyama’s unsettling thesis for contemplation.
Consumerism marks the "end of history" because it delivers what the ruling classes desire, while leaving the masses pacified, incapable, or unwilling to challenge the very system that exploits them.
Perhaps this is the real question we must confront: not what we consume, but what we’ve surrendered in return.
Zainab Khambaty
