consumer society

Introduction. Science in modern reality is closely intertwined with the cultural attitudes of the consumer society, and this connection is becoming stronger every year. The market economy, which underlies the culture of modern society, is a fairly flexible system, balancing like a tightrope walker between dynamically changing demand and consumption. Theoretical analysis. In order not to end up on the periphery of the economic system, scientific knowledge needs to show the same properties that a market economy does and, above all, flexibility.

Modern society is focused on a prestigious-status consumption, material values are cultivated in it to the detriment of spiritual ones, the meaning of life becomes unclear, a person falls into an “existential vacuum”. Consumer tendencies can be contrasted with love in its various manifestations, including one of the strongest – motherly love. But in modern realities, motherhood is faced with the devaluation, belittling of its role.

The society of consumption (another name – consumer society), as it is studied and understood in modern scientific literature, is a complex and ambiguous phenomenon. On the one hand, the society of consumption is associated with the domination of material values over spiritual ones, on the other hand, they say that the main objects of consumption are not material things themselves, but their symbolic and social significance, i.e. the intangible dimension of the material world.

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of freedom in the conditions of modern Russian consumer society. The relevance of this problem is expressed in replacing the understanding of the meaning of freedom as the freedom “for” with such an understanding, which includes the interpretation associated with such a phenomenon as consumerism, that does not allow to perceive it as a true universal freedom. Various philosophical concepts of modernity are aimed at criticism of consumption as an attribute of post-capitalist society.

The article is devoted to the research of consumerism as sociocultural practice. It is shown that consumerism has a feature of autoreplication. Consumer ethic tends to homogenise socio-cultural practices of contemporary men, which leads to the identity crisis and sufficient change of their subjectivity

At the end of the twentieth century the contours of a new civilization has began to develop in the West, based on a completely new form of sociality using new types of technologies, actively operating information flows. Not all generic features of this civilization has been established though historical and philosophical studies in this direction have been done for a long time. It is absolutely clear that its establishment is making cardinal changes in our lives.

This paper explores an operationalization of the concepts for contemporary Russian society. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of some concepts such as postmodernism, consumer society, post-industrial society the authors operationalize them. Our findings suggest that contemporary Russian society has a wide range of definitions. It is defined as post-historic, network or information society, postmodern society, etc. The set of different concepts represents Russian society and makes a definitions confusion. Such definitions should be applicable to modern Russian society.