Consumption and significance: The shape of things to come

Our necessary involvement in the everyday traffic of mass-produced goods and services also immerses us in a parallel exchange of symbolic understanding. From this basis, it is argued that the various landscapes which accommodate the consumption of these artefacts are themselves parts of the social and symbolic structures we create and maintain through such trade. Accordingly, a semiological analysis of goods from major industrial cultures like Britain, Japan and the USA shows how consumers of these goods are obliged to accept the limitations and the inequalities of a social and symbolic order which admits that, physically and intellectually, some of its members may render the world as artefacts while the next can only shape their lives by trading in these terms.