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Consumed : Construction and Transaction of Identity in The Image Economy Gruber, Carla Jean

Abstract

Shopping is one of the most uniting activities in North America—it is ubiquitous, voracious, and most recently, it is closing down. Online shopping has shuttered ‘brick and mortar’ shops, and has led to the merging of e-commerce with social media, giving rise to the ‘influencer’. This has resulted in individual identity being co-opted by brands to the extent that the two have collapsed into one. Shopping has become so engrained in everyday life that people don’t just buy brands anymore­—brands also buy people. This thesis presents a satyr in which the users and power dynamics of online shopping and social media are projected into physical space.

Item Metadata

Title
Consumed : Construction and Transaction of Identity in The Image Economy
Creator
Gruber, Carla Jean
Date Issued
2020-12-22
Description
Shopping is one of the most uniting activities in North America—it is ubiquitous, voracious, and most recently, it is closing down. Online shopping has shuttered ‘brick and mortar’ shops, and has led to the merging of e-commerce with social media, giving rise to the ‘influencer’. This has resulted in individual identity being co-opted by brands to the extent that the two have collapsed into one. Shopping has become so engrained in everyday life that people don’t just buy brands anymore­—brands also buy people. This thesis presents a satyr in which the users and power dynamics of online shopping and social media are projected into physical space.
Subject
branding; retail; consumer; mall; department store; public space; social media; identity; influencers; consumers; e-commerce; online shopping; brands; brandscape; image economy; retail space; women; female; braning; instagram; customers; image; brands; Vancouver; Canada
Geographic Location
North America
Genre
Graduating Project
Type
Text
Language
eng
Series
University of British Columbia. ARCH 549
Date Available
2021-02-09
Provider
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
DOI
10.14288/1.0395833
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/2429/77259
Affiliation
Applied Science, Faculty of; Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of
Campus
UBCV
Peer Review Status
Unreviewed
Scholarly Level
Graduate
Rights URI
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Aggregated Source Repository
DSpace

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International