Book Notes for The Experience Society by Steven Miles

“It is the Me Age and the Age of the No-Self at the same time. Seen from one angle, it is the age of triumphant self-actualisation, of radical individualism, an age when the human person has become the object of cult and the ultimate source of values. Yet, from the opposite angle, we witness the self’s destruction (Hankiss, 2006: 197-8)”

In an increasingly (apparently godless world), where traditional sources of purpose and meaning are in rapid decline, he or she becomes the ultimate, perhaps the only, arbiter of his or her own meaning”
– Chapter 1, page 6.

“Nobody actually needs the choice of thousands of car models…this form of commodity exchange is limited in the sense that at least consumers’ needs for products is finite… But the emergence of a world of digital consuptuiona dn a world that is increasingly deterritoriaised in the sense that how you consume is less and less determined by the physical space in which you consume, have arguably created a space for radically different kind of consumption, one in which expreicne is much more at the heart of why and how we consume.”
– Chapter 1, page 8

“These are moments that on the one hand appear to free us up, but on the other hand tie us to the ideologies of consumer capitalism in ways that are perhaps more binding than they ever were in the past. It is via this means that consumer capitalism has effectively been rebooted. The consumer capitalism we live by is a consumer capitalism in which the self is centre stage, but in which any kind of a centring o the self is little more than a facade designed to reaffirm their lived commitment to a social and economic system that equates choice with freedom”
– Chapter 1, page 10

“‘The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation’. The consequence of all this is an ‘objective force’ in which social relations between people are now mediated, first and foremost, by images.”
– Chapter 1, page 15

Further research:

• Low self-esteem: do I exist if no one sees me?

• What is a “spectacle” as described by Debord?