Baudrillard for Beginners.

Here I have collected scans and key points from the book Baudrillard for Beginners by Chris Horrocks and Zoran Jevtic. This book simplifies some of Baudrillard's ideas/theories into short snippets of information; it gets to the point. Areas this post will cover:

• Objects functionality becoming less important that social meaning
• Shopping spaces which aim to sell a lifestyle as opposed to a functioning object
• Liberation of Colour
• Freedom of Choice
• Needs

[Objects Meaning - Shopping Malls. Personal Relevance Rating: Very Relevant]

P14-15. 'Store displays refer to the consumer not to the objects function but their collective meaning - a calculus or network of signs.'

[Liberation of Colour. Personal Relevance Rating: Could be Relevant]

P16. 'In the 19th Century colours had no independent value from the particular objects they expressed-their symbolic meanings always arrived from their context. In the early 20th century colours became liberated and separated from their forms. They had a life of their own. Anything could be red, or blue, or green.'

[Freedom of Choice]

P20. 'Individual choice is the ideology of the industrial system. Freedom of choice is imposed on the consumer.'

[Needs - PRR: Might be Relevant]

P26. 'If we acknowledge that a need is not a need for a particular object as much as it is a "need" for difference (the desire for social meaning), only then will we understand that satisfaction can never be fulfilled, and consequently there can never be a definition of needs.'