Personality social development in conditions of commodification: inflation of social reality

The postmodern period contributed to the transformation of consumption practices from material practices to socio-cultural one. The ideology of consumerism is getting a dominate status in this new reality. Consumerism together with postmodernism philosophy affect the system of values, behaviour of the people, and socialization processes. The authors analyze the changes in socialization processes in consumer society. Today a new historical type of socialization is emerging, one that is characterized by the detachment of socio-cultural practices and a person’s daily experience from a concrete territory. This leads to the formation of deterritorized (virtual) localities. Visualization and aestheticization, proceeding in the space of total commodification, are becoming basic determinants of personal socialization. Visualization is replacing real interaction practices by visual patterns. Aestheticization reproduction of subjectness in conditions of consumerism has two specific features. The formation of subjectness is initiated by the consumed object, while the formation of identity is complicated due to the absence of the real Other in the media communication environment. The socialization temporality is characterized by a weak representation of the past in an individual’s experience. The present is contracting, the being there is reducing, and the orientation to the future is getting predominant.