ABSTRACT
In his early work, Jean Baudrillard, one of the most prominent postmodernist philosophers of our day (although a self-proclaimed modernist), argued that consumption items were not independent of each other, but that consumption is a system.1 Indeed, in some ways, what a pervasive and ironclad system it is. One wonders why it is that the products we find so diffused in the consuming society were the products that became so popular: why, for example, the car, the television, the telephone, and the washer-dryer? Why not the train, the theater, the neighborhood soda fountain, and the community laundromat? Are these popular products, which define so much of our daily lives, there just by chance or force of technology, or is there some rhyme and reason behind their popularity and diffusion?
