It’s easy to press buy on your Amazon cart and receive packages from overseas in two days. But, it’s harder to describe how that product was made and where the materials for it were sourced. Anyone can look at the tag on a new shirt and see it’s made from 60% cotton and 40% polyester, but many don’t know how that textile was woven and the stitch pattern needed to hem it. In our society that puts material goods on a pedestal and values consumption as a method of self-expression, the ignorance surrounding where our products come from and how they are made is dangerous to the environment and society as a whole.
It goes beyond the sense of sight in analyzing objects. As Edward S. Cooke Jr. writes for the Princeton University Press, “When we privilege sight and visual analysis alone, we fail to use a full battery of analytical tools deploying our eyes, touch, and embodied experiences to understand the material world.” For most of human history, people have either made their own goods and products or lived in close proximity to those who made them. Now, a majority of what we buy is imported, leaving many clueless about the methods and processes that go into making them.
As consumer culture expanded in the twentieth century, everyday people became increasingly removed from the origins of the objects they use. Thrift and frugality were prevailing American values up until post World War II when production exceeded demand and advertising was born out of the necessity to make new customers for the surplus of goods. Thus, advertising gave way to consumer culture by consistently telling the public that buying material goods is a mode of expression and a symbol of status, identity and emotion. As Kerynn Higgs wrote for the MIT Press Reader, “Though it is status that is being sold, it is endless material objects that are being consumed.”
Consumerism values speed, convenience and newness that intentionally hides labor and environmental costs. It is this distance from the creation of our goods through global supply chains that leads to the emotional distance and lack of responsibility we feel about our material goods. When objects travel across the globe to get to us, our responsibility seems to travel nowhere. Instead of repairing torn or soiled clothes, we opt to throw them out for new ones, often because “newness” feels more exciting than “well-made.” The materialistic values that advertising promotes is a key driver of excessive consumption, which is detrimental to the planet and complicates our relationship with material goods. Understanding materials through material literacy slows consumption and disrupts the cycle of endless replacement.
In a culture obsessed with the next best thing, material literacy reminds us that meaning is made, not purchased. By engaging in the process of making something from scratch, goods feel more finite than infinite. Making something forces you to confront the limitations of time, materials and your own abilities. By participating in the act of making, you can better appreciate the labor that goes into production, restore value to items and keep them longer than something mass-produced. Handmade practices create community through local makers, repair spaces, thrift culture and workshops, whereas individual consumption from things like online shopping creates isolation and physical distance from the creators of goods. A society centered on creation values collaboration; a society centered on purchasing values competition and novelty.
Material literacy offers an alternative to a culture that treats objects as disposable and endlessly replaceable. By understanding how materials are sourced, shaped and assembled, we can begin to resist the consumer culture that advertising promotes. This shift does not demand perfection or complete disengagement from consumption, but invites intentionality. Choosing to repair, make or simply learn about the things we own restores value not only to objects, but to the labor, resources and communities behind them.
