The “Educated” Consumer: The Formation of Memory,Attention, and Imagination in Consumer Culture

This article offers a critique of consumer culture that draws on Augustine’s vision of human consciousness, exploring consumerism’s formative effects on the memory, attention, and imagination of consumers. Drawing on William Cavanaugh’s analysis of consumers’ disposition of detachment, it explains how consumer culture distorts memory, attention, and imagination in consumers. It addresses the effects of consumerism on declarative, episodic, and procedural memory, on open awareness and concentration, and on intellectual, fantasy, empathy, and strategic imagination. The author suggests that religious educators should consider their work a form of reattachment therapy.