The industrial revolution, which became dynamically visible at approximately the time of the American Revolution, led to rapid advances in telecommunications, manufacturing, and transportation. It scientized the processes of production through the creation of efficient factories of mass production that replaced cottage industry. Work life became regulated by the demands and values of capital growth: efficiency, economy, and rationality. Gone was the sense of personal meaning that accompanies the act of creation of the individual artisan. Gone was the sense that work was a means of having contact with sustaining traditions and values. Work became instead something abstract: one traded one's labor for money and for most people one's sense of self and identity became detached from the work one performed.

As the factory replaced the home workshop, work was divorced from the family, a context especially hospitable to tradition and to the creation of self and personal meaning. Increasingly, people worked outside the home on some part of a product irrelevant to their own life, the purpose of which they might never understand.

As more and more goods were mass produced (including information products such as books, newspapers, and later film and television) and distributed broadly throughout the United States, they often replaced goods produced locally. In contemporary times, even local merchants are being replaced by national and international chains. MacDonald's and WalMart provide examples of the power of this process that edges out small, community-oriented businesses.

As this process gains force in a society, local economies -- which reflect the traditions, tastes, ideas, and culture of a local community -- may not be able to compete with the cheaper and powerfully marketed artifacts of the mass culture. Even local newspapers may be unable to compete with national newspapers designed for mass consumption (e.g., USA Today). Franchise operations have invaded many sectors of the marketplace driving out local businesses: food services, tax preparation, real estate, health services, home building supplies and hardware, office supplies, computer and electronic sales, clothing retail, education, etc.

To the extent that a local community fails to resist the mass culture, the community loses its unique content and flavor and its traditions are likely to be eroded. With the erosion of tradition, the individual is forced to cast around for sources of guidance in the development of his or her ideas about self. Mass marketers and advertisers know too well that today's American society is characterized by people caught in this process -- people who live in anxiety and doubt, ever searching to establish a secure and satisfying sense of who they are, a sense of self. Consequently many products are pitched solely on their basis to supply a solution to the problem of the insecurity of self identity. Examples abound: cigarettes, clothing, pickup trucks and cars, travel, beer and hard liquor, etc. These and many other products are marketed not as much on the merits of the product as on their ability to solve the problem of people looking for self definition. Sadly, even government sponsored gambling operations and military recruitment campaigns prey upon citizen's insecurities about self, suggesting that a lottery ticket might become a quick route to a desirable and stable self identity or that the notoriously depersonalized life of an Army recruit will allow you to "be all that you can be", or that the Marine Corp offers a "change for life". Even universities know how to pitch themselves to the desires of a population seeking self definition (from our own area, consider Rensselear Polytechnic Institute's pitch for its MBA program for "fast track professionals" -- the advertisements do not promote the program by telling you what you will learn, they promote the program on the basis of giving you an attractive vision of self).

One of the most notorious companies to use self-identity as the central basis for sales was the J. Peterman catalog company. Here are two examples that were typical of the product pitches from Peterman: