FEELINGS OF TRUST
7. What are today’s consumer citizens made of?
The Finnish public was prepared for consumer society over a long period of time.
Civic educational organizations, the industry and the school system started to purposefully transform the Finnish public at the turn of the 20th century according to their own agendas – sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing.
In the 1920s and 1930s consumers were procreated by ‘letting them see into’ the production in factories and thus reassuring them that things that are produced in factories can be good and usable. The camera eye watched over factories, carefully recording all the processes and bringing them to the silver screen.
Especially the idea of factory-produced foodstuffs called for assurances and trust-building efforts: bread made in factory, hasn’t it passed through millions of hands, isn’t it dirty? Butter is a natural product, but what awful things do they add into margarine? Films brought the factories in front of the viewer’s eyes, to be inspected by all, and assured that the factories were extremely hygienic.
Moreover, factories were efficient and skilled, in fact more skilled than housewives.
Technological development has rendered some of the properties of quality obsolete, such as, for example, how steep a hill a car can climb. In 1906 climbing capacity was still an important property with cars. Some properties of quality are naturally redirected to new areas. This has been the case with, for instance, freezers, which were primarily valued in the 1950s for their capacity to save energy in the housewife’s work. In the 1970s the marketing of freezers began to focus on their (electric) energy-saving properties. Energy issues are still important today, as are the advantages of freezing in preserving vitamins and nutrients. It is historically interesting that some of the markers of quality have actually turned against themselves. For example, dietary fats or ice-cream haven’t since the 1970s been advertised as high-energy food. Over-nutrition has commonly become a greater problem than malnutrition. Domesticity has also changed in significance as a dimension of quality.
If something has played a crucial role in the birth of the consumer citizen it is an emphasis on individual choice rather than responsibility. For a consumer citizen the origin of a product has been transformed from a decisive factor of choice to a property that is weighed against a product’s other properties of quality.
The consumer ideals of the different periods entailed elements that emphasize belonging in and influencing society. Cooperative societies stressed, from the very beginning of their existence, the importance of consumer choices, not only for the consumers themselves but also as a means of exercising influence. It was not however until the early 1960s that the cooperative movement in Finland and elsewhere started to speak of consumers as active and competent market participants. At the same time, bank advertising, for example, started to regard consuming in a positive light. Saving was no longer the primary meaning of life (Heinonen 1998; Kuusterä 2002; Lammi 2006; Lehtonen, Pantzar 2002; Uusitalo 1990). Consuming and saving were regarded as having a fundamental impact on the nation and its welfare. By consuming properly and soundly, consumers were acting, not only to the benefit of their families but also to that of the entire community. A good consumer was also a good citizen.
These observations correspond to the conceptions of Finnish identity proposed by Pasi Saukkonen. He calls attention to Finland’s profound identity as nation-state, which is marked by a deep-rooted peasant tradition, strong social cohesion and solidarity within the national community. The traditional features of Finnish culture are perceived as eastern or non-European and the modern ones as western European. The role of the elite and its relationship to the public are colored by the underlying notion among the elite that it is more European and modern than
‘common people’. (Saukkonen 1999: 289–291.) These cultural features may very well have supported the development of trust in the market economy, the production system and the structures of consumer society, and facilitated the exceptionally rapid transition of Finnish society from an agrarian society to a consumer society.
In the light of the studied film material it appears that the sovereignty of the consumer (as it is spoken of in economics textbooks) was a distant dream in the early stages of an industrializing Finland. One could conclude that (film) propaganda was one way of producing and promoting the ideal of a sovereign consumer. Finally the modern consumer citizen learned, at least in the educational short films, to act almost like the heroes of economics textbooks: to his best knowledge, maximizing profit and keeping within the limits of the budget, with trust in the system. Economical and market liberal thinking advanced the birth of an economical human perception and an economical human being. In other words, not only did economics portray the ideal of consumer but it also created it.
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