'The Lonely Crowd,' at 60, Is Still Timely

from Chronicles of Higher Education:
It was the first book to stress a change in modern society from a culture of production and scarcity to one of consumption as a social act—from making things to relating to people, from "the hardness of the material," as the authors put it, to the softer touch of consumer-focused sales and services.

The other big trend discussed by The Lonely Crowd was the rise of the "peer group," the importance of schoolfellows and contemporaries, along with the mass media, in socializing a young person...It was a picture of teenagers listening together to pop records or radio music...Though he thought the sociability it promoted was superficial, he differed from earlier writers on mass media, advertising, and consumption—especially Frankfurt School sociologists—who stressed the atomizing of people into self-centered buyers.