The Role of Adversing in Turkish Society's Transformation into a Consumer Society

Advertising is a communication discipline which affects and changes the life styles, consumption modes and behaviours through its specific discourse. The most important figure forming the consumption culture is advertisements. The rise of the consumer society was an inevitable outcome of the developments in the mass production, mass transportation and mass communication. In this article it is aimed to investigate on a historical trail the role the advertisements played in the emergence of the production society in the face of the American example. Accordingly, the things that we will examine are, firstly, the changes occured in the USA at the end of the nineteenth century and in the 1920’s during the evolution towards a consumer society; the rise of the consumer society and consumption under the effects of the changes in the working conditions; advertisements as an agent between consumption on the one hand and identity and modernity on the other. Secondly we will examine the stages witnessed in Turkey on the road to become a consumer society; the reasons for the rudimentary situation of consumption and advertising in the Ottoman area and in the first years of the Republic; the changing political and economical structure in the 1950’s and the development of advertising under the social, economical and cultural changes in the 1980’s in which the contented society evolved into a consumer society.