Precisamos falar sobre o assédio de consumo: a publicidade a serviço da indústria cultural

Abstract

Consumer harassment imposes itself in today's society as one of the greatest challenges for Consumer Law. Considering the power of the cultural industry and its ability to influence consumer behavior, identifying how this influence can be materialized by advertising and eventually converted into a form of consumer harassment practiced in the pre-contractual framework is the major objective of the study. Throughout a research based on the deductive method and bibliographical survey, the study is divided into three parts. The first is devoted to the investigation of the transformations and social processes that led to the strengthening of the consumer society as it is conceived nowadays, with special emphasis on the role of cultural industry and the multiple meanings of consumption, demonstrating that it became much more than a way of satisfaction to achieve meaningful aspects of life. The second part, in its turn, analyzes the impacts of these transformations in the light of the new moment of Private Law, addressing and revisiting important concepts for Consumer Law, such as vulnerability and hypervulnerability. At that moment, the study will focus on vulnerability as a notion of multidisciplinary character and, in addition, on the concept of consumer, proposing a re-reading of the traditional definition of this legal figure, considering its current role and new possibilities which are offered as well - which, in a paradoxical way, result in both greater freedom and greater exposure to abusive practices. In the final chapter, we will discuss relevant conceptual and normative aspects of advertising, as well as consumer harassment, seeking, in this second point, to find more defined contours for this phenomenon, suggesting even a concept of its own. In this way, from the subsidies achieved in this and previous chapters, it will finally be possible to reach a conclusion on the relationship between cultural industry, advertising and consumer harassment, finding that the overlapping of its persuasive function to the detriment of the informational can convert advertising into a manipulation mechanism and consequently into an instrument of cultural industry in the practice of consumer harassment within the pre-contractual scope.