The Introflaneur

There was the flaneur, wandering the metropolis of Victorian times. Then there was the auto-flaneur of Venturi's West and Reyner Banham's Los Angeles. In 2000, we were web-surfers. Now, we Americans with our boundless freedom (thanks to our tiny communications devices and our gargantuan credit lines) are interested not in exploring what's around us, but rather, what's within. Marketing tells us we can change our lives with the things we buy. The more we spend in response to that marketing, the more we are actually trying to change ourselves and investigate lifestyle and images alternatives. Oscar Wilde once wrote that private property damages the concept of the individual by supplanting the idea of the self with ownership: one's belongings. Lifestyle and image are belongings themselves sans the objects that accompany them; the more we look towards branded modes of living, the more we indeed are turning inward, histrionically clinging to the genius of advertising, pondering who we might be rather than where we might be as the curious bunch did in the past.