LONDON: Last week my son got mugged for his iPod. He wasn’t hurt, just a bit embarrassed about some of the songs his assailants will find on it. This week I had my mobile stolen while sitting on a park bench. This is low-level stuff that is now commonplace. But there is a vital link between these ever-upgradable gadgets and Tony Blair’s call for a rebalancing of the relationship between the victims of crime and the perpetrators.

In ‘my day’ it was different. No one got mugged, perhaps because we didn’t have anything worth taking. A home-made catapult was about as hi-tech as it got. Today a kid’s trainers, iPod and mobile can easily cost £400 to replace — and can be gone as quickly as it takes a hooded youth to claim there’s a knife in their pocket. I’m glad my son didn’t take the risk of calling his robber’s bluff.

But he had something they didn’t. An iPod and the right phone are now essential trappings of youth — not just because they let you talk or listen to music at your convenience, but because of what they say about you. Once we were known by what we produced. Now we judge ourselves and others by what we and they consume. The advertisers know this; that’s why they ask: “What does your mobile say about you?” Welcome to the consumer society and the world of the turbo-consumer. It’s a world driven by competition for consumer goods and paid-for experiences, of hi-tech and high-end shopping signals that have become the means by which we keep score with each other.

As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points out, to be a successful consumer now defines what it is to be ‘normal’. Therefore to be ‘abnormal’ is to be a failed consumer. The lot of the failed consumer is miserable.

This new poor may be better off in absolute terms than the poor of previous generations, but in the world of the turbo-consumer what you have means nothing — it’s what others have and therefore what we must have next that counts.

On these terms the new poor are falling far behind in an age when keeping up is everything.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service