Technology and the American Gospel of Consumption
Inherent in the study of technology is the notion of “mass consumption” and its relationship to American society, the global perspective, and the potential effect of technology on American consumption. Although Americans currently live in what is known as a “consumer culture,” it has yet to be seen what exactly this means and what potential effects may result from our participation. While approximately half the world still lives in poverty and the destruction of the world’s environment is quickly becoming a reality, the problems and consequences of America’s massive reliance on consumption is certainly a topic that demands our attention.
Technology has given birth to a wave of consumption unseen in American history. Never before has consumption been so widespread, and so vastly available to the masses. Jeremy Rifkin discusses this phenomena in his book, The End of Work, “Today the Average American is consuming twice as much as he or she did at the end of World War II. The Metamorphosis of consumption from vice to virtue is on...
Calder’s Thesis for this book follows the development of American consumer culture from its unorganized infancy around the 1890’s to about the 1940’s. There are several references to credit and debt outside this range as a reference to where we started and w...
Kaba, Fatos, et al. “Solitary Confinement and Risk of Self-Harm Among Jail Inmates.” American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, Mar. 2014, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3953781/.
In historical context the rise of the free market industries is at its peak. In the year 1999 oil industries, electronics, fast food, clothing lines hit the front line. For the first time ever poor people are able to have what rich people have. Keeping up with the Jones, as many people say. There is this mindset of get it now and pay for it later. This leave most of the working class in debt. While consumers get the latest luxuries they are being “Consumed by Consumerism” (Domigpe). We have all become slaves to the brands of everything we buy. For example, when new electronics come out on the market that is mostly a want, but looks awesome, we buy it to keep up with the Jones and also because the advertisements tell us to. We also need the companies to live, because without them there is no employment. “Because of this circle, which is hanging over everybody in a modern society, the capitalists have pushed us into a place, where consumerism and capitalism go hand in hand” (Denzin). With the deb...
Kessler, Andy. "The Rise of Consumption Equality." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 03 Jan. 2012. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.
America’s current standard of living is going to cause our demise. Consumerism is a problem throughout Americans culture since mass production began in the late nineteenth century. The obsession with consumerism has led to mindless wastes of resources, a diseased society and economic instability. Rick Wolff, a professor of economics at University of Massachusetts, states “economics of capitalism spread consumerism—now uncontrolled, ecologically harmful, and fiscally disastrous—throughout the United States”. Wolff’s viewpoint on consumerism aligns with mine. Believing that an economy based on promoting endless consumption is volatile and unsustainable. Consumerism can be analyzed and seen to be embedded by corporations and politicians.
Imagine. You are alone with your thoughts. There is nothing that can separate you from their unpredictable horrors because you spend 23 hours a day completely alone. In silence you wait, desperate for a chance to leave the four-walled, concrete cell you now call home. These are the conditions of solitary confinement that are still in widespread use throughout America today. Although solitary confinement may seem like the safest way to protect other prisoners, guards and even the inmate himself, it is an inhumane and cruel punishment and it has the opposite effect of what prisons are intended for. .
Today’s correctional institutions, policy makers, and supreme courts still continue to ignore the studies displaying the psychological effects of prisons. For example, in recent case challenges against the eighth amendment over solitary confinement have rarely succeeded. This is due to the regulation that conditions must deprive prisoners of at least one identifiable human physical need to be declared unconstitutional. Studies have shown that depriving proper mental stimulus results in extreme mental harm, but because it’s not physical damage courts rarely recognize the extreme mental harm in conditions retaining to confinement. Many court cases related to the psychological damages were inspired by the famous Stanford Prison Experiment that
Imagine sitting in a tiny cell for the years at a time slowly but surely losing your mind. This is what many prisoners in the American prison system face today. Solitary confinement is when an inmate is isolated from any human contact, often with the exception of members of prison staff, for 22–24 hours a day, with a sentence ranging from days to decades. This cruel and unusual punishment is used by prisons daily throughout the country. Atul Gawande, a surgeon, public health researcher, and author for The New Yorker writes the article ¨Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?¨, successfully convincing the reader that solitary confinement is nothing less than unreasonable torture.
As demonstrated in Henry David Thoreau’s passage from Economy, Wendell Berry’s from Waste, and John Kenneth Galbraith’s passage from The Dependence Effect, America’s overly advancing society thrusts ideas like materialism and the “love of buying” into the interior of every American’s mind. Even the American Dream, a fundamental notion to our nation, now unites all people of all cultures under materialism and greed. The highly capitalist American society distorts values such as the “quest for freedom” into a search for cash and the frontiers no longer exist. America’s increased production yields the increased wants of consumers and as Galbraith states, “One man’s consumption becomes his neighbor’s wish (479).” With this reckoning, the more wants satisfied, the more new ones born. Berry, on the other hand, more out rightly attacks America’s capitalist economy and the wastes it has produced when saying “The truth is that we Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of ubiquitous damned mess of which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators (485).” America’s corporate capitalism and consumerism culture undermines our well-being in that we deplete Earth's limited resources, produce excess waste, and indulge excessively in unnecessary luxuries that ultimately result in our unhappiness and financial downfall, while trapping us in an endless cycle of dependency.
If a person convicted of a crime shows no signs of being mentally ill when entering a prison which enforces the long-term use solitary confinement, by the time they completed their sentence and are released, their mental health will have been severely compromised. Studies have shown that the long-term use of segregation in prisons can cause a wide variety of phycological effects such as anxiety, psychosis, depression, perceptual distortions, and paranoia, often leading to a desire to self-harm or in more severe cases suicide. Not only is it wrong to hold a criminal in solitary confinement for any longer then fifteen days, it is unconstitutional. Although many believe the use of solitary
Solitary confinement is the isolation of a prisoner in a separate cell as a means of punishment or protection. Inside the cell is a bed, sink and toilet, but rarely much else. Food is brought through a slot in the door, aside from that small peak of the world outside during meal times, prisoners are allowed one hour of exercise in a cage outside. Solitary confinement is a controversial issue and has become something researchers frequently look into, with it they came to the conclusion that extreme isolation is not good for the psyche. In fact it has been discovered that some of the side effects of long period isolations include a specific psychiatric syndrome, characterized by hallucinations; panic attacks; overt paranoia; diminished impulse
Kostić, Milena. "The Faustian Motif in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus." Facta Universititas 7.2 (2009): 209-22. Web. 04 Dec. 2013.
Sigmund Freud believed that adults seduced children and this is where their problems came up in adulthood. As for all things, many people did not agree with Freud’s theory. “Freud believed that people could be cured by making conscious their unconscious thoughts and motivations, thus gaining insight” (McLeod, “Psychoanalysis”). According to Freud’s Psychoanalytical Theory, there are three elements of personality the id, ego and superego. The id is an individual’s inner child.
Written in 1899, by Thorstein Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, analyzes and critiques consumerism in the United States. Veblen explores the lifestyle and ways of thinking of the exploiter versus the exploited; in a point of view from those who are born into power and those who serve people in power. It is in this book where Veblen created the phrase “conspicuous consumption”, where it means buying goods in order to display a higher social class than others (Heath, 2001). He traces almost all practices and tastes of the leisure class directly to the pecuniary interest. I chose this book because I wanted to learn about how certain groups in society try to distinguish themselves from other groups and how it came to be for such differential.
Snow, Edward A. "Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire." Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Ed. Alvin Kernan. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Print.