Wasteful People

                Americans have been under the spell of corporate activities for many years now, and do not realize the consequences our actions have had on ourselves and the planet we live on. Our habits as a population have a correlation to the intentions of corporations in their strive to make profits. One effect that this has had on us is that it had made us very wasteful. The mindset has been established that it is ok to throw out large amounts of materials, and when a purchase is made it is ok for it to last a given amount of time until it is time to replace it. The idea of disposable items was introduced to the country during the early 1900’s and has had a profound effect on the consumer market ever since.

                One of the first items to hit the market was the Waterbury steel pocket watches. These watches were highly reliable and low priced. After this a company called Ingersoll released a watch which cost 1 dollar, about as much as an average days pay in that time (compared to many watches on the market around $10. If these watches ever broke, instead of attempting to fix them, customers would rather buy a new one. When wrist watches became popular, the old pocket watches in American households became obsolete and new watches were being sold to the same customers. Items like this do two things to the mindset of the general consumer. First, they accept the fact that their purchases are not meant to last forever and can break and be replaced. Second, they accept the obsolescence of their purchase caused by the release of a newer model.

                Soon companies began to plan the obsolescence of their products. They release products which are either disposable, have intended flaws to keep them from lasting and knowing they will release a new edition in time to have customers coming back for more. Examples would be the Gillette shaving blade and the condom. Both these products needed to be replaced after every use, and incorporated an aspect of the consumer’s daily life to ensure customers returning. Americans seemed to have forgotten the values of not wasting and the business integrity in the building of products.

“Then there was the problem… of what to do with the old blade, which might imperil the fingers of his young. As usual, he tossed it on top of the medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that someday he must the 50 or 60 other blades that were…temporarily piled up there. (25 from Made to Break by Giles Slade).

Americans slowly began to fill the dumps with wasteful products and packaging, with the MSW (Municipal Solid Waste) almost doubling from 269 million tons in 1989 to 409 million tons in 2000 (jgpress.com). During World War 1 National frugality campaigns were organized by the treasury department in an attempt to decrease waste. This attempt was shot down by corporate America in defense of their profit creating methods of production.

“Local newspapers weighed in, supporting their advertisers, the retailers. Editorials championed “Business as usual” across the nation well into 1918, and Boston papers refuse to run a series of patriotic ads supporting the thrift campaign sponsored by an assortment of local academics” (54).

                The media is also run by corporations, as they are trying to earn a profit by selling advertisements in their newspapers. They listened to the cry of corporate America and used their resources to control the attitude of the public against the campaigns by the government. This further shows how aspects of our daily lives and our behaviors are affected by the actions of corporations. If there is one lesson we can learn from this, is to be aware of the intentions of corporations. Do not take to heart what you see on TV and read in magazines without considering the true implications and reasons behind it. Make decisions for yourself with the future of mankind in mind and hopefully we can end the immense amount of waste created by our country and resist the other mannerisms caused by the greedy corporate America money has created. 

“We growing wiser, are we just growing tall?” – From Patience by Nas and Damian Marley

wikipedia post 2

Wikipedia has over 16 million articles with millions of users constantly increasing and editing the information on the website making it more detailed and accurate everyday. For this massive amount of users there has to be a set protocol for managing people and information to ensure efficient work in a productive direction. This is created by giving users a status, based on the contributions they have made to the website. Then as users rise up the totem pole of statuses (such as administrator) they get more power within the website. They can eventually delete entries, block users and ip addresses.

The users of Wikipedia can be described as a democratic colony of ants. Many of the users are working towards a common cause, to make the website a better source of information. Some of the users are vandalizing the website and are then kicked off. The users are not told what to do, so their actions are randomized but in such volume that the general direction is that of progress. They have their own individual intentions but with the amount of people on the website it works to an advantage.

The reason the site is not overwhelmed with vandalism is because of how easy it is for a user to spot the vandalism and undo it. The administrator can also see what other posts the user has edited, and block the user and his ip address with a few simple clicks. This effort is much less than it takes to create an account and vandalize the site, hence why the vandalism is powerfully moderated

“We love and need new contributors, and that none of this should be construed as in any way criticizing someone just because he or she is new to the project. If we criticize anyone, it should be because they’re writing bad articles, acting trollishly, or otherwise acting in a decidedly noncontributory fashion.” (123). The site needs to maintain certain rules to make sure its core values are held strong. Anyone is allowed to write anything they want with no censorship, and the system accommodates for multiple points of view. The result is a plethora of ideas and opinions of people from all over the world, making the website a stronghold against mainstream media biases and allows the people to learn a neutral illustration of many events and histories.

                When edits are made to an article, it can result in controversy between users. This is discussed and negotiated between users and a compromise is made. It ends with everyone’s input coordinated in a non biased informative way. This constructive criticism is the core process behind the scenes which keeps the articles neutral. Over time each article grows and is edited until it is full of organized detail and linked to many other Wikipedia pages which provide more related information. Wikipedia has grown to a large interconnected plethora of information and is still growing every day.

the world and wikipedia 1

Wikipedia creates an atmosphere where information can be categorize, created, verified and edited by infinite numbers of people around the world. Weather Wikipedia is reliable or not, it has an immense amount of information which is available to users with speed and convenience. Currently having 3,437,445 articles it is one of the largest sources of information available to an individual. It is also extremely fast growing, “on 12 august 2008 wikipedia reached 2,500,000; on 20 march 2009 there were 2,800,000 articles” (Dalby 50).

These articles are constantly being revised and updated by the Wikipedia community, and from the date of creation the article becomes more detailed and accurate by day. Also, many different points of views are reflected due to the fact that anyone can write on the site anonymously. This ranges from different political views, cultures and religions. It is a true reflection on the thoughts of the people. Not only the so called “experts” or professors, but anyone who has an interest in expressing their thoughts.

According to Dalby there were three aspects which made up the invention of Wikipedia. First is the “survey of knowledge”, which simply means a complete circle of knowledge. This can also be found in encyclopedias which have no single topic they cover, but instead a vast number of topics which are organized by alphabetical order. Wikipedia has no limit on the number of topics that can be covered, and instead of a table of contents it uses the power of search engines to make information convenient and organized. The second part was the dictionary. A dictionary encompasses all the words that make up our language, with definitions, and as the definitions begin to include facts and ideas then it becomes more of an encyclopedia. The last is the sourcebook, which is used to track information and to reference more information. Wikipedia has put these three together, from defining terms to expanding on them, relating them to ideas and linking those ideas with more related ideas. Also, sourcing where the information has come from to find primary, more accurate sources if necessary.

There is a large amount of data and information available on Wikipedia, but the biggest concern is the accuracy of the data and the meaning behind it. Is this actual intelligence or simply large amounts of data. “These sites, he continued, were like communal gardens of data, with some participants doing ‘a lot of heavy planting’ while others preferred to ‘pull a weed here and there’ (51). As Wikipedia grows, the more useful of a resource it will become with more accurate information. Theoretically if the amount of users keeps growing the information should have more meaning and value. This is a perfect example of web 2.0, which is the fact that the world wide web is now not only becoming a place to receive information, but also to contribute. Simply using the web affects how the web interacts with everyone else. Clicking links and visiting pages increase their popularity, which increases the chances of coming up on search engines which then in turn bring in more visitors. Websites such as social networks tie people together in a virtual world that never existed before. Your actual physical location on the planet is slowly loosing importance. Everything is effected by the internet, from the way we shop, go to school, interact with each other and make money. So should it also effect what we consider valid information, and who we trust to give it to us? Do we trust the ‘experts’ who are renounced professors and authors and write books and textbooks? Or do we trust the collaboration of the everyday person’s thoughts and ideas from all over the world. By including the views of every person, every culture, every individual situation, we can move closer to what we can consider ‘accurate’, ‘trustworthy’ and essentially the ‘truth’.

Postman part 2 Analytical Blog

Technology has a force over the daily lives of Americans as religion depicted the lives of the crusaders of the 12^th century. As new technology is introduced to the people, our reliance on the technology increases. Our lives begin to revolve around the products why buy and use, and are yet to be released.  A good example is the integration of technology for medical use, and how it changed the entire field and economy of medical practice.

American medical practice was greatly influenced by Dr. Benjamin Rush, who stressed that relying on nature held back the improvement of medicine. He convinced other doctors and patients that “American diseases were tougher than European disease and required tougher treatment” (97). Rush used methods such as bloodletting and large amounts of mercury for patients with the yellow fever. These appeared to work and Americans began to accept Rush’s radical ways of curing disease. “Americans met the challenge by eagerly succumbing to the influence of Rush: they accepted the imperatives to intervene, to mistrust nature, to use the most aggressive therapies available” (97).

These ideas were amplified with the introduction to technology to the practice. One of the earliest inventions that had a great impact was the stethoscope, invented by Rene-Theophile-Hyacinthe Laennec in 1816. As doctors began to use the stethoscope to diagnose patients, they began listening to their body but not what the patient had to say. This trend followed through with the introduction of other tools into the doctors office such as the ophthalmoscope (to see into the patient’s eyes), laryngoscope (to inspect larynx) and the X-ray. Doctors began to rely more on machines and tools than their own knowledge about the patient and relationship with the patient. “Medicine is about the disease, no the patient. And, what the patient knows is untrustworthy; what the machine knows is reliable” (100). The entire system has changed to support this way of thinking. Doctors now feel liable to use every means of diagnostics they have available in order to keep themselves being liable for malpractice. The fear of the patient taking the doctor to court exemplifies the very fact that the relationship between the patient and the doctor has become less humane and more robotic, with no sympathy or care on the patient’s or doctor’s side.

This aggressive nature for using technology can be extended into the rest of American culture. “Nature is an implacable enemy that can be subdued only by technical means” (102). We begin to solve all our problems with machines, and make all our processes numerical and simplified using machines. We embrace any new machine which makes our lives easier with trust without thinking of the consequences. The introduction of the image through the creation of graphic interfaces such as tv’s and computers. Images for the first time could be recreated in a mass quantity to distribute to the general public. Obviously there was a economic drive behind the distribution which was the advertising of products to consumers. This created a psychological and aesthetic science behind advertising, flooding peoples lives with images. As these images continue to flash in American eyes they begin to loose their value. Symbols such as the statue of liberty or god have been showed so many times that when someone thinks about the statue of liberty they no longer feel the relevance of the symbol to their lives. Everything has become a result of corporate advertising. “The constraints are so few that we may call this a form of cultural rape, sanctioned by an ideology that gives boundless supremacy to technological progress and is indifferent to the unraveling of tradition” (170). Technology is slowly eating away at our values and ideals by creating a new artificial world we live in with new definitions of what is important to an individual person.

“Can a nation preserve its history, originality, and humanity by submitting itself to the sovereignty of  a technological thought world?” (183). This is the question Postman brings on us in his last chapter and gives us with a few ideas how to make this possible. He paints the picture of a resistance fighter which is the optimal way of thinking to overcome the intellectual demise caused by technology. It involved an individual free of technological bias and holds onto true values of family, common sense and humanity.

The corruption caused by technology can be seen everyday in the daily life of an American. The values of society have been manipulated through technology by the greedy corporations who’s only goal is to obtain money at any cost. The effects can be seen in the dreams of the average child who has grasped the situation he has been born into, as his goals are predetermined by the media to becoming rich one day at all costs. We are institutionalized from kindergarten and enter the system which tells us we need to get a job and contribute to the corporate world, or end up with no money no food and a narrow path of options that lead to jail. Men and woman are objectified in many ways, defined by the cars they own and houses they live in, enforced by the media-created culture of the American people. We enter the world with innocent minds and then become slaves to the corporate struggle as we try and become accepted into society by accepting the lives presented to us and drop our natural human values in the process.