A nice parable about modern society and two ways of understanding how to organize our world society and the practices we live with.
If you ask a fish if its in water, it'll say "what's water". Just as the fish floats in a sea of an existing matrix of conditions, so do we float in a matrix of existing thoughts and ways of being that we can call the prevailing consensus opinion.
I have a slew of old digital cameras that are taking up space in my humble abode. The feeling I get from possessing unused things is a heavy weight. They take up space, and the space costs money to maintain. I believe in keeping a smaller number of possessions, if only to keep the clutter monster at arms length. But the question is how to properly dispose of the cameras.
But who would want an old digital camera? These cameras are still functional and useful, so it would be silly to just throw them away. Even if one of them were broken, these are electronics items and to be ecologically sound one must give them to an organization which will do the right thing.
Since these cameras are still good and useful it would be better to hand them over to someone who will put them to use. But these old cameras are not the new hotness cameras that are so much better that camera buyers are be looking. These old and tired cameras from previous years were good, in their day, but who would want them now. That's the way of modern electronics, isn't it, a rapid retirement of perfectly good widgets because newer ones have surpassed them. These cameras could be sold via eBay, but that's a bit of a hassle. I often give things to Goodwill or other charities but am concerned what Goodwill will actually do with them. Turns out there are some worthy charities who have interesting models to recycle old camera's into new uses.
I searched and found these following organizations. In each case their web sites claim to be running programs that funnel cameras to worthy causes. I sent emails to each one and they did not respond. Given the lack of response my cameras will be going either to Goodwill or one of the charities who use Recycling for Charities.
Photo Voice - http://www.photovoice.org/ - They focus on giving cameras to Palestinians and others who have traditionally been the focus of documentaries. It's a kind of turning the tables on the documentary world, giving cameras to those who normally are the subject of documentaries and ask them to produce their own documentation of their own life. Another catch phrase is "empower some of the most disadvantaged groups in the world with photographic skills so that they can transform their lives." And by "establishing in-field photojournalism workshops ... individuals find confidence in their voices and are enabled to speak out about their challenges, concerns, hopes and fears." Sounds great. They are a UK based charity.
Global Classroom Connection - http://www.classroom-connection.org/ - They aim to connect students around the world by pairing classrooms with peer classrooms in distant countries. With the increasing interconnectivity of the world it's vital that we and our children more deeply understand other cultures. A way of doing so is to connect children classroom to classroom. "By tapping into the vast social and economic network that is the internet, and familiarizing themselves with the technologies of the future, the youth of the world can better enable themselves to stride confidently into the 21st century." One method is with photography, and they assemble camera kits to send to "disadvantaged" classrooms. They are a US based charity located in Berkeley CA.
Lens of Vision and Expression - http://www.lensofvisionexpression.org/ - Their vision is "To transform the lives of marginalized children through creativity and to impact the attitude, beliefs and actions of others by providing a window into another world." They do this by providing "photography workshops to non-profit organizations that work with marginalized children." Donated camera's will be used in future training programs. They are a US based charity located in Aurora, IL.
Democracy Now - http://www.democracynow.org/get_involved/donate - the internationally acclaimed news program is continually asking for cameras and other equipment to help them produce the show. One occasionally finds other organizations like schools or wildlife clubs asking for camera donations that in turn are used in their programs.
The Sustainable Electronics Coalition at the Univ of Illinois has a long list of organizations involved with recycling or reusing electronics including digital cameras. http://www.sustainelectronics.illinois.edu/resources/resources.cfm?i=21&s=78 The U.S. EPA has a similar list Where Can I Donate or Recycle My Old Computer and Other Electronic Products? http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/materials/ecycling/donate.htm
Eco Squid - http://ecosquid.com - 1800recycling - http://1800recycling.com - are search engines for recycling programs.
Recycling For Charities - http://www.recyclingforcharities.com/ - This is a "donate for charity" organization that puts a recycling spin on it. As they say the best form of recycling is reuse, so they determine among the donated goods which are worthy of reuse and find places to sell the usable items (such as via eBay). The money raised from the sales is what's donated to charities. Hence they cannot guarantee what the reuse of the camera is, only that money flows to charitable organizations. Charities in turn are enlisted to put banners on their sites saying "Donate old cell phones etc to fund charity".
In the mail today was an envelope reading "We've produced the TV Ratings for over 50 years!" Good for them. Really. I'm sure that's important to someone. Their market research though was wasted because they might have been able to discover that I do not own a television, do not take part in that cultural wasteland, and have no interest in getting involved. But here it was, an opportunity to become a Nielsen Family, if I so wanted. To become one of the few who are influencing the garbage that infests the television spectrum. It was possibly a chance to become an influencer over television and who knows what might have resulted if they had my opinion thrown into the mix. But somehow I doubt they'll be enrolling in the program after I truthfully told them I own zero televisions or DVR's.
It has me curious though about the long term trending showing a drop or decline in TV viewership. For instance are movements like the TV Turn-Off week (What's the point of TV Turnoff Week?) actually having any effect? Are any significant number of my bretheren humans also eschewing television? Or are most of my fellow humans still wasting their lives being fed with memes by which the corporate masters want us to live our lives?
What came up immediately in searching was of course a Nielsen report, the Three Screen Report to be exact. The report comes from their "Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement" initiative, and clearly intends to be a measure of where "the market" is watching video media content. The three screens are actually five screens, "TV in the home", "timeshifted TV", "Internet", "Video on the Internet" and "Video on a mobile phone".
Hurm, I wonder how they'd count the latest generation iPod Touch I just got? (It's not a phone)
The chart is from 3rd quarter 2009, and does not show a decline in viewership. It shows tremendous growth in watching via unconventional means like DVR's or over the Internet, but still strong growth in people watching this garbage.
Reading the report I'm struck at how it characterizes the audience they're measuring. What they're looking for is how to gauge the amount of time our fellow humans are spending time watching video material. If they were neutral observers not out to influence viewing habits it would be one thing, but of course this company is selling data to organizations who wish to maximize the impact of where they spend advertising dollars and in turn sell the most widgets.
They are characterizing (and ranking) the audience (that is, us) by viewing time. This report is used to look for increase or decline in viewership. A hidden agenda in the report would be ensuring viewing time does not decline. A serious decline in viewership would threaten the Nielsen's existence as well as the companies to whom they sell market data.
Good thing for them the report shows strong growth in viewership and especially technological widgets like DVR's or the Internet are growing as popular ways of watching video media. My contention of course is that this is a vast wasteland and to be sad for my fellow humans who have been snookered into watching this stuff.
I wonder what would happen if there were a serious decline in viewership? Obviously these companies would take a viewership decline as a threat and make some effort to counter such a trend.
An example might be Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth, a study of traffic trends on Twitter. It finds there is a large number of twitter users who don't return after the first month. In other words, twitter has a retention problem. "People are signing up in droves, and Twitter’s unique audience is up over 100 percent in March. But despite the hockey-stick growth chart, Twitter faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest."
Replace "Twitter" with "Television" in that report and would there not be a lot of worried articles in the news saying "Nielsen ratings show the death of television, woe is us, what can we do?" Right?
One can dream...
Their site is full of other marketing insights so here's a random collection revealed by trawling around.
Number of U.S. TV Households Climbs by One Million for 2010-11 TV Season This report shows the rising number of sheeple being led to gorge themselves on televised junk.
Can Neuromarketing Research Increase Sales? Describes research into scientists using gizmo's to track brain waves and eye movements while a customer is looking at a widget they intend to sell. By looking at neurological responses they're able to detect which version of a given widget elicits the desired response, presumably with the desired result of more sales.
A recently published study titled Do Green Products Make Us Better People? somehow has led to some articles suggesting that "green" consumers are meaner than non-green consumers. Hmm? It's clear that some are making "green" lifestyle choices (buying Prius's or shopping at Whole Foods) because of a kind of moral stand. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore repeatedly talked about the morality and ethics issue. It's likely that some people take their green choice as a way of internally telling themselves they are holier than everybody else and have more leniency to commit other sins. One might prefer however that people making a stand for higher morality would make other higher morality choices in their lives. But that may be a naive thought; for example the number of spiritual teachers who commit sexual transgressions (such as pedophilliac priests) indicates that we all have struggles with living to our moral standards and it doesn't matter how morally pure or impure we strive to live.
The study (link below) involves some experiments that are very abstract. Partly this has to do with the practice of Science where they like to isolate variables to minimize the number of external influences. But this leads to wholly artificial contexts that the human subjects are put in. This study for example had the subjects "shopping" in a totally artificial "online store" and drawing conclusions from their behavior in the artificial store. That is they did not study their real behavior in real stores in their real life, but their behavior in an artificial store.
After subjecting their subjects to an artificial store, they then subjected them to artificial social interactions meant to gauge their willingness to share money with others. First there's an assumption that a moral person shares money with others. But is it truly moral to share money with others? Let's say you're walking down the street and see someone with a sign out asking for money, what's the moral stance you take? I look at that person and decide between several choices based on who they appear to be, whether they appear to be capable of earning a living on their own, etc. It's not a simple choice based on simplistic formulation of "sharing money" is more moral than other choices.
While I have lots of qualms about the study the writeup has some interesting things to say.
"In the past few decades, consumers have become increasingly attentive to social and ethical considerations in areas such as energy consumption, animal husbandry, and trade" Great .. yeah .. there are other considerations to our purchases than how much money is spent. It's very important and I've written over and over about this. "This increased concern and feeling of responsibility for society has led to remarkable growth in the global market for environmentally friendly products" Yeah, I do see more products that label themselves as "green". However I'm not always convinced that the products in question actually are any better than other products. "...the assumption that purchasing choices express not only price and quality preferences, but also norms, values, and beliefs..." This is very true for me and to my understanding this is true for everyone. Probably these effects are buried in the subconscious as are so many of the other factors affecting our choices. "People do not make decisions in a vacuum; their decisions are embedded in a history of behaviors." Yeah.. what I just said.
One thing about the study and that "history of behaviors" comment is that they did not appear to connect the choices of the research subjects with their own history of decisions.
"Although mere exposure to green products can have a positive societal effect by inducing prosocial and ethical acts, purchasing green products may license indulgence in self-interested and unethical behaviors." As a main conclusion of the study it's rather interesting. However embedded within the statement and other discussion in the study is this concept of "priming" behaviors through exposure to concepts. They referred to a study where people were shown pictures of fancy restaurants and that affected whether the people then went on to eat with high society manners, or not. Hence a conclusion is that presenting certain images of positive social consequence could lead others to practice positive social behaviors. Or contrariwise shown images with negative social consequence could lead people to practice negative social behaviors.
In other words perhaps people playing violent video games will be influenced to more violent behavior?
But I draw another idea from this. These are psychologists studying the behavior of "consumers". I've heard about how the most brilliant psychological research is done around consumption and buying practices. The idea is that if a company can understand the buying psychology they can worm their way into the subconscious of consumers and cause them to buy more stuff. Hence stores are probably full of subtle psychologically derived cues that induce purchasing behavior.
It's helpful for the corporations to have consumers buy more stuff because that's how corporations live, by having more money flow to their coffers. But is it "green"? If one overconsumes "green" products with impeccable green credentials the truth still is that one has overconsumed. Part of the ecological problem we have is overconsumption. But if the companies cause us to overconsume because they have studied the psychology of green consumption and found the psychological cues to induce green consumption the result will still be non-green overconsumption.
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It's thanksgiving day, 2009. I am thankful for my life, the work I'm doing, the ability to speak the message which I have to share.
Today is supposed to be a moment of being thankful, grateful for the bounty of our lives. Of course gratefulness is a practice for every day, not just one day a year, but it's helpful to have the reminder of gratefulness due to the day for giving thanks. But, wait, is this what most of thanksgiving celebrations are about? Is the orgy of football games a practice of gratefulness? Is the orgy of eating a practice of gratefulness? Well, okay, maybe that one is, or at least can be. Is the orgy of shopping on the day after, commonly called Black Friday, a practice of gratefulness?
Black Friday is supposed to be the official start of the Christmas Season. It's commonly the day a guy dressed as Santa lights the Christmas Tree, and there is the Thanksgiving Day Parades led by guys dressed as Santa. Sure it makes sense to have a ceremony to launch a period of other ceremonies leading up to a major celebration. But, just what part of Christs story does Santa come from? Just what part of Christs story do Christmas trees come from? And most importantly just what part of Christs story implies we should shop til we drop and engage in an orgy of consumption?
Buy Nothing Day is organized by Adbusters. It is observed on the day following Thanksgiving, the day commonly known as Black Friday, and the idea is to engage in activities other than shopping. Part of the message of Buy Nothing Day is the above points and others I'll be making below. I believe the purpose Adbusters has in mind behind Buy Nothing Day is to interrupt the practice of overconsumption tied into Black Friday and the way Christmas is currently practiced in the prevailing paradigm.
There are a lot of videos on youtube about Buy Nothing Day, just search for them. Some are linked below.
Buy Nothing Day is important to me for several reasons. One is the subversion or destruction of the real meaning of Christmas discussed above. Christmas is supposed to be a celebration of the birth of a great spiritual teacher, and it is supposed to be symbolic of the awakening within us of attributes taught by that spiritual teacher (Jesus Christ). But think about how Christmas is celebrated and the common symbols. Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus, the Nutcracker, Good King Wenceslaus, the Christmas tree, candy canes, elves, the orgy of presents bought and gifted, and on and on. None of this has a single thing to do with celebrating the birth of this great spiritual teacher. Not a thing.
Still, those things are the focus of most activities related to Christmas. And it is Black Friday which starts off the orgy of buying.
Another reason BND is important has to do with the ecological impact of the economics of this orgy of buying. Our Capitalistic system is driven by Consumerism. You hear it pretty plainly in the news if you care to listen. They talk about "Consumer Confidence" which is gobbledygook for measuring how much people are spending. The more we spend the more confident we are, supposedly. The news during Christmas season is full of analysis over how much we spend, and it is Christmas spending that keeps the economy going.
What this means is that rates of consumption drive rates of economic activity which drive rates of production which drives rates of mining resources to build this stuff. Often it's stuff that isn't truly needed, and in any case is produced for a celebration that's a subversion of a very real tradition our society has had with over 1000 years of history behind it. That very real tradition of Christmas has been destroyed and replaced by a fake mockery pretending to be the real tradition, but instead is a total and complete sham.
This sham is harming our traditions and harming our environment.
TechnoSanity #35: Buy Nothing Day
It seems the businesses surrounding us, the businesses that fill our stores with products, that these businesses are dependent on ever growing sales. The stock market values companies whose earnings are always growing, and punish those whose earnings are stagnant or declining. But, what does this have to do with "use it once and throw it away"?
It used to be that products were reliable, that they would last for years, that you could repair things, and that people did actually repair things and keep using them for years on end. Today most products are cheaply built, they don't last, they are unrepairable, they tend to fall apart quickly, and many products are meant to be used only once and then thrown away.
If a product can only be used once doesn't this encourage more consumption of products? If your eating utensils are plastic and unwashable, then you have to buy a new set of them after every meal. If your pen cannot be refilled then you have to buy a whole new pen, rather than buying just a refill. If your MP3 player cannot have its battery replaced, if the circuit board is too complex to repair, what do you do when it breaks? It goes on and on like this with product after product.
This makes for an ever increasing flow of stuff being sent to landfills, and ever increasing destruction of the planet to make raw materials. Well, to be precise there is always a constantly increase in products being made simply because the population constantly increases. But I think that compounding the ever increasing population is the higher quantity per person on the rate of consumption, that we are consuming more per person than did our ancestors.
Making any raw material, whether it's a metal, a plastic, a fabric, or a wood, requires taking some sort of resource and converting it to the raw material. For example it might mean mining and smelting copper ore, and the copper ore is gotten by tearing rocks out of the depths of the earth or in some cases by destroying mountains. Producing the copper leaves a residue of many other chemicals and slag left over from the industrial processes. And, then, say the raw material is turned into a product that's used once, and thrown away. This isn't making very good use of the resources given to us by the planet. An ever increasing use of raw material means an ever increasing destruction of the planet.
If a resource is reused multiple times then that planetary destruction rate is lessened. But a use-once-and-toss paradigm hastens planetary destruction.
Our ancestors did a lot of recycling through simply reusing discarded stuff. Recycling and repairing used to be normal, but today recycling seems to be so completely foreign that one almost has to beg and plead with everyone to get them to recycle.
Robert Greenwalds latest movie is about Walmart. I've written a bit about him and his work here, here, here and here.
I have yet to see the movie, but the trailers on the web site and this review by buzzflash.com really has me anxious to see it.
The premiere week is November 13-19 nationwide, and unfortunately I'll be out of the country that week. You can find a screening through the web site, as he's following a very non-traditional distribution system. Rather than distribute through the mainstream movie houses and DVD sales channels, and rather than be subject to the implicit censorship that happens in those channels, he is doing this as direct-to-the-people as possible. Partly this is because a goal of the movie is to build a movement, just like his earlier movies had a goal to build an anti-Bush movement.
Apparently in this movie he documents the image of Walmart destroying small town economics and underpaying their employees. The story has been around for awhile, and occasionally on the news there will be reports of locals fighting against Walmart building a store in their town.
For example (from the buzzflash interview):
BuzzFlash: A couple of things we've read about Wal-Mart astonished us – one in a book that came out this summer, and there's another book coming shortly, on Wal-Mart. But one of the two of the things was that in some states – I know in Arizona - I've read that Wal-Mart is the number-one corporation for having employees on Medicaid.
Robert Greenwald: Yes, there's this whole section of the film where we go into this fact. Wal-Mart - by design, by pattern, by system – and we have managers on camera talking about this – they pay their employees so little – and this is a corporation that made $10 billion last year – they pay their employees so little, that the employees are encouraged and guided to get public assistance, Section 8 housing, food stamps, and various healthcare plans provided by the states. It's scandalous that everyone's tax dollars should be going so that Wal-Mart does not have to pay its employees decent wages or benefits.
There's much more along those lines. To think that people who have a full time job (oh, wait, Walmart forces their employees to work only 35 hours a week max so that they aren't full time) are being paid wages under the federal poverty line... and to think that Walmart is effectively subsidized by the government in this circuitous fashion ... this is outrageous.
At the same time this is not a new effect.
In 1951 or so my Grandparents bought a Hardware store franchise in Harrisonville MO. They ran that store for nearly 25 years. The last few of those years saw competition from large retailers on the edge of town. This wasn't Walmart, as Walmart hadn't really begun yet in 1970, but some other large chain. They were towards retirement age anyway, but that large chain really damaged the business leading to its death. They'd spent 20-25 years building that business, and by all rights should have been able to sell it as a going concern, but instead had to liquidate.
While Walmart may be the most successful of this kind of business, the culprit is really a general wave in retail sales operation. The example in the hardware store business is Home Depot and Lowes, between the two of them the mom-n-pop hardware stores like my Grandfathers store has basically disappeared.
The movie isn't yet available but this book: The United States of Wal-Mart looks to be right up the same alley.
