Commercialization of Culture
Advertisements, mass production, sacrificing quality for time and quantity, the desire for bigger and better, these are the problems of commercialism. Commercialism has been advancing nearly unnoticed by most consumers even since Babylonian times. But, what makes it harmful enough to be explained in a paper?
Everyday we sit in our homes desiring goods and services that we do not need or may not even want, and discussing issues that have little or no importance to our lives other than to make small talk. Everyday we work hard to buy stuff that is better or at least equal to what society considers normal. As our former president Herbert Hoover even stated prior to the Great Depression, what he would have liked to see in every American household is "Two cars in every garage" (The American President: Herbert Hoover, 2002). We are fashioning ourselves to be boringly equal cogs in one giant corporate machine, and in turn, are losing our culture to business and propaganda. When a new "hipper" culture appears, commercialists explode the culture across the United States like a plague. What average adult would not know what a skateboard is, what reggae music is, or what Middle East tension is. We have all been commercialized by the news.
Few sources indicated a way to prevent or end commercialism, because our lives revolve around it, it is hard to vision a world without economy, advertising, and commercialism. Communism, at its purest form, when are working as equals to obtain a certain goal seems like a way to escape commercialism, but human nature and greed in the former Soviet Union prevented pure communism to develop. Other problems with communism are lack of interest and lack of incentive. It also can suffer from a stagnant culture and lack of tradition and values just like commercialism. Separatism is another way to escape commercialism, living in the wild, making everything for yourself. Unfortunately, eventually the small areas of the world that are not commercialized will more than likely become commercialized as world population grows, and our current lack of nature skills limit us to our current commercialized state. For the places that live in harmony with commercialism, there may be salvation. Of these are the Amish, the Quakers, or The Farm, which all are limited from our current state of commercialism, however such places give little room for technological advancement and other benefits of commercialism.
So in turn, to give up commercialization not only gives us more freedoms, it gives us new burdens, or the incentives of commercialism.
6.Percentage of 4-6 year-olds who, when asked to choose between watching TV and spending time with their fathers, preferred television: 54
Most of us suffer from some form of debt, and any of us can suffer from a money hungry criminal, but why? Are there ways of escaping commercialism? In the next section I will attempt to find ways to escape or at least limit the negative effects of commercialism.
2.Number of TV commercials seen by the average person by age 65: 2 million
4.Percentage of day care centers that use TV during a typical day: 70
2.Number of minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful conversation with their children: 3.5