Journal 9

We have begun to think about our poster topics for our final symposium presentation at the end of April. I started to think about different topics that would be interesting and relevant in today’s world. In my marketing class, we have begun to talk about different marketing technique that huge companies have invented to manipulate us to higher consumption. The advancements of technology through social media has allowed companies to track our web searches and activity and use this information to know our true needs and wants on a deeper level.

So why is this so scary for our society? Because as explained using the capitalist binary with slavery, this increase in technology will forever force us to be slaves to larger corporations. The capitalist system thrives off of the demand of consumers. In a sense, we are slaves to capitalism because we rely on other people for everything and our lives revolve around money. However, the people somewhat had power in the system because our wants and desires drive capitalism. When people realize that we have information about ourselves that the capitalist want, but will never receive, that knowledge gives us power and balances out the system. However, the introduction of social media has revealed some of our personal desires that companies otherwise wouldn’t have known. That is why our news feeds have become populated with adds for goods or services that you most recently were thinking about. While this new marketing advancement has increased sales drastically for many companies, people’s privacy rights are being compromised and the power that was given to the people is now put into the hands of the fortune 500.

One example that I want to give on this is Amazon. Amazon has blown companies out of business as they have the market share of online shopping. Recently, my marketing professor told me that Amazon uses your web searches to filter your Amazon searches. While this first seems harmless, it actually is causing you to pay more for items than other people. For example, recently I was looking online at phone charges because I know my current phone charger is seeing the end of its time. I also went through somewhat of an online shopping spree the other week because I was looking for work clothes. When I went to amazon to buy a phone charger, the first few results showed chargers that started at 20$ each. With this price I was satisfied and purchased a charger to be delivered the next day. Later that day, I asked my sister to look up a phone charger off of her amazon account (after my marketing teacher told me of this tactic). The first options that showed up on her page were the same products, sold between 15$ and $18 a piece. Because Amazon tracks my web searches, they knew that I was planning on buying a phone charger in the near feature. They also know that I am somewhat of an avid online shopper and I am willing to spend my money online. With this combined information, they made the results from my search contain products that were of a higher quality and a higher price than my sister’s results. Because I did not have my sister amazon search at the same time, I had know way of realizing that some of the products could have been sold at a cheaper price, or that there were good quality options offered at a cheaper price. I became a slave to my own desires/tendencies and I did not even know it. While Amazon’s new technology is relatively new, it won’t take long for other companies to employ similar technique. Now we as a society need to begin to question the ethics behind these advancements in technology.