суббота, 24 марта 2018 г.

Consumer society and the bitcoins


  Currently in the whole word (except probably North Korea) the consumer society is dominating. This is shown, for example, by the fact, that most people are anxious very much about their revenue and prosperity. As far as I know, there was not such anxiety in 19th century. The realities of our century, for example, are that during the wars people often suffer from economical sanctions more, than from the military operations themselves.
  Some people are trying to find out why such a situation has appeared. I have heard such interpretation from some people in Russia: “previously they wanted us to become communist builders, and now they want us to become consumers”. 
  I think that in reality the reason for emergence of the consumer society is unexpectedly banal: such mass media, as TV channels and radio stations, are obliged to put a lot of advertisement in their content, because they do not have other sources of revenue. And the excess of advertisement forms the consumer society itself.
  The first mass media were newspapers, which earned on direct sales. When radio and television appeared, these mass media appeared to have no such possibility of earnings – you can not directly pay for viewing a TV program. Because of that, TV and radio had to earn by the advertisements only. This problem in principle could be solved organizationally, in governments instituted a TV tax, calculated the ratings of TV channels and paid the channels a part of this tax, proportional to the channel’s rating. But this task proved too difficult for the politicians.
  The same problem persists for the mass media in the web. Despite there are such web money as Paypal, currently they can’t be used for paying for viewing a content in the web. It’s a pity that we can’t pay Google for cutting of the advertisement at Youtube. I suppose, the possibility to pay for Youtube is not available because of some bureaucratic obstacles: maybe, the US laws do not include such source of revenue, correspondingly Google can’t pay taxes for it, and without the taxes the revenue becomes illegal. In Russia in 75% cases we can’t purchase new films, music, audiobooks in the web, and have to download them from torrents – I suppose the reasons are similar.
   I expect, that if the bitcoins (or, more precisely, the cryptocurrencies) will become the approved money, all these problems will be solved automatically. The Web will become commercial, and correspondingly its quality will become higher. People will pay with the bitcoins for any content instead of watching the obtrusive ads, and the “power of advertisement” will be overthrown.
  A good video concerning the subject: "history of stuff":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM



  In this video it is said, that the consumer society appeared mainly  in 1950th. This was the time when television became popular, so this video confirms the idea of the connection between the consumer society and TV ads.
  Update 2020: the paid subscription has appeared at youtube, and this seem to be a great blessing. I suppose, when the humanity transfers from TV to paid youtube, the "power of advertisment" will end. However I see that youtube bloggers place ads in their video, so I hope a next step will be made - direct payments to the authors of the videos on youtube (or transfering from youtube to Vimeo).

2 комментария:

  1. I never considered myself to conspiracy theory, but I believe that the development of mass media is only a step in the evolution of humanity, and the emergence of an ocean of advertising and media programming of people is a consequence of the planned activities of world corporations for their own enrichment. Unfortunately, most of them do not want to think about the future of the planet, all their thoughts revolve around the money.
    Regarding the legalization of cryptocurrency, I immediately come up with an analogy with the artificial language of Esperanto. Yes, it is convenient, yes, it will destroy many barriers. Perhaps even significantly accelerate the development of mankind. But this will not happen, because it is not profitable for states and corporations. They will lose control, profit, monopoly. Although illegal groups have long since switched to cryptocurrency ...

    The video is interesting and informative, but some arguments, for example, about toxicity of products and differences in computers are somewhat erroneous, in my opinion.

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