Santa Clara University

Consumption 

      Can we imagine leaving our dorms without a camera, an iPod, or a phone? Maybe walking around like inspector gadget, with a mp3 player ready to pop out of our pockets, isn’t a good thing. A kid on a skateboard listening to his iPod is sure to tick off quick-to-jump-out-of-the-way pedestrians, but are the groups of students walking together but talking separately on the phone less obnoxious and reckless? Changes in what we consume and how we consume it change who we are as people, as students, and as friends. Examining our gadget kit, and what we can’t live without, seems pretty important.

      Potato chips that look like the virgin Mary and old star war figurines are routinely sold on auction sites like eBay for ridiculous amounts of money. Students painlessly buy and sell books, supplies, and furniture using sites like Craigslist. Technologies have decreased the need for waste because one man’s garbage, another’s gold, can be posted, bought, and sold on eBay.

      While the potential for saving and reusing products is enhanced, the increased desire for instant gratification seems to have increased. Marketing companies are inundating popular sites with product suggestions based on a customer track-list of prior purchases. The Internet and its websites are cleverly being used by companies to stoke desires for products we didn’t know we needed but now can’t live without. A consumer culture is driven by instant gratification and a reckless disregard for the consequences of waste and excess. Ethical brakes should be applied on consumption patterns that encourage buying without thinking and needing without reflecting.

      Apart from the physical changes in consumption, digital consumerism is ushering in an entirely new age. Digital materials do not deteriorate like other physical products. What you download and consume, you can share with a million other users at no expense to yourself. This concept has profound consequences for encouraging different consumption behaviors in individuals and society. Are people becoming less selfish in sharing all their music on a university network, or are they supporting a larger borg-like consumption by the masses without regard to property rights, social welfare, or justice? The increase in copyright infringement law- suits on Santa Clara’s own campus demonstrates that instant gratification consumption facilitated by the Internet is creating some legal, and important ethical questions. Companies are desperately figuring out ways to guide, regulate, and profit from the consumption of their products. For example, the new iPhone can be turned into an iBrick if programs are used to modify or change the product. Companies are beginning to seek ways of even controlling how we consume their products.

      The struggle for possession is positioning companies in one set of trenches and radical computer programmers in the other. Consumers argue that after the purchase of a product, the choices of consumption are up to them. Companies disagree and are instead attempting to monitor consumption to market future consumption, controlling consumption, and charging for consumption. Who controls consumption and regulates its form is question about people whose concerns at which ethics should be at the forefront.