Spaces and exchanges: o what extent can we escape the consumer society and challenge the consumer culture?

Spaces and exchanges

My presentation is going to deal with the notion Spaces and exchanges. First of all I'd like to give a definition of this notion. Exchange is a continuous output of products, a continuous movement or circulation of all types of exchanges: people, trade, media, etc. It can also be a general movement or tendency. To illustrate this notion, I’m going to answer the question: To what extent can we escape the consumer society and challenge the consumer culture? I will focus consumerism with the American way of life and then the alternative to this system like bartering and the freegan movement. For this, we are going to talk about different documents. At first the audio report “black Friday and Mega Monday, Skynews”; secondly, the video “The new age of bartering CBS, December 13, 2008”; and finally the text “what is a Freegan”.

First of all I would like to show how consumerism is implanted in our society as the American way of life. There are two significant days, Black Friday and Mega Monday. In this Audio report of the first document, we can imagine what it looks like. Black Friday is the Friday following Thanksgiving Day and it is the starting point of the Christmas shopping season in the US. Most major retailers open very early and offer promotional sales. In this day the chaos is everywhere. Mega Monday is the name given to the busiest online shopping day of the whole year, and the point at which Internet usage is usually at its highest. Mega Monday usually falls prior immediately after the end of November, when online shoppers spend their November pay packet on Christmas presents for their friends and family. 90% of online shoppers might buy at least one item on the internet and 27 items are to be bought every second or 750 orders a minute. This shows us the crazy and controlled society that push us to consume everywhere and every time.

Secondly, let’s talk about the alternatives of this consumerism society. To start, we have a video document “the new age of bartering CBS, December 13, 2008”, in this video we can see a man interviewing a brownie maker who uses bartering to cut down the cost of the oven, the man explains that doing this he can won everything because he is paying with his own product. This report also shows a web page that put you in contact with other people that wants to use batering. In my opinion I think that bartering can be a good solution to escape the consumer society.  With bartering, we can reduce costs, and like this, won more money with out paying taxes.

Another movement is the Freeganism as we can see in the third document, the text “what is a Freegan”. This text presents and defines us a freegan, it is a person who buys as little as possible and makes use of recycled or discarded goods and materials, in an effort to reduce waste and limit environmental impact. They are all around the world and they have an objective, fighting consumerism.

In conclusion, we live in a consumer society that influences you to buy and buy everywhere and every time to follow the American way of life with the influence of Mega Monday and Black Friday for example. But fortunately, this is starting to change, many movements are appearing to cope whit over consumption, but is going to be a long and a hard way that guides you to liberty.  In my opinion, all of us have to work to build a better society independent of global companies and the material way of life. To open whit a question, haw will be the future if our society was not an over consumerism society?    

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