Efficiency...

How has the increased need for efficiency in the fast paced world changed the modern world? If people look around today they will see two different worlds working together, that of supply and that of demand, both being dictated to by the need for increased efficiency. Today’s demand wants a cheaper product with value and today’s suppliers wants a large market that can easily be manipulated to suit their selling needs. Both sides, suppliers and demanders, want increased efficient either in consumption, what the producers want, or the creation of a cheap product with value, what the consumer wants. The idea of increasing efficiency is not nescient by any means. There are many quesitons on the topic, but the one that may be the more important is: are the outcomes of a more efficient world for all intents and purposes a better world?

In the modern world, people consume, it is a fact of existence. How people consume and what people consume is of great interest to anyone who produces any type of good. With the growing market, the need to secure a niche and have control over consumption is increasing because for those who do not secure a niche will soon be out of business. I recently read Vinyl Leaves; Walt Disney world and America by Stephen Fjellman, and he contends that this need to control has manifested itself in the manipulation of perception through mass media in the form of advertising. Fjellman gives the idea that consumer being actively created by replacing wants with needs. Fjellman contends that people have this constant powerlessness and guilt and to alleviate this guilt people identify with products that have been so easily laid out for them via mass media. In addition he states that there exists a corporate paternalism: telling people what to do and how to be which goes to further his point of the consumer being actively created. Fjellman states that the creation of the consumer comes with its own implications and responsibilities. One of these implications implied in his argument is the new consumer is being programmed to consumes with efficiency and subject to the whims of the suppliers.