My cousin Goga

I remembered a very curious experience that I had this summer. My aunt had a birthday so I visited my uncle’s house for an evening. It was just me and my mom, who asked me to come because she did not want to go alone. As expected the birthday party was full of adult female friends of my aunt, neither of whom I knew. They also did not take much interest in anything other than gossiping so I had to spend most of my time babysitting my cousins. One of the cousins called Goga is 6 years old and the subject of my story. 
It happened that my aunt’s friends also brought their children with them whom my cousin was friends with. The children having the company of each other did not need much supervision so instead I decided to watch what they do. Now, my cousin’s family is considered to be wealthy enough to afford many things outside human basic needs, meaning that my small friend got almost anything he decided to have. As a result his room was full of luxury equipment he almost never used properly: a huge plasma TV, a new PC, a laptop and a cell phone are just a few that come to mind. Considering all kinds of toys scattered all across the room I assumed that was what the children would play with but something unexpected happened. All of a sudden all three of them pulled out cell phones and started arguing about which one was the latest model. I was stunned at first and later almost embarrassed about how much more the 6 year-olds knew about the phone models than I did. “Well, ok” I thought “It is already not that surprising to see small children having cell phones mostly because of the games that come with them”. But what happened later made me understand the phenomenon a little deeper. After settling down on which cell phone model was the newest the discussion diverted to the size of the memory cards the phones had. I also witnessed some acts of bargaining two small sized memory cards for one big one just for the sake of having a memory card with the largest memory capacity. I make the last point because I know those memory cards were and would most probably stay empty! Moreover the fashion in which the trade was done made me feel like this was a previously unsettled act of trade that could have a chance to be settled at this point. Little later a similar thing happened with the new PC sitting proudly on the desk. Goga was very curious to ask me about the memory capacity of my computer. I answered that it was 250GB and as a return I got a smile and statement with a big smile “mine’s better”. I got interested and found out that Goga had hardly any files other then the windows system ones installed on his 350GB computer. He actually did not get the point when I was trying to explain what the memory space was used for, or what the numbers 350GB meant. The funny thing was that Goga is not too good at counting yet, he can compare numbers in terms of which is more than what but just listening to him trying to articulate the words for 350 was hilarious.

Now that I am taking the course and get to think about consumerism more seriously I ask myself a question: what was that? We said that consumerism is a way of buying your status in the society. Some of the authors that we read spent a good amount of words trying to explain this phenomenon but what my example illustrates is how simple the idea in reality is. It is so simple that even children can keep up and make it the main system of their interrelationship. The only thing they need to have is the simple sense of comparison of values (in this case numbers). The system can function without its participants understanding the products being used, their true use and potential; we could also say that people generally get affected by the simple and attractive idea of consumerism as a way of getting status in the society on a subconscious level. Maybe this is why consumerism spread, got accepted and deeply internalized so fast and well.  

It is also interesting why the object/s of competition in my example was technology and not for example the toys that were on the floor or the cloths that the children were wearing. It might be the case that the toys were already an object of such discourse at some time in the past but I think if we take into account the age of the children we might conclude that technology seems to give a very easy way of judging the value of its products. This mainly has to do with the fact that industries of technology tend to follow a straight line, not being very willing to change the quality, appearance or complexity of the products substantially or often, but instead progressing gradually with small steps. 

And the last point: children, especially male children always compete over something, which would most probably be the same for the past generations of children but the fact that the main object of the competition, in my example at least is technology, which is a clear representative of the consumerism culture makes me think of the depth of the influence consumerism has today.