Ideas

This may be a potential tangent but after yesterday I was thinking about a few of the concepts. This largely stems from our initial project as well, why were we forced to make our own clothes to remove ourselves from the 'system'?

I loved the Jodies' idea of the invisibles in everyday life. Relating this to yesterday, I think this invisibility that people ignore in their everyday lives does interlink with consumerism and consumer culture.

I do hope that if people were given more information about their consumer choices that they would act upon their moral compasses and pay more for a fairer product. In effect using capitalism against itself with the current asymmetric information, i.e the lack of knowledge the consumer has in the market compared to the producers. I think this is also an invisible.

This also relates to the other concept of being targeted extremely often every day by marketing companies, selling products which we don't need but also promoting themselves as a good/friendly etc when they are not (conspicuous consumption).

Companies have literally created products for people to by, for example the diamond ring industry, my personal enemy for the last couple years.The industry is massively over-priced and demonstrates the extent that humans will go too to in essence buy an extremely shiny rock :/. By using elaborate marketing schemes we have been compelled to buy this to get married. I read somewhere that the corporations restrict the supply to massively over-inflate the price of diamonds, to the extent that they threw tonnes in the ocean. Here is a video which partially gets at what I am trying to explain :

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5kWu1ifBGU.


In a way I think perhaps by exposing companies true aims they are forced to change their ways through the capitalist system due to the thirst for profit, however it currently remains largely invisible.

Campaigns like these have been gaining success, for example http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21595948-israels-politicians-sound-rattled-campaign-isolate-their-country

BDS is a campaign which promotes the avoidance of buying products funding Israel.

I was also mentioning when I went to a lecture with the head of Oxfam and spoke to him about new campaigns, this is the "Behind the Brand" campaign which I found absolutely fascinating and was quite successful in coercing companies to change their inhumane methods.

http://www.behindthebrands.org/

However, all of these campaigns are extremely limited, what happens if religious organisations/banks/governments could be scrutinized by the same mechanisms?

Just a thought, which semi-relates to our play project.