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The Market of (In)convenience
-- By ManuelLujan - 25 Oct 2024
Introduction
The development of technology is usually seen as a positive force pushing us towards a brighter future in many different ways, such as facilitating communication, opening new opportunities for learning, or enhancing our safety. One of the most common claims about technological development, though, is that it makes our lives easier. By removing the obstacles and barriers that stand in our way and hinder our enjoyment of art, entertainment, and education, technology makes our lives easier, stress-free, relaxed. Or at least it is supposed to.
Building the Toll Booths not the Roads
As someone born in the mid-1990s, I remember experiencing a succession of platforms used for playing audio: cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, iTunes, Spotify. I recall the thrill I felt in my teenage years when I got my first mobile device which could store and play music without any physical accessories or attachments. No matter where you were, as long as you had a tiny device inside your pocket, you could listen to dozens of songs, provided that you had previously purchased them—or pirated them, as most of us did—beforehand and stored them in your device’s SD card. Now, those long-gone years of dragging .mp3 files from a desktop computer into a cellphone storage unit seem like prehistory, the kind of stories nostalgic adults tell children to impress them.
Today, more than a decade of progress later, I am paying monthly subscriptions to streaming services in order to be able to listen to innumerable songs without actually owning any of them. Some platforms, such as Spotify and YouTube? , do offer free services, but their paid services are so convenient it is actually worth paying for them: with premium streaming, I do not get interrupted by ads after every other track, I can turn off my phone screen and the music does not automatically stop, and I am able—allowed—to download the files so that I can listen to them without an Internet connection. In other words, I find myself paying for something I used to take for granted over a decade ago. What happened?
The music industry is not an isolated case. When on-demand streaming platforms, such as Netflix, became popular, they promised to give us unlimited and unrestricted access to all sources of audiovisual entertainment and seal the fate of obsolete cable television services and video rental and retail stores. Nowadays, due to exclusive proprietary content, consumers have to purchase four or five different services to have access to a volume of media that compares to that which cable television has been offering for decades at lower prices. Maybe the most brazen example of this phenomenon is that of Anti-Lost Straps for AirPods? , which attach wireless earbuds to your neck to prevent them from falling out. What a time to be alive.
The Roads We Choose to Tread Along
One of the forces moving technology forward is convenience. Convenience comes in multiple ways and it is supposed to allow us to do that which laziness prevents us from. We can get all the stuff that we used to have to walk long distances and pay lofty amounts for. However, in these times of uninterrupted, granular change, the appearance of stagnation can be deadly for technology companies. As a result, some of them have had to resort to developing inconveniences, rather than convenience, in order to sell us the solution to the problems they created. Marketing ingenuity fills the gap left by a lack of technical innovation. By placing the barriers that they will eventually bring down, companies can secure easy room for progress and development.
The question that naturally ensues is, why do we submit to the deterioration of our conditions and buy the solutions? A likely answer is that there is a subconscious expectation that everything new is going to be better. When new products and services are introduced, aggressively marketed, and turned into mainstream staples, a need to acquire them emerges, which usually comes accompanied by the impression that the old is obsolete. Once a user base is consolidated, it is difficult to break it: network effect, the phenomenon of services becoming more valuable the more users they have, does the trick and reinforces the trend, while the fear of being stuck in the past or left alone in uncharted land drives us closer to the herd. Therefore, people emulate their peers and consume the services perceived as the latest advance. We are willing to surrender the comfort of remaining static in order to keep up with change. And when technology rewards us with tiny morsels of convenience, we pay for them gladly.
Conclusion
The incentive pushing technology companies to develop and market new products and services is not, as only a very naïve person could think, a selfless desire to advance progress. The incentive is making money. If we pay for roads, we will get roads. If we pay to tread along the paths that we used to have open for free, we will get the toll booths. Maybe the answer would be to take a more rational approach to what paths we decide to tread along.
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