"It is always the latest song, the one that echoes last in the listeners' ears, that people praise the most." -Telemachus (The Odyssey)
Humans beings seem to have always housed the desire to discover the next best thing, praising the up-and -coming and shunning older models. How many of us discarded our perfectly functional iPods or cell phones when a newer, more exciting model was introduced? Does our desire for the latest and (so we think) greatest reflect an appreciation of innovation, or a naïve belief that the new is always an improvement from the old?
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
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This simplification, I believe should only apply since the industrial revolution when the consumer- corporation relationship became a major advance in the "reality" of the new world. Since then, the importance of money has increased more and more and now it can be considered a way of life. Getting to my point however, new isn't always better because, especially in our society, we see degradation in the quality of products in order for companies to save a few cents here and there. For example, Coca-cola was introduced in a glass bottle and now they've degraded it to plastic. They also started with steel cans, now they sell them in aluminum. Therefore, to answer Hannah's question, both mentioned possibilities seem accurate. We have no choice in the appreciation of newer innovatingly cheaper packaging and cool gadgets because corporations compete with each other and the only way to counteract it is to start up a company of your own that sells its products for the opposite reasons. Also it is naïve consideration that new is always better than the old because the people who think that are probably too consumed by the advertising and the hype that the company puts out when there could be a lesser company with an equal or better product.
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