WALMART SELF CHECKOUT TV

Ritzer suggests that we donвЂ™t mind because we are enjoying ourselves. Only a small percentage of social media users earn money. When you upload photos to Instagram or videos to Tik-Tok, or when you make a post on Twitter or Reddit, you are doing the job of content producer, and the social media site makes profits as a result. We provide posts, record videos, create memes, manage groups, and so on - without any expectation of remuneration. Sure, some people make millions as social media influencers, but most of the rest of us (including writers on Medium) earn little to nothing. Without people posting on Twitter, there is no Twitter, for example. Social media platforms exist only because of user-generated content. Not only do social media users pay with their personal data, they also pay with actual labor.

Worldwide, the total number of social media users is in the billions. More than 80% of Americans use YouTube and nearly 70% are on Facebook, according to the latest data from Pew Research.

Oddly, this hasnвЂ™t deterred too many of us. Social media companies and others collect and sell this data for profit. Browsing the internet and using social media require not just our attention but our personal data: who we are, what we like and dislike, where we go, who we associate with. Perhaps it is a small price to pay for entertainment, but that price has increased since the world went online.

WALMART SELF CHECKOUT TV

For the privilege of watching television shows, they provide the labor of their attention to the TV screen. When Canadian researcher Dallas Smythe studied the phenomenon in relation to television, he called it the вЂњaudience commodity.вЂќ The viewing audience, he argued, is performing unpaid work every time they watch a commercial. We know this, because we are old enough to remember the changes, or we know people who used to do these jobs.Д«ut in the case of social media activities, we are performing work without even realizing it, just by participating. These are all tasks that, not so long ago, paid employees completed for us or helped us to accomplish. Today, we use ATMs for cash, pump our own gas, book our own flights and hotels, order pizza, even use our smartphones to tour real estate. Self-service shopping has been around for a long time - consider the automats of the 1920s and 30s - but the growth of electronic and digital technologies has increasingly shifted the task of production to consumers. Ritzer indicates we are at the state where вЂњthe interrelationship of production and consumption where it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish one from the other.вЂќ Digital Work The lines between production and consumption arenвЂ™t blurred theyвЂ™ve disappeared. WeвЂ™re living in a do-it-yourself economic culture. Today we are primarily prosumers because, as technology has advanced, we have been required to become more involved with the production process. But todayвЂ™s electronic and digital technologies have tipped the scale: the process of consumption these days requires a much greater amount of production. Production of goods has always included at least a little consumption, he explains, even if itвЂ™s just the acquisition and use of raw materials. Sociologist George Ritzer has applied the idea of the prosumer to our 21st-century technologies. Toffler used prosumer to describe how technology is blurring the line between production and consumption, but even he could not predict the extent to which those lines are dissolving. The term prosumer is a portmanteau of producer and consumer and was coined in 1980 by futurist Alvin Toffler in his book, The Third Wave. In fact, we may be more correctly called prosumers. We may not realize it, but we are intuiting an important economic idea: every consumer is also a producer in some way or form. We are aware that shopping requires physical and mental exertion: searching for the correct item, comparing prices, putting purchases in the car, bringing them home. In our family, we jokingly refer to the process of shopping as вЂњhunting and gathering,вЂќ alluding to the activity of non-agrarian civilizations.

This is true, and the proliferation of self-checkout lanes irks me for that reason, but also for another: these big box retailers, who are already making billions of dollars of profit, are exploiting their customers by making them work for what they are going to buy. YouвЂ™ve probably seen the meme going around social media urging you not to use self-checkouts because theyвЂ™re putting store employees out of work.

Walmart self checkout