Advertising and robots and planned obsolescence. Oh my!

As we have seen with the diary going digital in the form of the social network, manufacturing too is going digital (The Economist, 2007) just as the Industrial Revolution of 1760, where manufacture moved from traditional handmade methods to workers using machinery designed to make it faster and cheaper, now in our modern society we have seen another transition -- we now have automaton machines making other machines. 

Image retrieved from: http://www.123rf.com

Assembly isn't the only process that is evolving and going digital. Advertising has been in use since 4000 BCE where the ancient Egyptians used papyrus for sales signs and marketing. Advertising has undergone many changes since then such as; the materials used; content -- the use of propaganda in WWI and WWII -- and now with the aid of social networking advertising can be tailored to you and your interests and delivered directly to your 'smart' phone or computer.

The winners in this situation are the Transnational Corporations that hold most of the world’s wealth and have their products manufactured overseas in developing countries where most works live on $1 a day - or less (Dicken, 2007). Companies such as these use "planned obsolescence" (Kuttainen, 2013) to keep their monopoly on the market through the 'want and need' of their consumers to have the newest and most fashionable product in the market regardless of the condition of the workers that made it - if there was any workers at all and it wasn't made by robots.

Reference list: 

Economist, The (2012) Manufacturing - The third industrial revolution
                Retrieved from: http://www.economist.com/node/21553017/print

Dicken P. (2007) Global Shift (5th edition) - Mapping and changing contours of the world economy.
                London, Sage Publications.

Kuttainen V. (2013). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narratives and the Making of Place, Lecture 8, Stuff                           [Power Point Slides] Townsville, Australia, Retrieved from http://www.learnjcu.edu.au