A few weeks ago I published a 5 Minute Break on the subject of phone zombies – those people who insist on walking along crowded streets with their noses so deeply buried in their phones that they are apparently oblivious to where they are going. My point was that as they are not looking, then it becomes necessary for the more responsible citizens who are walking towards them to get out of their way, or shout to alert them (see the full article here).
This week I would like to expand on this, and use these Phone Zombies to illustrate a wider point – that as a society, I believe we are becoming increasingly self-centred. Indeed, it seems to me that we’re going well beyond mere self-centredness and have arrived at an altogether more insidious place. A place called ‘self-entitlement.’ A place where anyone who wants to act in a selfish way can do so, despite the negative impact their behaviour might have on others. Indeed, any resulting unpleasantness is the other person’s fault for trying to thwart their self-expression.
Take these phone zombies as an example. When I challenged one after I had had to step out into the road to avoid his meanderings, I got a mouthful of abuse. ‘How dare I,’ he seemed to be saying (I didn’t hang around to catch the exact words, so I am speculating a bit here), ‘how dare I tell him to watch where he was going? I was abusing his right to look at his phone while he was walking, and the mere fact that I had to step into the road was my effing fault, not his.’
Perhaps this same chap was in an Audi A3 that tried to pull into my lane on the M5 recently, causing me to have to brake hard and hit the horn. If I interpret the single finger sign he gave me out of the window correctly, before he sped off at well over 70mph, then it was my fault for being in his way, rather than his for not looking as he pulled out.
A couple of further examples, neither of which need much elaboration: people who don’t pick up their dog’s mess (or hang a bag of the foul stuff on a tree – what’s that all about?), and people who eat noisily, talk or look at their phones in the theatre.
How have we got to this place? As a writer of Tudor-era historical fiction, it is tempting to say that it is merely a continuation of the entitlement previously felt only by the nobility and landed classes – but now democratised to all members of society. And I am sure there’s an element of truth in that – but I think it goes further. Maybe it’s the weakening of the influence of the church on society (see here for more of my thoughts on this). But if you look at the church’s use of entitlement to protect its own position – from the Inquisition all the way to today’s US Christian Fundamentalism – then that argument doesn’t hold. Indeed, the church’s persecution complex when challenged on its dogmatic insistence that everyone has to live by its moral code, seems to me to be the very definition of self-entitlement.
No, I think the blame lies with consumerism in general, and marketing in particular.
“Whoa there, Jonathan!” you might interject here, “are you lurching to the left? Are you becoming a bit of a socialist in your old age?”
“Well, no,” I would reply, “I still think that the overall freedoms of a capitalist society far outweigh the necessary restrictions of socialism, but hear me out on this.”
Consumerism means offering in essence what the buyer wants (or in the case of Apple, what the buyer didn’t actually know they wanted, but do now). So companies are only successful if they meet the desires of the consumer. And as the existence of a thriving market research industry demonstrates, companies will spend vast sums of money finding out exactly what those desires are. So we’re a society where the needs of the individual are not only respected, they are actually worshiped – at the altar of consumerism.
Which is where marketing comes in. In the old days, this was conducted on a one-to-many model – where a single producer of goods or services shouted their wares by advertising to anyone who would listen (usually a large – and therefore diverse – segment of consumers). As receivers of this advertising, we recognised that we were not seen as individuals – so we were less likely to feel any sense of self-entitlement as a result.
But now marketing has recognised that we really are a much more diverse bunch, and each of us is in a mini-segment of one. So even though mass-targeted advertising does still happen, the internet has enabled a new ‘sharp-end’ of modern marketing that works on a one-to-one model – with each of us being served marketing content over the internet based on our individual buying and viewing habits. OK, it can sometimes get it spectacularly wrong – such as the recent spate of ads I have been getting on Instagram for private jet hire – but in essence we are now having our very own individual needs and desires heard by companies, all falling over themselves to offer us the mix of products and services that is wholly unique to us as individuals.
And if that does not make us feel self-entitled, I don’t know what does.
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Do you agree with our society becoming more entitled? What other examples can you give? (use the comments section below).
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