When Hyper-Consumerism collides with Super-Criticism
Yesterday, Christmas Day, I read about Jason Calacanis‘ excitement about Blippy, a new social way for people to share what you’re buying with others. YIKES. I signed up for the beta waiting list of course, but started to think about the ramification of monitoring everything that I buy over time. Everything from eBay, Amazon, Borders, Oldies.com, DeepDiscount, Newbury Comics, Woot, BensBargains, GoDaddy and MANY, MANY more. Blippy steals a tagline similar to Twitter’s, which is, “What are your friends buying?” Double YIKES.
If there’s anything that I’m REALLY good at it, it’s buying stuff. If selling things online were as easy and as fun as buying stuff online, I’d be retired by now - if I believed in retirement, that is. I’m quite certain that my mailman is probably suspicious of all the packages I receive on an almost daily basis. At one point in my life I had such disdain for a co-worker who seemed to derive her entire identity from buying things. When a package would arrive she would announce it widely about what it was she bought and why it was the greatest thing in the world. My consumption is much more private, with only my wife and postman having any real clues as to what kind of dollars I drop on a monthly basis for my obsessions (mostly music CDs, music DVDs and music books (biographies - not the sheet music stuff - being a musician is way too difficult)). Here’s a “partial” list of what I received from my wife for Christmas yesterday - most of which came right from my convenient Amazon wishlist:
Toots & The Maytals - Roots Reggae CD Box Set
Say Anything - Blu-Ray
Wall Street - Blu-Ray
Spectacle (Season 1)- The Elvis Costello music TV show - Blu-Ray
Wlid Years - The Myth and Music of Tom Waits - book
Devo - Limited Ed CD/DVD/Vinyl box
Sting - Bring on the Night - Blu-Ray
There was more, but I’m already embarrassed by how much stuff I get, and how much stuff I’ve already bought during the month of December. If I documented it all here, I would probably need to sign myself up for some kind of 12 step program for obsessives. Maybe that’s how blippy will help me. We’ll see.
But what will happen when we can view each others consumptive habits? If you go out to eat three times more often than I do, will that create a rift between us? If I buy new clothes twice a year and you buy new clothes twice a month, will that change my shopping habits? Plus, what about the idea that we are all critics? There was a quote I barely recall about the power of blogging and what a massively powerful tool it could be for communication, but instead all we want to use it for is to write our own music and movie reviews.
If our new reality will be being aware of all our friends purchases, and then our friends are providing feedback and criticism about the things they buy, the shows they see, the places they eat, maybe their feedback would actually reduce my consumption? Soon someone will mashup consumption objectives with an augmented reality app like FourSquare and we will actually become the Pacman eating our way through life at a series of local restaurants and pubs, chasing incentive coupon ghosts that we never really seem to catch. Or maybe it will change crime; Maybe I’ll just wait for someone to post that they’ve just purchased a new Mercedes or a new 5 carat diamond and then pay them a visit… while they are away on vacation, tweeting live from Amsterdam.
Finally, blogging has been a mostly word-based communication vehicle for 10 years. Podcasts have allowed me to hear people’s thoughts and ideas, but now Nokia phones, iPhones and Droids are able to stream video in real-time and capture video forever, so establishing your opinions on a restaurant could happen while you’re still in the restaurant! Maybe that kind of reality would be better since we know for certain that the person providing the review was actually there. (Just reserved OneTakeReviews.com for this idea). Maybe we even begin to review the wait-staff within the restaurants as well. Maybe I’ll follow a waitperson on Twitter first to make sure they are happy with their career (and less likely to spit in my pasta). Things are getting really crazy.
But I need to go now - I’ve got an ebay auction ending soon and another opportunity to spend $80 before lunch. Not to mention a haircut.
-pjc