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If there is one thing that new media technology does well, it is sell. Materialism has been an ethical issues for nearly all technologies, but never before has acquisition of goods been quite as conspicuous. According to Neil Postman (1993) the rise of the technological system led to a belief, "that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived not as children of God, or even as citizens, but as consumers, that is to say, as markets" (p. 42). James Carey (1992) wrote,
The new media centralize and monopolize civic knowledge and , as importantly, the techniques of knowing. People become "consumers" of communication as they become consumers of everything else, and as consumers they stand dependent on centralized sources of supply. (p. 169)
Turning a want into a need is just one of the things that the technological system does according to Ellul and others. Paul Saffo [26], director of the Institute for the Future, studies technology and future trends.
There's this myth that we're satisfying consumer needs with information technologies. Eventually we do satisfy needs but long before you even begin to touch a need, what the technology does is really satisfy desires. Let's face it, information technology is so far away from the basic needs of food and shelter and companionship that it's an optional desire. It's only after it's been in our lives for a decade or two that it becomes a real need. The telephone in 1900 was a desire. The telephone in 1995 is a desperate need. If you switched off the tiny phone network in 1900 nothing would have happened. Shut down the global phone system on this planet for 30 seconds or even a part of it and you'll probably have airplanes flying into each other, hospitals not getting the plasma they need to keep people alive. You know you will kill people by shutting down the phone system today. And today personal computers are for the vast majority of people who own them optional desires. They could happily get rid of them and never miss the device in their life. In fact their life would probably be better and more peaceful without them. I guarantee you within 10, 15 years, those devices on our desk tops will be such essential needs that you could not take them away from people without killing someone in the process. (Frontline interview)
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