The McDonald’s giant interactive LED billboard at London’s Piccadilly Circus was created to do more than just sell burgers, it is an interactive poster allows the 34 million people that pass it every year to actually live the brand’s value of simple easy enjoyment.

Using a series of 40 second iconic still and moving images, people can take pictures of them with the poster as a backdrop and create a fun photo of them appearing to wear or do something. The digital technology allows to display a variety of creative executions – London – centric (e.g. bowler hat), seasonal (e.g. umbrella) and tactical (e.g. Mother’s Day, Halloween). Already in the short time that the poster has been live, a Flickr group has been created and when you go down to Piccadilly Circus you’ll now see people striking strange poses as they manoeuvre into position for their perfect shot. I think this is a piece of clever work!

Advertising Agency: Leo Burnett, London, Great Britain

This post is about the effects of global consumption societies. It can be considered as the next half of my previous post titled  ‘All Consuming: Turbo Consumption‘ in which I discussed how the society we live in has made each of us the citizens of a fast consuming society and how too much consumption caused a global financial recession.

With the rapid increase of globalisation in the 21st century, we, as the consumers of fast consuming societies, all entered into a tragicomic vicious lifecycle and we are not able to get rid of it anymore. We work hard, try hard to have everything and we continuously purchase even there is no need. The financial crisis occured due to this crazy behaviour called turbo consumption and the global financial recession was the biggest effect and reflection of turbo consumption on people’s lives. It seems that we may have forgotten another most serious and fast growing, hidden environmental problem that will maybe have the most negative impacts on humans’ lives; that is Global Warming. Despite the media’s too much focus on the early discovery of global warming, I cannot make any sense why the subject has been ignored recently – it may be because they do not want to give people the heebie jeebies after the explanation of some scientists about the global warming being unstoppable. However we should be aware that our planet warms due to our unconscious & careless consumption.

It is for sure that countries of the developed world like the USA, the UK, Japan, and Germany consume twice as much as we do due to having more buying power, but it is not an excuse for us not to take an action against global warming. We have also been making confident steps day by day to be a more developed country therefore becoming a more consuming society that damages the world as well as the environment.

In the last three decades, selfishness, rudeness is all around this fast consuming society which has been created by all of us. By living in consumption societies, the idea like “life is short, the world is mortal, so who cares, live it as you wish!” has been adopted by many. Individualism and marginalization concepts overrided the concept of society so we’ve all become independent and careless about the unification. Although we pay the society concept a lot of importance, we define ourselves as individuals. We care about human relationships, but want to live independently. As Neal Lawson points out, although our cars are designed to carry at least five to six people, we drive them alone on our own. Moreover, our modern cars equipped with latest technology accelerate global warming by consuming fuel in traffic jams and even going slower than the horse carriages in the ancient world.

Even though we use public transport, by wearing our earbuds on buses, we are withdrawn into our small worlds and alienated. As the people of the 21st century we take communication seriously, but even in a house shared with the family, everyone sits in different rooms, consumes different media, music, films, eats on their own; the communication model of human integration have changed, and mechanized with the invention and rapid development of smart computers and phones. There are people who prefer to socialise on social network websites like Facebook rather than meeting their friends in real world. From now on, even the nuclear family which is the core element of consisting a society is divided into smaller pieces that we have lost the common values shared in a family. People cannon even live without their phones. More choices for consumption have become available and this is just another effect of a consuming society.

And what about the famine and the global poverty that we cannot see in the rest of the world? As the developed and developing consumption societies, we eat more than what we need, and also chuck the leftovers out without any thought. While thousands of kids die every day of hunger in Africa, fast food companies like McDonald’s, in order to provide us hamburgers, feed cows and calves with the grain taken a few meters away from the homes of those people dying of hunger. While as a country we give our millions of pounds away to dieticians in order to lose weight, people on other countries try to live with 1 dollar a week and we continue ignoring this fact in our warm houses. Why do we consume that much?

In the past, we were only consuming to survive, and to meet our physical needs. Now we consume to fullfill our egos and emotions; we consume to buy our identity, gain respect, and protect our social status. The brands that we wear, eat, drink and buy form our identites, products talk on behalf of ourselves, and reflect our personalities. Young people are shamed to carry their phones if it is not the latest model. A child that does not wear a well-recognized branded piece of cloth is alienated by his/her peers at schools. The difference between the poor and rich is increasing among the turbo consumption societies.

We will continue to have unhappy lives in this vicious consumption cycle which is the core trigger of environmental pollution, financial crisis and global warming. The negative effects of this current system is severe and countless. I don’t think that we should stop consuming and die, but consume consciously to prevent ourselves from being the victims of our own egos and needless desires.