(February 3, 2014 at 3:05 pm)pocaracas Wrote: You know you're in a hyped consumer society when you celebrate commercials.For a time, the Super Bowl was where advertisers went all out creatively, in the hopes of making an impression on what is usually the largest viewing audience of the year. There were usually at least two or three ads that were funny or otherwise memorable enough that you actually bothered to watch the commercials. The last few years it has dried up, IMO. Maybe the ads of the past increased expectations or maybe we're coming to realize that they're just ads, or maybe I'm just getting older.
I don't get the big deal...
But we've been a rabid consumer society for a very long time, so much so that we're probably still rabidly consuming even though that age has passed us and we really should be saving.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
