Present etiquette

From the 1st to the 12th day of Christmas my true love gave to me... well, nothing. And the feeling’s mutual. I didn’t get my boyfriend anything either. This may come as a shock to some of you, as did a friend of mine when she asked what I had got him. "We don’t really believe in giving presents for the sake of it," I told her.

If only her now ex-boyfriend lived by the same philosophy. He "chucked a sook" having received a canvas print from her one Christmas. My guess is that he was wondering where the other nine parts to his gift were.

How did we come to breed kids with attitudes such as these anyway? Then I thought back to my shifts in retail this Christmas season, and how I’ve swiped many a parent’s credit card for upwards of $500 on one child.

I trolled the internet hoping to point fingers at who got us into this mess.

According to Articles Base, "in the Christian faith gifts… represent the presents the wise men brought to the baby Jesus." Since then "gift giving became a symbolic reminder of the birth of Christ."

Then, “Christmas shopping was encouraged to overcome the depression during the period 1839-40” (All Things Christmas). There’s not much difference in 2009, with recent news coverage lamenting that this year’s Christmas expenditure won’t be enough to undo the damage of the global financial crisis.

Ironic how materialism rides on spirituality.

Love, Noeline.
xox

Feliz cumpleaños, 生日快樂, Hyvää syntymäpäivää, среќен роденден, Happy Birthday

Yesterday I turned 20. How does it feel? About 15. I still can't drive. My mum still makes my lunch. I sill can't cook anything but toast and two minute noodles. I still live at home.

But I have stopped counting down the days, the presents, the money, the people. Does that make me mature minded or just a killjoy? Have I lost that intrinsic human element that makes people want, or need to make a shindig every 365th day of their lives?

Greg Merrick wouldn't say so. I've merely risen above a capitalist scam that maintains the hegemonic structure of society.

...the traditions associated with... birthdays, especially the obligatory purchasing of gifts, feeds the greedy jaws of capitalism by promoting the malignant scourge of wasteful consumerism, and therefore contributes to the acceleration of our own demise. How’s that for irony?

In defence, Samantha Price states:

I don't see the problem with giving people birthday presents. In fact, its almost as fun as getting your own!... birthday parties provide a positive function because people might feel blue over getting older, and parties make them feel better.

Good or bad, how have we come to comply with such an unquestioned tradition? The Coolest Kid Birthday Parties website reveals that

Birthday celebrations began as a form of protection. It was a common belief that evil spirits were more dangerous to a person when he or she experienced a change in their daily life, such as turning a year older. To protect them from harm, friends and family would gather around the birthday person and bring good cheers, thoughts and wishes. Giving gifts brought even more good cheer to ward off the evil spirits. Noisemakers are thought to be used at parties as a way of scaring away the evil spirits.

In some cultures rites of passage into adulthood are marked by a certain number of birthdhays. In Africa children "leave their parents' homes, paint their bodies white and are taught how to become young warriors" (Birthday Celebrations). Jewish boys have a bar mitzvah, Jewish girls have a bat mitzvah, Indian girls have a thread ceremony, and Filipino girls have a debut (Wikipedia) In Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Uruguay - girls dance the waltz with their father and/or potential suitors. Doing so in high heels worn for the first time represents the transition from a girl into a woman (Bubble Gum Parties).

But sometimes the line between a rite of passage and an extravagant display of wealth and love become blurred. Check out this brat.



Love, Noeline
xox

Chequebook

The following is an appropriated exceprt from an essay I did last year. I’m not an academic (yet) but it was marked by one or a few, and I got a Distinction if that helps my credibility. Thought I’d share it with you all while Facebook is still timely and hasn’t been usurped by Twitter yet.

“Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life” (Facebook 2008), and then some. You may or may not have noticed the banner ads on the right hand side of your home page. But just how much you’ve been sucked into them might give us an indication of how well Facebook fulfils its purpose as a White Pages for third party businesses – a database of “sixty million active members” (Krivac 2008, p. 41).

From an economic perspective, the pitfalls of broadcast advertising, which saw the wasted energy of companies “pushing their message to consumers who would never buy their product” is alleviated by “niche communities [who] put the consumer at the beginning” (Digital Branding 2008). This is a major theme captured by Hirst and Harrison (2007) who argue that

the commercialisation of the internet in the past fifteen years has also led to a greater corporate reliance in personal data to refine advertising and marketing techniques at the heart of narrowcasting (p. 286).

Facebook achieves this “by collating ever more detailed subscriber profiles… to categorise users, charging premiums for the sale of these groups to advertisers seeking highly specific niche markets” (Murray 2005, p. 424 cited in Hirst and Harrison 2007, p. 69).

Facebook's Beacon records the “clickstream” (Hirst 2007, p. 285), or browsing patterns of its members through the use of cookies: “a small, unobtrusive piece of software… used to track preferences when visiting that website… [to construct] a profile of the computer user” (Hirst and Harrison 2007, p. 284). Facebook would then advertise similar searches on the ‘News Feed’ of the individual and their network of friends.

On the receiving end, members claim that their personal details were exploited for capitalist gain. For example, Chris Nash reveals that Facebook makes money by “extract[ing] information from people’s private to private communications” (2008, 3:30min)* and sell it to advertisers, as well as businesses for the purpose of screening potential employees. Yet, “the supporters of free-market data-mining argue that they are only trying to satisfy consumer demand” (Hirst and Harrison 2007, p. 326).

With legal policies slow to catch up, the government “must be careful that it does not appear to be too hastily doing the bidding of the major commercial players” (Hirst and Harrison 2007, p. 279). But when “personal data become the lawful property of Internet firms, and of their clients” (Castells 2001, p. 174) to ”monopol[ise] control over the information… so that it can tax advertisers wishing to reach these individuals at the highest possible rate” (New Era of Advertising Hinges on the Free Flow of Information 2007) - an ethico-legal paradox becomes apparent.

From personal experience, when I started posting status updates about the large amount of food I ate that day, I was bombarded with weight loss ads such as the ones below.




While posting comments to my friend about the PCD concert, I was quick to receive this.


Oh, and they also know that I love to write.




Don’t believe me? Let me introduce you to my best friend Jeremy. He’s Asian and he likes basketball. Keen to move out of home, he recently searched real estate online. “Bingo!” shouted Facebook.




As can be seen, socialisation within a virtual landscape brings with it issues of ownership, control, ethics, privacy; and the disclosure of consumer buying habits, preferences and personal details. But is the invasion of our privacy a fair price to pay for keeping up with our friends?

I wonder what ad I’ll get next. Anti-spyware software, perhaps? How close do your Facebook ads hit home? Tell us by clicking on the ‘comment’ link below.


SOURCES

2007, ‘New Era of Advertising Hinges on the Free Flow of Information’, Marketing Week, 15 November, p. 22.

2008, Digital Branding: Close friends, New Media Age, London.

Castells, M. 2002, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, Oxford, New York.

Hirst, M. and Harrison, J. 2007, Communication and New Media: From Broadcast to Narrowcast, Oxford, Victoria.

Price, J. 2008, Facebook: Making Friends or Making Sales?, Facebook Podcast Part 1: Jenna talks to Chris Nash, Communication and Information Environments, University of Technology, Sydney.

Krivac, T. 2008, ‘Facebook 101: Ten Things You Need to Know About Facebook’, Information Today, Vol. 25 Issue 3, pp. 1-44.