Good morning everyone, I’m Frans Rubio and today I will be talking to you about our culture of consumerism as Chileans and how it has unfolded over time since the Pinochet dictatorship...

It’s a fact that we have always been consumerist since the very first moment of our birth, but from the dictatorship on Chileans have become more consumerist than ever before and not always in a good way. Media mass and advertising play an important role in this story because they’ve helped people to create necessities that are not actually necessities. I will explain this in a minute, but I also want to add that as our society becomes more developed over time, things that were not a need before has now become a need in order to be actualized.

When I say that media mass and advertising play a big role I mean that they can make a person think that they need a lotion for their skin when they actually don’t need it, or maybe they do, but this is not a real necessity as eating or drinking water. That is what they did with electronic devices such as tv’s, cell phones, computers, laptops, even cars.

However, nowadays everything is becoming more technological, even education. For instance, here in university, we use computers very much during our classes, sometimes we don’t even need a copybook. Therefore, as everything is more modernized, we might say that a computer would be essential to us so that we can have an updated education.

Another point is that with this capitalist system that runs our country people is spending money that they don’t have with these credit cards that they give to them and that is just one way to be up to your neck in debt because I am sure that this is a huge business for the powerful people of the elites. Now we are a consumer society and we don’t realize, we just live it and we keep playing the same game over and over.

In conclusion, I think that we should overthink a bit more about the things we need and the things we are buying and we also need to be aware that they will try to make us want to buy the most useless thing in the world in order to earn money. So guys, don’t trust everything you see on tv or everything that you hear on the radio because I would say most of them are manipulated by powerful people that don’t care about us.

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