Consumerism

David Marsell

11/21/16

HIST104AKP

Cluster Summary 9

        There absolutely is a relation between communications and ideas.  The more people that communicate the better because everyone has a different perspective.  As technological innovations made it easier for people to communicate, people began to realize that even if they are comfortable with their current conditions there is always room to make it better.  The McNeill’s write, “With radio, movies, and TV in particular, hungry illiterates could catch a glimpse (accurate or not) of how more fortunate people lived” (270).  This suggests the idea of a cult or a religion.  The potentially false hope that your life is not that bad nor important and there is a chance it will all be made better.  Along with this, technology and communication made it easier for politicians to gain power.  The book notes that this idea of mass media promotes ambition and resentment (McNeill, McNeill 270).  These emotions are easily manipulated when the right things are said.  Hitler did a great job of manipulating the masses into following him.  He made the Germans resent the Jewish population while making them ambitious to make their country, for lack of better words, great again.  This is important to remember because this was less than a century ago.  After many years, the people became aware of the schemes the manipulative media people would play and it did not work as well.  Also, politicians became very similar in the sense that they understood how to effectively manipulate people through media.  Science and Technology have not always been closely linked.  In the past, technology was not needed to advance or apply science.  As science became more complicated and essential to win wars and improve countries, technology became more important.  Scientists needed the states money to make advance their technology and at the same time, the states needed the technology so it was a case of mutual needs and wants.  Science slowly began to take over the role of religion as it began to answer questions religions had attempted to answer.  For the things science could not answer, religion stepped in and altered their stances in hopes to fill that gap.  Science played a crucial role in the population growth of the twentieth century.  The world’s population quadrupled in this century.  The book states, “The main reason for this extraordinary burst was the transfer of successful death control measures to most populations on earth” (McNeill, McNeill 279).  I feel that urbanization led to the population growth because urbanization helped humans solve many medical problems.  All different diseases and injuries being treated in the same place gave doctors and scientists an easy opportunity to learn more and help fight these diseases.  People did not move to cities because the countryside was overpopulated, they went there for opportunity.  This opportunity ended up creating several advancements in medicine and technology.  As populations increased, the rate advancements were made increased.  Ironically, urbanization also made human population growth slow down after nineteen-seventy.  Children made it harder for families to thrive because they were expensive and unproductive.  On the countryside, children could do the tasks their parents do making them quite useful.  Fossil fuels also played an important role in human population growth because the more energy humans could harness the more they could do.  The downside to this is that the extraction of fossil fuels greatly hurts the environment.  Burning fossil fuels, using car emissions as an example, also hurts the environment by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causing the planet to be at abnormally high temperatures.  The reason people haven’t stopped using these fossil fuels yet is because they have been so effective and profitable.      

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