Whatever Team

1. JESUS DARIO HERMOSILLO AGUIRRE
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE.
WHATEVER TEAM
SOCIAL MEDIA AND CONSUMERISM

2. OBJECTIVE AND RESEARCH QUESTION
How does social media affect consumerism?
Well the main objective of this study is to understand the joint impact of self-
awareness and the gender of consumers in their perceptions of brand / style / trend
/ etc ... The impact of the theory of self-concept is inextricably connected with the
perceptions of the brand and brand choice of these consumers. According to the
theory of self-congruence (Sirgy 1982). We try to make consumers aware of how
they are manipulated, informed and aware of their decisions and the number of
options they abandon when they marry some type of brand /style /etc ...
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
The issue we chose is a social and economic one as it concerns almost all the
people that are currently involved in social media. However, we chose to see it not
from the economic perspective, but from the social one. The problem we chose is
how social media encourages consumerism. This is huge issue because most of
the time users are not aware of how they are constantly being monitored by huge
brands in order to be perfect targets for whichever product they are
selling, excluding the fact that a lot of the times, they don't necessarily need them.
In order to have a better understanding of this issue in general, it is necessary to
completely understand what consumerism is. According to Collins Online
dictionary, consumerism can be defined as “the consumption of goods and

3. services.” Basically, every time you go to the supermarket to buy groceries or go
shopping for a new shirt, you are contributing to the consumerism society we live
in. According to the journal article “Consumption and the Consumer Society” by
Neva Goodwin, Julie A. Nelson, Frank Ackerman and Thomas Weisskopf,
consumerism can be a positive thing when you see it from an economic point of
view, “final consumption is the ultimate purpose of all economic activity” (Goodwin,
Nelson, Ackerman & Weisskopf, 2008, p. 2) but like previously stated, we are not
taking into consideration all the economic advantages this issue has but rather how
consumerism has become a phenomena that involves thousands of people. Rather
than changing perspectives, our main objective is to provide information of how
consumerism is encouraged. In this article, we can understand that consumerisms
main objective is to satisfy basic needs and get pleasure using goods and services.
In this modern society, the use of technology and social media has a huge role on
how consumers view this goods and services.
Now that consumerism is better understand, it is important to look on to social
media. Social media can be defined as “websites and computer programs that
make communication possible with the use of computers or mobile
phones” according to Collins Online dictionary. The top social media sites are
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, they all
have thousands of advertisements that we see every day. It is important to
acknowledge the fact that social medias had its boom in the past decade, with
millions of user joining in daily. Before this platform existed, brands promoted their
products “the old fashion way” through the use of billboards, newspapers, radio
spots and tv commercials. If the range of people they address was big, the
number they address now through social media is unimaginable. To put it in
numbers, 2 billion people use Facebook, 700 million Instagram and 68 million use
twitter approximately (Oaks, 2017.)
The number of people that brands can reach is a big reason why they use social
media to promote their products, but not the only. Another important reason of this
is that social media marketing allows brands to directly target specific users thanks
to paid-and targeted- marketing that use cookies and algorithms like Google’s
Hummingbird to store all online information and then sell it to advertising
companies so that adds of your convenience start to pop on your social media.
This is the reason why every time you google “Puebla to Cancun flights” for
example, the next day you are using Facebook, advertisements of hotels,
tours, restaurants, etc. in Cancun may start to appear and this is when it becomes
a problem. The issue here is that it is an invasion of privacy. It is known that almost
all brands that sell and advertise their products through social media pay large
amounts of money to marketing companies in order to get there product out there
and collect information of internet users, however not all people are aware of how
this social media marketing is making them spend money they don’t really have on
things they don’t really need. In agreement with the journal article “You Are What
You Buy: Postmodern Consumerism and the Construction of Self” by Danielle
Todd, consumerism works in a way to create a sense of self. This makes sense,
what you wear, what you eat, what you listen to, etc, help create your style and the
way you live. Many users believe this consumerism to make them unique, when,

4. it is the complete opposite, “...it must be concluded that consumer driven
production of self is less to do with “who am I” and more with “who are we” or “with
whom do I belong.” (Todd, 2011, p. 48) This is an issue because what many
believe is giving them a sense of self is actually taking away their identity. Brands
stop seeing people that use social medias as human beings and start seeing them
as users and possible income sources.
It is important to state the obvious, what you see in social media is not the real life.
All those famous people users see advertising a miracle product that helped them
lose weight or wonderful bracelets that help you sleep better are full of lies. Brands
know that being a celebrity sells and therefor pay them thousands of dollars to
advertise products that may have nothing of what they promise. Still, many users
fall for this celebrity marketing and end up paying hundreds of dollars on products
that don’t really work or they don’t need, just because they saw their favorite singer
using it.
In conclusion, we chose this topic because we are aware of the huge number of
people that are active on social media and the constant exposure they have
to adverts, whether they know it or not. We believe it was important to share this
information for people to realize the huge impact consumerism has on one's self
and how social media is one of the main platforms that encouraged this by allowing
brands to monitor and target their users. Consumerism is inevitable, almost
everything we do is somehow linked to it, food we buy, places we travel, music we
listen to are some examples of how we contribute to a consumer society. The key
is to be informed and use it wisely in order to truly satisfy one’s needs and wants
and use social media to its full advantage, not as a brand, but as a user.
SOURCES:
1) Collins Dictionary https://www.collinsdictionary.com
2) Goodwin, N., Nelson, J. A., Ackerman, F., & Weisskop, T. (2001).
Consumption and the Consumer Society. International Journal of
Sustainability in Higher Education, 2(3), 1-21.
doi:10.1108/ijshe.2001.2.3.288.7
3) Matsuyama, K. (2000). The Rise of Mass Consumption
Societies*. Department of Economics, Northwestern University. Retrieved
November 27, 2018.
4) Oaks, J. (2017, September 19). How Social Media Has Changed
Consumerism. Retrieved November 28, 2018,
from https://socialnomics.net/2017/09/19/how-social-media-has-changed-
consumerism
5) Todd, D. (2011). You Are What You Buy: Postmodern Consumerism and
the Construction of Sel. University of Hawai‘i at Hilo · Hawai‘i Community
College, 10, 48-50. doi:10.3897/bdj.4.e7720.figure2f
KEYWORDS

5. 1) Social media:
2) Consumerism:
We chose these key words because they are related to the issue
we chose; how social media encourages consumerism. They are relevant and
can be found in the problem itself. According to the UNESCO thesaurus this are
some related terms with social media and consumerism.
We also looked for these terms in an online thesaurus (Thesaurus.com) and this
are the best descriptions that best fit our topic:

6. 1. Consumerism: A modern movement dor the protection of consumer
against useless, inferior, or dangerous products, misleading advertising,
unfair pricing, etc.
2. Social Media: Websites and other online means of communiaction
that are used by large groups of people to share information and to
develop social and professional contacts.
SEARCH STRATEGY
One of the advantages of my strategy is that the information we seek is easier to
find, the information we do not have thanks to our keywords, than in our work.
Truthfulness is important in this kind of thing, because anything that is wrong, can
lead to a big problem, it is important that everything is in order, that of course the
information we provide our readers report correctly, something that we consider
very important is that the site must be updated on a regular basis. The article must
have its date of edition and must be of a current and reliable function.
Looking for several ways to do our search reference, this was that we liked:
(Consumerism OR consumer) AND (social media OR society) WITH
(marketing) AND (affect) AND (product) AND (identity)
Since it was the one that brought us more successful results to what we were
looking for, because other of the search strategy are, they went wrong, with many
references, with very little subject about what we really wanted.

7. These were our previous proposals:
• (consumerism OR consumer) AND (social media OR society) and
(marketing) AND (marketing)
But it happened that with the first reference we obtained 21,848 results and it is
very many.
• (consumerism OR consumer) AND (social media OR society) AND
(marketing) AND (product) AND (affect)
With the second reference we get less, but 687 are still too many.
• (Consumerism) AND (social media OR society) AND (market) WITH
(product)
With the third reference we get less, but 181 are still so much.
• (Consumerism) AND (social media OR society) AND (market OR marketing)
AND (product)
With the fourth reference, grew to 1,508
• (Consumerism OR consumer) AND (market OR marketing) AND (product)
The fifth reference we found many more (400,784), and we realized that it was
because we put many “AND”.

9. CRAAP TEST
C--> CURRENCY:
Our blog perfectly applies to currency because we try to make our publications
daily and of recent and interesting topics for all public, when our information is of
the network we try and we make our links keep working and in this way our readers
can investigate and know more on consumerism applied in all areas.
R--> RELEVANCE
Our blog counts with relevance, since all our publications are published with
respect to the subject that we chose, we try that the provided information is the
appropriate one and has a great impact for the people that are reading us and, in
this way, show more interest, and in this same way, we try to make our information
fully comprehensible in order for readers to be informed about social media and
consumerism.
A--> AUTHORITY Regarding authority, we consider that it is important that readers
know who was the one who made the publication, this is why we decided to sign
each of our publications to announce who made it, in this way give confidence and
have a little more order with our blog. All the posts we published also have links to
the pages were we took the information from so readers can see the original
authors of the pages.
A-->ACCURANCY
As with other points, we review each of our publications to avoid having
orthographic errors, in the same way we avoid leaving the context of the
publication and link each topic with a website where you can verify that the
information that we writer is verifiable
P-->PURPOSE
Our blog has the clear purpose of demonstrating the effects that consumerism
brings us, we try at all times to demonstrate why we chose this topic and persuade
the public to understand why social media or social media affects the way we
buy. Our purpose in general was to inform the reader of the relation that
consumerism has with social media.

10. The platform we selected was Blogger. This page allows you to easily create blogs
and add as many publications as you want. The topic we chose had to do with
social media, therefor we thought that a blog was the most appropriate platform
because of the range of people that it could reach. It is online so anyone that has
access to a computer can access it and look through it. We liked the page because
it was easy to use but it had the option to add everything we wanted from videos
and pictures to adding links that take you directly to the page where we got the
information from. It also gives the option of statistics where you can see things like
how many visits it has per day, how many followers, entries and where the main
audience is from. Our intended audience were people that are active on social
media, so an online platform was the best choice because it is likely that people
that read blogs also have other forms of social media.
Conclusion
In conclusion, our experience working on this project is that it was challenging. As
a team, we had to be in constant communication in order to really accomplish our
goal and keep up with all the work that had to be done. The communication in our
team was good. From the starts, we did a checklist in Trello that helped each team
member to see which day they were in charge of posting on the blog.
In general, we did good in the posts. At first because we didn’t knew much about
the topic, our posts were not really informative, however as days went by and we
started to become more and more familiar with the topic our posts improved in
content. Something that also helped a lot were all the topics we saw in class like
the importance of keywords and how to do a good search strategy in order to
maximize efficiency when looking for a certain topic. The teamwork was effective
most of the time, however we did have a few setbacks. Out of the 5 original team
members, only 3 remain as Carolina Herrera and Angelica Zenteno quit the class
without informing the rest of the team members previously so this made the work
load much bigger but at the end we managed.

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