Blog Post #1

After reading the essays, "Economic Citizenship and the Rhetoric of Gourmet Coffee" by Marche and "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" by Mathieu, I came to realize that these authors wrote about these subjects because they are subjects of everyday American life, whether we use them or not.

"So what do we buy when we buy a cup of Starbucks? One might be tempted to argue, 'Just good coffee.' But that position itself engages in scotosis, because it looks narrowly at the quality of the product (something the consumer somehow 'deserves') and ignores the Starbucks worldview as well as the ramifications of its practices within the global economy. When we consume Starbucks, we consume justifying the narratives along with the products."

This quote from Marche's essay has a good point, but almost seems to accuse the consumer for agreeing with the practices of Starbucks through a simple purchase. In actuality, there may be more going on with the company than the consumer will ever know based on how the product is presented to the public. I don't think that Starbucks would be affected much as a whole if a single consumer walked away, but only if large amounts of people banded together to protest what is being sold. Marche sometimes comes off with an unrealistic proposal of how to fix the problem, when it could take much more effort to fix.

"A recent study out of Australia (where close to half the population is active on Facebook), titled 'Who Uses Facebook?,' found a complex and sometimes confounding relationship between loneliness and social networking. Facebook users had slightly lower levels of 'social loneliness'—the sense of not feeling bonded with friends—but 'significantly higher levels of family loneliness'—the sense of not feeling bonded with family."

In Mathieu's essay, I thought this was an interesting quote because it recognizes an arising problem Facebook is bringing to our society. The fact that users are so focused on staying connected with friends whether they are close or distant, at the expense of family is sad because it breaks relationships that are supposed to be the strongest. I have personally seen in some of my own friends how this has affected them to become distant with their parents or siblings.