INTRODUCTION
Although consumption is fundamental to all forms of life, human consumption is extraordinary in its variety and sheer inventiveness. Some physical consumption, such as food and water, is essential for basic survival and thus shared with other organisms, but humans are remarkable in the scale of consumption over and above meeting basic needs, and indeed in the way that even “basic” consumption is embellished and elaborated—consider, for example, the sheer number of brands of bottled water. The centrality of consumption is not unique to the modern age, of course, nor is it unique to humans. Animals spend much of their time searching for food and consuming it; similarly, our ancestors spent much of their time foraging for, preparing, and consuming food (Kaplan 2000, Sahlins 1972). With modern technology, however, the nature of consumption has changed: Whereas our ancestors needed a minimum of some 15– 20 hours per week to gather and prepare food, the current U.S. consumer can accomplish the same tasks with one 30-minute trip to a supermarket per week and 30 minutes per day preparing meals, thanks to innovations such as microwave ovens and instant meals.
But how do humans use this additional time?
One avenue that humans clearly pursue is overconsumption of food; having evolved in an environment where food was both scarce and unpredictable such that eating to our physical limit when food was available was a dominant strategy, continuing to apply this rule mindlessly when food is abundant underlies modern obesity epidemics (Pinel et al. 2000, Wansink 2006). In addition to hunger for food and thirst for water shared with other animals, however, humans use this additional time to address their unique—and seemingly— insatiable appetite for consumption of information, so much so that Schelling (1984) famously called the mind a “consuming organ,” and Borgmann (2000) wrote that “to live is to consume.” The staggering amount of time people spend reading blogs about celebrities attests to this appetite; more broadly, evidence can be found in human desires for stories (originally through oral storytelling, and increasingly through books and movies), for rumors and gossip, for news, for cultural memes, and so on (see Allport & Postman 1947, Dawkins 1976, Heath et al. 2001, Sinaceur & Heath 2005).
Thus, in some sense people have switched from consuming food (foraging for nuts) to consuming ideas (foraging for information in blogs). Although not a literal one-to-one exchange of consumption of food for consumption of ideas, we suggest a basic property of human consumption:
As basic needs are met with greater ease and celerity, humans find a wide variety of increasingly psychological avenues for quenching their consumption thirst. Even the labor with which humans have replaced hunting and foraging is telling, as countries transition from manufacturing to knowledge economies (Drucker 1959), where both the production and consumption of ideas are paramount. Shirky (2008), for example, has noted that whereas Americans spend some 200 billion hours per year watching television, Wikipedia—the online dictionary whose intellectual content is generated entirely by unpaid contributors— now represents roughly 100 million hours of human thought, a novel and promising use of excess consumption energy.
You can download the full abstract at www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/ariely%20norton%202009.pdf
May it quench your appetite for consumption of information.
