Dakota,
As you pointed out in your post, our society now is always looking for quick and easy
fixes to everyday problems. I like to associate this problem with our society’s incessant need for
instant gratification. Gone are the days of family dinners around the table every night. In order
for families to live day to day, both parents have to work and provide for their families. When
parents get home, they are often times too tired to fix a full meal for the family, so they stop to
pick up processed foods that, in most cases, are not the most healthy for human consumption.
Overconsumption of processed foods will lead to a multitude of health problems such as obesity,
hypertension, and diabetes. Historically these problems were suffered by the older generations.
We are seeing that this is not the case anymore and these diseases are becoming more prevalent
in the younger generations. This will cause future generations to bear the burden of footing the
cost of medical care that is going to be required.
Ko (2018) theorized that the insinuation of social media’s predictive ad algorithms is also
to blame for society’s need for instant gratification. The Ko (2018) study also indicated that the
predictive ad algorithms fostered that instant gratification feeling that was learned from previous
impulse buying can be a reinforcement learning source that becomes a durational inner stimulus
of impulsive consumption. The Ko (2018) study also revealed that both perceived herd behavior
and instant gratification would lead users to generate reactions of perceived usefulness and
perceived enjoyment toward advertisements on Facebook news feed, which in turn intensify their
impulse buying tendency.
References
Ko, H.-C. (2018). Exploring the factors driving impulse buying tendency on advertisements of
Facebook. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Education Technology
and Computers - ICETC '18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290511.3290563
