I recently spent a week in Vienna, Budapest and Bratislava, cities I have been to a few times before. During this week, I had the chance to observe and analyze these three cities, which I know every inch of, moment by moment, as I was not in a hurry or in an effort to see them all. The fact that this time I saw it from the perspective of a sociologist broke the spell. It was sad to see that all the people of the world, as "silent victims", are repeatedly chewed, digested, crushed, used until the pulp comes out between the wheels and teeth of a machine (Neo-capitalism) and then recycled and brought back to the same cycle all over again... It was sad... Despite the sub-zero cold even during the day, all the main streets, boulevards and squares of all three cities were packed. Fairs, carnivals, food and drink venues, gift shops selling touristic items. You could not move a needle. Tourists from all over the world, as well as their own locals, despite all the scorn and rudeness, are shopping like magic. Everyone has the same drink in the same cup, the same food, and if they don't have it, they queue to buy it.

We often had to go into Mc Donalds to warm up when we were cold on the streets and to use the toilet. And every time we met Turks there for the same reason. For all of us, they were one of us, part of our culture. However, I used to talk about Ritzer's view of the "Mc Donaldization of Society" all the time, everywhere.

Ritzer puts forward the concept of the "Mc Donaldization of Society" to point to the imposition of uniform standards that prevent individual creativity and dehumanize social relations. Since it is a part of even my culture, it is not possible to resist subliminal coding. In the words of Adorno, one of the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, the culture industry, by using the media, through cinema, music, television, print and visual media, advertising and sublingual messages, imposes "commodity fetishism" on the individual and pushes them to try to satisfy their so-called(!), false needs. We human beings, under the pressure and clamp where people are shown what their needs are and how to fulfill them, and do not realize it, are conditioned to have more, to buy more, to be the most beautiful and the most..., to buy more and to satisfy our false needs. In parallel to all this, the media is constantly hammering into our heads what we need. We like what others and everyone else likes, we eat what others eat, we wear what others wear. According to Marcuse, in the face of these serious instruments of oppression, we have little choice and discrimination, and no power of control.

It is actually very easy to understand that these pleasures offered by the world's economic powers are a marketing and money-making endeavor. They have succeeded in turning the world into a global village where they can easily move among us, recycle and package the raw material they take from us and sell it back to us as fashion.

They were even able to package and wrap the sages, philosophers, Yunus, Mevlana of our lands and sell them to us. They were able to decorate our yogurt and ice cream with fruits and candies and market them to us. The people of developed countries may be more fortunate than the people of underdeveloped and developing countries, but the result is the same; our mechanization and mechanization...

Mukaddes Pekin Başdil

Researcher-Author

Source: Denizli Haber