New (Technology) is Always Better

In the episode "Architect of Destruction" of the sixth season of How I Met Your Mother, main character Ted, who works as an architect, is assigned to tear down an old building called the Arcadian in order to construct a new building for GNB, a highly visible yet morally misaligned bank. Barney, Ted’s womanizing friend who happens to work for GNB, assures Ted that new is always better, and that the new GNB building will be well worth destroying a building that some consider a landmark.

"What's my number one rule, Ted?"

Like many things in the show, this statement draws parallels to life beyond the Arcadian, and also emphasizes Barney's perpetual state of singleness and disinterest in relationships. The idea that new is always better suggests that there is always something (or, in Barney's case, someone) better than the old just around the corner, and this seems to reflect how consumers evaluate products in the American marketplace.

Companies have caught on to and perpetuated this trend. In addition to trying to release new products periodically, they also feel a need to “improve” current products with “new and improved” features. Sometimes, these changes are good. For example: Since 2003, McDonald’s has made their chicken nuggets with white meat chicken instead of the gooey pink paste known as MSM, or mechanically separated meat. MSM is essentially an amalgamation of the garbage bits of food ground up into a paste to be soaked in ammonia to get rid of the bacteria, reshaped into friendlier (nugget-like) shapes, artificially flavored, fried, freeze-dried, and shipped to your neighborhood McDonald’s. I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief that McDonald’s took the steps to create a new and improved nugget.

In general, however, such marketing of "new" is just a gimmick that taps into our primal need to hunt and gather. This is all linked together under the psychological needs within our consciousness. We all have a need to feel like our best selves, and in a country where our basic needs like food and personal safety are generally met without struggle, the next steps in the Hierarchy of Needs have to do with feeling like a complete person. And the easiest way to do so, whether or not we all admit it, is buying stuff. With all the new things floating around for us to discover, why would we settle for our old things? This new shirt is going to make me a real boy!

If it ain't broke, leave it the hell alone.

One of the industries with the highest turnover is technology. For those of us who aren’t tech savvy early adopters, updates are just what we do when our current models of phones and laptops start to fail, but in reality, the extraordinarily fast evolution of technology and electronics is even quicker than we realize. By the time something like a laptop is developed, approved by higher ups, packaged for sale and placed on the shelves, its software and hardware, which is oh so new and shiny to consumers, is already as obsolete as your old desktop PC, the one whose screen size resembled a toaster oven.

But if you’re like the rest of us real people, you can’t run out and buy every new gadget that comes on the market, no matter how much you might covet it from afar. Most of us just don’t have enough burnable cash on hand to do so, or don’t possess the patience to try and transfer all your data over into something new, or something that only has a few tweaks and modifications that aren't a stunning departure from what you already have.

You just bought your iPhone 5S? It would be a shame if we...deemed it obsolete a week later.

So we're not that obsessed with newness, are we? Do we really think that just because it's marketed as technology that's hot off the press, it's more desirable? We're not that materialistic as a society, are we?

Actually, maybe we are.

There’s power in numbers, and brand popularity is a contest we vote for with our money. The numbers for revenue show just how much the tech industry rakes in, and how much technology has taken over our households. At the end of their fiscal year for 2013, Samsung earned $327 billion in revenue. For comparison, that same year Apple raked in $170.9 billion. That’s in contrast to Procter & Gamble, who at the end of its 2013 fiscal year made $82.6 billion in revenue. Who’s Procter & Gamble? You might know their logo, P&G, since it’s on almost everything from Crest to Duracell to Tide and Gillette. That’s right – Samsung earned almost four times more in revenue than the conglomerate that’s been around since 1837 and probably owns everything in your bathroom and kitchen.

Recognize anything?

Granted, there are circumstances to account for this disparity. Certain brands are only available in certain countries, electronic stuff generally costs more per product both to produce and in sale per unit, and so on. Samsung has also ventured into other investments, such as pharmaceuticals. Yet Samsung is now in the top ten companies that had the most earnings at the end of their 2013 fiscal year, right up with big oil companies.

You can’t just look at some data and statistics without factoring in the human element, particularly when it comes to consumer goods. What drives us to buy? What makes us so willing to drop thousands on electronics? What is it about electronics that have seemingly dominated the consumer goods markets over the course of a short period of time? Why are we so gullible when it comes to the idea of "new"? There are many, many theories and psychological analyses to explain it, but for now, I’ll just leave it at this: New is always better.

© Cultivate Blog 2014