The other day I was thinking about my phone. It's the iPhone 4S and I was just looking at it thinking, "how do you know that my touch, my finger on the screen, means to open up this app and then how do you run that app? How can you just know how to open that app? How can that app even work? I mean all I've done is touch the screen!"
As a result of technology becoming more and more important and inventive and helpful in our daily lives, I never really associate people with the production of gadgets. In the news you just hear about the gadgets that are someday going to take over the jobs that humans do and rule the world. But, I have been corrected in my thinking; there are people still working in factories to make all our shiny new gadgets.
Indeed, on this day in 2010, a nineteen-year-old worker at the Foxconn factory in China died after 'falling' off the building. The large company, which produces mainly mobile phones, including the Apple iPhone, and other electronics for computer companies, admitted to stopping several suicide attempts earlier in the year.
In fact, the deceased man became the tenth person to die in this way since the beginning of 2010. It all stems from a rumour that workers at this company are pushed to their absolute limit and are under a great deal of pressure to produce the goods.
The image raises a valid point. If there's so little pressure on us as consumers when using the product, why does there need to be so much pressure on the producers when creating the product? Not coming up with the design or the schematics or anything, although that opens up a whole other can of worms, but the actual construction of the thing itself.
Maybe we as consumers need to work a little harder.
Just to save some lives.
Image available: http://sacom.hk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/
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