What's happening is that our culture is becoming completely based around personal consumption, with the sinister twist being that it's isolationist consumption. At one time, you got laid listening to the new Sabbath record with your girl, or you passed a book around a friend sharing circle. This generation is about individuals, with individual apple/kindle/Xbox accounts consuming in private. The consumer culture is about headphones, expensive digital delivery devices, and NO RESELLING.
To make matters worse, these ersatz consumer goods, which have virtually no overhead (A kindle book, a Steam downloaded game, an itune, etc) compared to their physical counterpart are both priced to maintain parity with the brick and mortar markets, and do not allow resale.
So what we are all party to is creating a consumer society where media consumption is expensive, permanent, and exclusive. I wonder if participation in this insanity is partly responsible for all the corporate cheerleading you hear this days, whether for video game publishers, sports corporations, or media empires.
Part of the implicit consumer agreement is that a purchased good can be consumed, and if desired, resold, or given away. This both allows an individual to subsidize the cost of the purchase with the knowledge that resale is possible, and to allow a user to not become so attached to their goods. When I look through my Steam account, and see the games I bought 4 years ago which I have never played, and have no interest in, I long for the ability to liquidate, or at least to give away unwanted items to friends that can enjoy them.
This new media culture reeks of corporatism, corporate welfare, over-consumption, and a loss of community.
You are not your iTunes library.
