So everyone is talking about 'Social Media' all the time and how it has brought people together digitally and how it has transformed lives, blurred borders, easy to market stuff, spreading the word and all that babble!! Be it Facebook, Twitter, BBM and a whole bunch of other wannabe sites and apps. Lets face it, most of us who use it have become addicted to this stuff through our phone, PC, browser and any other gadget having internet access. In other words you are a slave to the Social Media. But lets leave that for another blog.
A website which has come to my attention is Made in a Free World - and it is crafted really well - good design, usability, smooth transition (provided you have good broadband speed) and sends a strong message to the 'slaves' out there to become an 'anti-slave'.
No....its not related to the stuff I wrote at the top. That was just to catch your attention. Made In A Free World attempts to calculate the social impact of our
lifestyle – not the entire social impact it would have, but merely attempting
to measure how much forced labour it takes to sustain the way we live in
our current situation. Slavery isn’t much talked about today, but yet
there is an estimate that there are 27 million of them.
Most people have heard about their ecological footprint or carbon footprint – which is a way
of measuring your lifestyle’s demand on the eco-system and how much pollution you are contributing to the environment.
Made In A Free World makes it easy: You fill out a nice questionnaire. It
looks at what you consume, what you own and gives you an estimated number
of how many slaves that a supply chain would likely have. San Francisco creative agency MUH-TAY-ZIK HOF-FER and digital partners
at London's unit9 have created an innovative calculator that allows you
to figure out how many slaves are working for you.
The number you are given represents the total number of forced labourers
likely to be involved with creating your products, looking at source
countries, raw materials and the processing of the most popular consumer
goods. I'm not going to talk about it here, because the geniuses at Made In A Free World believe in transparency methods in what they do and explain it rather well.
A companion mobile app, called 'Made in a Free World', allows people
on-the-move to make inquiries about what a brand's supply chain looks
like from an ethical labor point of view and call attention to their
questioning. For instance, checking in at a brand will create a post on
both the brand's Slavery Footprint page and the main Slavery Footprint page. MUH-TAY-ZIK created over 1,000 individual brand pages on Facebook to aggregate the inquiries.
You would be surprised how a simple lifestyle will reveal so many hidden supply chain horrors.
Go ahead..give it a try and see how many slaves you have!!
And NO...I am not advertising for them and No again - I am NOT anti-consumer. If everyone stopped buying goods - it would only increase slavery than reducing it. The whole idea which most people would agree is to join brands and make them aware about these supply chain horrors. Improvisation and tweaking is what these brands need to do. As for me, I am simply engaging in a kind of social media awareness thingy.
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