When we have not yet had time to digest the tiresome Black Friday, they assault us with the Cyber Monday. In other words, the day of offers on e-commerce portals, thinking about Christmas shopping.
Curiously, at the beginning it was not the result of any marketing campaign, but of an empirical observation made by businesswoman Ellen Davis, when he wanted to explain a phenomenon that occurred at the beginning of this 21st century. In America, Monday after the long weekend marked by Thanksgiving Thursday and Black Friday, many consumers had spent hours strolling through the malls, not to buy, but to look at the prices. So when joining their jobs, They took advantage of the fact that the internet of the companies where they worked was more powerful than the one at home, and they ordered online from the office.
Davis, who was vice president of the National Retail Association, saw a good opportunity to encourage purchases via the web and, as of 2005, marketing campaigns were launched under the Cyber Monday umbrella. The proposal had an excellent reception and the term became so popular that today you will surely have an email in your inbox trying to seduce you with succulent discounts.
The history of the term
But before you start clicking left and right, pay a moment of attention to the prefix ‘cyber’, so present in the technological field. Now, this does not mean that it is recent. On the contrary. It is the adoption of the Greek term ‘kybernaein’, which could be translated as direct or rule. In the contemporary world the first to use it was the Frenchman André-Marie Ampère in 1834 in his ‘Essay on the Philosophy of Sciences’ where, to describe the science of government, he used the word ‘cybernetics’.
In today’s dictionaries, you can read that this term means “Science that studies the communication and automatic control system in living beings and its application to machines & rdquor ;. This definition is inspired by the book ‘Cybernetics’ published in 1948 by the American mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener. The postulates that he presented there had an enormous influence on philosophical thinking about technology that, during the second half of the 20th century, was gaining more and more presence with the appearance of computing. After him, other technologists delved into the question and, In 1982, the term ‘cyberspace’ was coined, that is, the virtual space where an interaction between individuals and machines is reproduced through a telematic network. Although the concept is very complex, in everyday vocabulary it has ended up acting as a synonym for the internet.
In fact, from the moment when computing was fully incorporated into all areas of human life, the prefix ‘cyber’ began to proliferate everywhere. Even more so when the expansion of the Internet began. According to a linguistic study carried out in 1994 by the researcher Rainer Nagel, at that time there were more than a hundred new words constructed with cyber. Among them some that have ended up making their fortune such as’ cyberpun’k or ‘cyberterrorism’; others who had their moment of glory but who have passed away as ‘cybercafé’ or ‘cybermuseum’; and others that did not have any type of journey such as ‘cybermeditation’, ‘cyberpagan’ or ‘cyberhippie’.
In 1996 the ‘New York Times’ echoed Nagel’s publication and when trying to explain why that mania for putting ‘cyber’ everywhere, said things by name: no one had a very clear idea of what the prefix meant, but a lot of people used it to create Pretentious neologisms that gave a modern and technological touch, a trend typical of the eve of the new millennium that was about to arrive.
In fact it still happens now. That is why, spending all day today browsing the internet to try to find deals is called Cyber Monday. It seems that you are in the latest fashion, but you end up spending the money anyway.
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And then the Giving Tuesday
To curl the curl of these days with strange names, tomorrow will be “Giving Tuesday & rdquor ;, that is, the Tuesday of donations, which consists of making financial contributions to non-profit organizations. He began to organize in Chicago in 2011 to compensate for the consumerist embarrassment of the previous days. And to ease the conscience a bit too.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com