Ethics Girl: The Devil Wears Primark
I spotted this article a couple of days ago, but ignored as it was yet another piece on sweatshops. I remember being a bleeding-heart liberal Uni student and refusing to wear Nike after reading about their manufacturing practices (I still don't, but it's more Nike's lack of style and overpricing these days), and this topic gets re-hashed year after year after year.
What's most typical of current affairs blogs with comments these days, especially on hot-button topics such as third-world manufacturers, is that the commenters talk at one another. God forbid they should actually converse. The world would end if lovers of fast fashion and hippy ethical campaigners ever got together and learned from each other.
The reality that polarising issues create very little genuine debate annoys me to no end - we can learn a lot from those who work at Primark and have experience of their policies, as well as activists who have visited some of the worst factories who deprive their workers of basic employee rights. It's equally annoying when commenters speak from a position of imagined authority about the suffering of those poor factory workers in China or India without having lived there and becoming familiar with the people.
For all that the World Wide Web has done in making the world much smaller, it has also made damn sure that individuals are much less willing to listen to one another - they can simply shout their opinions and ignore any reactions. I think blogs have made a lot of information accessible to all and closed a lot more minds in the process.
