How the mobile market celebrates the Independence Day or about applications that support patriotism
The eleventh day of November is the most important holiday we celebrate, in terms of our nationality. It is a day of remembrance of the Polish spirit of struggle and steadfastness in the face of unfriendly oppressors and the cruel fate of our country in the days of the rightly past. It is also a day of contemplation – a time of patriotism, which echoes Poles after the celebrations of May 3. In accordance with this noble pro-Polish idea, several applications have also been created, which we will present today!
What is patriotism??
Patria is the Latin word for homeland. In Greek, on the other hand, the word patriotes is used for it. The suffix -ism suggests a word that is closer in meaning to an abstraction, doctrine, or orientation. As we can already guess the word patriotism will mean a state of mind that relates directly to one’s homeland. Homeland according to the Polish Scientific Publishers (PWN) dictionary is a country in which one was born, of which one is a citizen or with which one is connected by national ties.
So patriots are people who believe in the idea of patriotism. The idea itself, as the name suggests, is in the world of thought-forms, which does not allow it to have a definite pattern, structure or scheme. There are no particular types of patriotism and practicing it may have different phases, symptoms and motives. Some ridicule initiatives such as the Independence March, calling them a monopoly on patriotism.
Politicians cynically use the patriotic motives of Poles to control their moods and behavior, just like stores sticking “Polish product” stickers everywhere.
The truth is that a patriot can be a participant of the Independence March, a person supporting small and medium local businesses, as well as a gentleman collecting trash from passers-by. Society should learn not to categorize everything in one way, and tribal thinking – who is not with us, is against us – has not and will never bring us anything good in the Polish backyard.
Independence Day is a great time to see a very important and very interesting relationship with each other – after all, we are all Poles and we all have something in common – country, persistence, resourcefulness, and perhaps a slight detachment from reality. We can treat it jokingly, although it is quite a practical statement. We all have our traditions and above all a common history, which shows us as a strong, steadfast and indestructible entity, although sometimes reckless, throwing obstacles under its own feet.
The most important characteristic of patriotism is not to show specific attitudes, but the feeling of respect, love or devotion to your country. Wikipedia says it’s also a willingness to sacrifice for it and a willingness to defend it, and while most readers will agree with the latter, if sacrifice here means dying for one’s country then life for some may have a higher value than patria, which may be a small point of debate for the general public.
Patriotism is also cultivating national ties, traditions, culture and historical memory. It is also about taking care of your mother tongue, working for the good of your country and supporting solidarity towards its interest. It’s also a love for nationalities and places that are part of the mother country.
A lot of patriotism here so far, but not much technology..
Consumer patriotism
Supporting the country through purchases dictated by the good of the country? This will seem ridiculous to some, but it is currently the most supportive form of patriotism. After all, nothing promotes prosperity like money. The growth of an economy depends on its revenues, which in turn are related to the payment of taxes by firms. Supporting the Polish market by purchasing from manufacturers who are registered in Poland is fruitful in its consequences for the entire economy.
POLA APP
– “Fed up with the massification of global corporations? You are looking for local companies creating unique products? Pola will help you find Polish products. By taking Pola shopping, you find products “with soul” and support the Polish economy” – we read in the description of the Pola application.
In fact, the description says everything about this application. It uses the camera built into the phone to scan product barcodes. It compares the scanned code with the ones it has in its database. If a product has already been entered into the system by the developers then a description of its specifications will appear on the screen.
After verifying the product we will get information on whether it is part of a foreign corporation or from Poland, whether it pays taxes in Poland and whether it employs workers from our country. So the app can verify the actual origin of “Polish products”. The application features a 100-point rating scale, used to mark scanned items. These get points:
- 10 points. – company registered in Poland,
- 10 pts. – is not part of a foreign corporation.,
- 15 points. – employment of Poles in the field of research and development,
- 30 points. – production takes place in the country,
- 35 points. – Polish capital participation.
The App field also allows you to add a suggestion for app developers to include suggested products in the app’s database when they are unable to scan a product. The creators assure that the data already placed in the database are updated on an ongoing basis and what the application says is most consistent with the facts. This is even confirmed by this year’s latest comments from users who are happy with the app’s performance.
Pola has been in operation for equal 6 years as a free tool for Polish consumers. So far it has managed to collect almost 9 thousand reviews on Google Play, which translated into a rating of 4.7 stars. It collected 567 votes in the App Store over the period, which gave it 4.9 stars. Translating this into an overall score is 9330 votes, which gives 4.8 stars, which is a very good result of quality and satisfaction with the application, although out of 38 million people, which is only 2 percent of the population – not even one percent!
Entertainment and educational patriotism
Education is a very important pillar in shaping every person. The same is true of entertainment, which provides a balance to the problems of everyday life. For healthy functioning, entertainment is necessary to relieve psychological tension that may also arise during study load. However, there are methods and solutions that combine these two fields – education and entertainment. The creators of the application decided to include patriotism.
POLISH UNDERGROUND STATE
On the government website IPN we can read about last year’s initiative to try to create games for Poles. The result of the developers’ work is a turn-based game, which is a digital reflection of the existing board game of the same name.
The application combines educational values about the Polish Underground State, while providing fun gameplay and learning about the history of characters known (or unknown) from various national holidays.
WSPIERAMROZWÓJ.EN
It is a portal for counteracting the so-called “spam”. unfair tax optimization, i.e. diversion of capital transfer that should be received by a particular entity – in this case the Polish State. It launches new initiatives every now and then. Unfortunately no longer working application to conduct a Quiz on economic knowledge about brands – Polish Brands QUIZ seemed like an interesting educational idea. The portal pops up new editions of the Polish Brands app from time to time. Currently, version 2 is available in the Google Play store.0 for PLN 11.99. The service is already advertising the third generation version of this application, but the most interesting solution is search engine suggested by SUPPORT FOR DEVELOPMENT.en. It works similarly to POLA App, however it is a search engine. After typing the name we get information about the searched product, which we can also find by filtering in categories and brands.
Patriotic embezzlers
Not only political and commercial environments can exploit lofty feelings towards the motherland. It turns out that this is also a great maneuvering field for fraudsters, including digital ones. An article from three years ago on sirt.pl described situations of downloading by Polish users an application called Polish Flag, which was supposed to change the wallpaper on our smartphone to one of the themes corresponding to a Polish city. However, the application downloaded a twin version, which was used as malware to steal login credentials to mobile banking.
In the United States, scammers will also take advantage of Independence Day. They create fake accounts for charities for the military and war veterans, through the promotion of which they earn huge amounts. Service wthitv.com reports that these scams can also take the form of phone calls, text messages, emails and social media posts. All these activities are aimed at stealing personal data and access to money of deceived people.
As you can see, you have to be on guard even when it comes to patriotism, although Independence Day is not that commercialized since you don’t see such a huge number of applications in this field as for example in the case of social media or shopping for outerwear. One sentence can be said in the face of such a situation: it is as sad as it is comforting.