All these seem to be members of the same set

[solarbird]

Something the friendly folks at Minyanville have been talking about for a while is how social change and economic change work together, and how this will trigger a social change away from spending. Essentially, the things you can't have become uncool, in the classic "fox and grapes" scenario. You can see USA Today's take on that here, wherein they note how, for example, Ellegirl.com, the teen offshoot of Elle magazine, launched a new video fixture called Self-Made Girl, which shows teens how to make clothes and accessories. Mish talks more about it here.

In that context, I present these items:

Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus, an article from the Here Comes Everybody blog about new participatory media and collaborative activities taking away from passive activities such as television, for the better. You should read it, and then you should read:

The Gospel of Consumption, and the Better Future We Left Behind, talking about the end of the 6-hour workday and the quite-intentional development of the consumerist society in the 1920s and 1930s, when industrial leaders feared that too much productivity would destroy the business world, and their solution to that dilemma.

Then, finally, we have something of a synthesis of the first article's idea of "cognitive surplus" and the second article's advocacy of "free time," over here, in roozle's livejournal, wherein Rachel disagrees with National Association of Manufacturers president John E. Edgerson's 1927 comment, "Nothing breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure," and has other comments on collaborative tools and networked communications vs. the "real world" with which I take issue, but that's a secondary point.

Essentially, all of these are talking about paths away from having things and watching things (in both cases, consumerism, and largely passive) into more participatory activities that, arguably, innately are about the creation of value, if in no other way value of community, all in ways that involve taking power (in this case, creative and/or economic) away from higher-degree concentrations of power, either by doing things yourself, or not caring particularly what other people decide to offer to you.

And all of that goes back to the argument I've been making (on and off, here, but sadly not lately) about the reversion to a more dispersed formation of power, and the ability (or, more commonly now, lack thereof) to force the degrees of concentration of power seen over the previous couple of centuries.

I don't have a conclusion to hand you from this set, I'm afraid. But it is interesting seeing these kinds of things keep popping up.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I disagree with a certain extent with roozle's point that the computer cannot create community. I don't think it's the end-all and be-all; at some point you do gotta git out the house, or at least invite someone else to do likewise. But. I agree a whole lot with Kaplan, that it's amazing what an extra two hours (more like two and a half, because if you're not having to walk 15 minutes each way lunch can be shorter) in your day can do. And if you spread those hours out over the course of the day, you save even more time and money by not having traffic jams.....

And the community built with that extra time can do extraordinary things.

Much food for thought, yes. How to get from here to there is a considerably more difficult question.

[loopback.livejournal.com]

I am in complete agreement re: community. just like internet on its own can't make a community happen or be sustainable, neither does physical closeness or being out in the big blue room.

See also the oft-lamented 'death of the neighborhood', where people don't know their neighbors, don't talk to them, etc. Yet they're physically there.

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

More or less agreed; but then again, I don't think we've been **all** that far apart. I do have the needlepointed "use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without" passed along from my great-grandmother, up on the workroom wall. It's a simple reminder.

Rather glad to see that the mainstream is starting to catch on, but the collapse of consumerism **will** hurt the retail-service sector (even if all the manufacturing jobs lost would be Over There now anyway).

And also quite agreed on the point of the extra time in the day; having never had the telescreen device in my house, I've had lots of time to either:

read good stuff
write good stuff (most of which will stay pseudonymous: just say that I've been busy at it).
sew nicer clothes than I could ever find to buy
play music

and keep a day-job that has long crazy hours and 6.5-day weeks.

So, it's **all** good.