TV serials, says Richard Beck, self-consciously set out from the very beginning to get us to take them seriously. From
Hill Street Blues to
The West Wing to
The Sopranos and
The Wire,
how the television series convinced us that it was art — and now, why
Lost's achievement of success via casual genre mixing and narrative derangement might signal that there's no future creative ground left within the old limits of serial drama.
posted by hat
on May 24, 2010 -
120 comments
Never wanna work/Always wanna play/Pleasure, pleasure every day. What happens when the jobs go away and
don't return? Should we take the surpluses generated and
pay people not to work? What happens to the assumption of scarcity when
nanotechology allows us to generate potentially anything we want from
grass clippings? Maybe Marx had it wrong all along. Maybe, instead of fetishizing work and the authoritarian mindset that it generates, we should have been reading Paul Lafargue
instead.
Just as a thought experiment, what would you do if your job category disappeared? How would you spend your time? Would you invest more time and energy in friendships and other relationships? Hobbies? If you were your employer, what technologies would you use to get rid of your position and save money?
posted by jason's_planet
on Jun 25, 2006 -
43 comments
U.S. workers will leave an average 4 vacation days on the table this year, one more than last year, according to the 6th annual
Vacation Deprivation Survey sponsored by Expedia. This despite the
fact that at an average of 14 days total, we are already deprived, trailing Australia (17), Canada (19), Great Britain (24), Germany (27), and France (39) in holiday time. Why don't we get more time off? And why aren't we using the time we do get? [
Full results (PDF))]
posted by madamjujujive
on Jun 5, 2006 -
89 comments
Thorstein Veblen , Economist and Social Commentator, who contributed to the common tongue the phrase
conspicuous consumption.
Who was Thorstein Veblen--and why should anyone care?
I should like him for his writing style alone:
The appreciation of those evidences of honorific crudeness to which hand-wrought goods owe their superior worth and charm in the eyes of well-bred people is a matter of nice discrimination. It requires training and the formation of right habits of thought with respect to what may be called the physiognomy of goods. Machine-made goods of daily use are often admired and preferred precisely on account of their excessive perfection by the vulgar and the underbred who have not given due thought to the punctilios of elegant consumption. The ceremonial inferiority of machine products goes to show that the perfection of skill and workmanship embodied in any costly innovations in the finish of goods is not sufficient of itself to secure them acceptance and permanent favor. The innovation must have the support of the canon of conspicuous waste. Any feature in the physiognomy of goods, however pleasing in itself, and however well it may approve itself to the taste for effective work, will not be tolerated if it proves obnoxious to this norm of pecuniary reputability.
From
Chapter Six - Pecuniary Canons of Taste of the work entire,
The Theory of The Leisure Class. Feel free to consume conspicuously.
posted by y2karl
on Oct 29, 2002 -
7 comments
