This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed at home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none,
And this little piggy cried,
"Wee wee wee" all the way home...
- Traditional Nursery Rhyme
What moves us?
Was it roast beef that first led the little piggy to market, to community, to (inter)dependence? Was consumer culture ever thus?
Food. Our first consumption. Hunters gathering around the campfire to enjoy the fruits and the tales of the kill. What moved them to wheat field, to surplus, to specialization, to science?
Interchangeable parts. Industrial revolution.
What moved us to run off to the cities, to factories? Aggregation, combination, city anonymity. New distances, technologies, communication. Old needs, new networks. Fireside chats. Atomic colliders. Nuclear family bonds broken. Microwave TV dinners.
Restaurants are the new tribal campfire. Houston has the highest rate of eating out, almost once per work day. "When you're here, you're family."
If restaurants are the campfire, TV is village elder, tribal chief. Storyteller, decision maker. Facilitator and shaper, homogenizer of emerging consciousness. Distributor of industrial plenty. Surplus, trade, competition. Choices. New culture of variety, sensation, pleasure. Individuation, separation, isolation. TV as carrier of social currency, surrogate family: teacher, babysitter, friend.
Things gained, things lost.
What moved us then? What moves us now? Aggregation becomes disaggregation. Offshoring and outsourcing. Home offices. Telecommuting. Web-based teaching. Cultural replacement becomes displacement. Relocations. 500 channels. Netflix.
Last week CBS cancelled the last remaining network weekly movie.
Democratization or disintegration? As technology increasingly disaggregates the industrial work-centric culture of the 20th century, what new forms of social networking will we create to fill our natural dependence on each other, our need for community? The people make the city, but what happens when the people leave? What makes the suburbs?
"One man's labor market inflexibility is another's social safety net."
Should our society's laws and our personal decisions attempt to resist or enable these changes? Do we continue to break apart and make portable the social safety nets of family, community, government and religion, to enable economic transformation ("grow the pie")? Will chasing economic possibilities improve the lot of the world's poor and enable the wealthy to rebuild more traditional communities, or will it inevitably lead to overconsumption and the eventual collapse of society?
What rules will govern the evolution of economies, of culture, of community?
What moves us, and where do we go from here?
3 comments:
what's your email address??
Well, that is a lot to think about on a Friday morning. I mean, my weekend is fast approaching...
Here I am in the suburbs. I have no idea what moves me. I know the answers that come easily: money, career path, green space. But those seem flat and unimportant. So, why are we here? dunno. The better question is, as you said, what MOVES us? Why do I get out of bed? Why do I keep writing this dissertation? Expectations. My own, my family's, my culture's.
Shame is a great motivator. I would say a better one than money.
Anyway, I'm still thinking about this one. Processing. Moving in my cage.
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