Slade sums up the focus of the book in the Introduction: "What you will read in the coming pages is a description of how we progressively sacrificed the quality of human life for our economic well-being. If, currently, your best friend is your iPhone or iPad, after reading this book you will understand why that is so, and also you will finally understand the real cost of numbing the pangs of human loneliness with human-mehanical neo-friendships."
In the course of the book, Slade traces the development of this condition of substituting technology for real human activity and interaction. To my surprise, he traces it back to the introduction of the radio. And already at that time, you see the clever marketing trick of audience ratiocination - the cosy image of the family huddled together around the radio apparently only lasted 3 or 4 years. Radio manufacturers quickly saw their sales taper off as most families soon had a radio. What to do? Create target audience specific programming, encourage tribal identities, so everyone in the family soon needs their own radio so they can confirm their new identity by listening to the shows targeted at them. Brilliant marketing... not so brilliant social phenomenon, according to Slade.
Here is another quote he includes in the book from William Deresiewicz: "We have given our hearts to machines, and now we are turning into machines." Faux Friendships, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 2012 This is another interesting point, and I see it connect to that other elusive subject I am interested in - the essence or zeitgeist of the corporate structure/mindset/organizing principle. You can see this trend from early on in the mass production revolution - humans become extensions or servicers of the machine. Corporate hiring practices now are like this too. Instead of submitting a carefully thought out, creative resume, you go through their on-line process, responding to a set collection of questions in categories. The questions and categories are determined by the software, the algorithm, the computer process they use for screening applications. You, the prospective employee, are no longer yourself, you are an extension of the machine. Efficient, yes, but also completely dehumanizing. This is maybe one of the key points of the corporate Way - everything is reduced to a cog of the larger machine, a process dictated by efficiency, profit (for a few), and technology. This has been said before, and has been true for a while now, but this corporate ethos is invading more and more areas of our life. (Which is what Rukhoff talks about in this book, Life Inc.)
Another point Slade brings up is the origin of a materialistic society in the U.S. He place that origin right at the end of the second world war. Social leaders were worried about the returning soldiers willingness to return to the narrow confines of the poor worker's life after experiencing their strength during the war, and making so many sacrifices in defence of "free" society. The strategy that was hit upon was to increase availability of material goods and create the possibility of acquiring ever more bigger and better material goods. (This increase in availability is also tied to the mass-production corporate structure itself.) This is an interesting point worth exploring further.
Yet another area of interest is his discussion of trust in modern society. In smaller, agrarian society trust is based on directly knowing people. In large urban, industrial societies, you don't really know anyone -society is anonymous and distanced. The need for trust was then extended to the "expert" and we see a growth in the importance and role of experts. Unfortunately, these days even this trust in experts is waning, as it becomes more and more obvious that the main concern of experts is to protect their position and interests (or the interests of who is paying them).
An important book - a few sections are a bit of a slog, but well worth reading. I wish he had included a bibliography.
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