How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety
November 10, 2008
Conley (Honky
) makes a prescient analysis of how technology and free markets have transformed American life, comparing the mid-20th century American with the present-day incarnation. These are two very different animals—one compartmentalized and motivated by the traditional American ethos of success, and the other a psychological hybrid of impulses connected to work, pleasure, materialism and consumption. The results of this brilliant and, at times, chilling comparison, are manifest not only on these pages but in real life. “Cheap and easy credit,” he writes, “has been a major reason why the United States recently dipped into negative savings for the first time since the great depression.” Conley examines how, technology has altered how Americans earn and spend money, playing out the behaviors characteristic of “late capitalism,” or simply an evolving economic system that, by attaching a price to virtually everything from child rearing to dating, has helped devalue people, the work they do and the material goods they desire. A sociological mirror, this book is equal parts cautionary tale, exercise in contemporary anthropology and a spiritual and emotional audit of the 21st century American.
January 1, 2009
A well-written, explicitly reasoned argument does not a convert make, nor does the marshaling of facts and figures and phenomena. What New York University sociology professor and author (Honky, 2000; The Pecking Order, 2005; et al.) Conley sets forth is the premise that our work and our lives now blendand that he is providing a map to this new cultural landscape. For certain, he pokes into and prods every facet of our lives to point out supporting proof points: many offices, for instance, have become total institutions, providing food, concierge services, babysitting, and child care, among other life needs. Public has become privateand vice versa; witness the onset of advertainment(commercials in movies, for one) and cell-phone blasphemy. Marriage has been transformed into serial monogamy, or, as he prefers, dynamic polygamy. And the intravidual reigns, uncomfortable disharmonybetween inner and outer selves. The thinkings sound, yet its an amalgamation and synthesis of others observations. What would truly rock would be guides on how to cope in this not-new world of always on, 24/7.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)