Sociology break

Interesting essay on Amazon by Dalton Conley, the writer of Elsewhere, U.S.A. on what prompted him to write it...
The subtitle of the book is a mouthful but revealing... "How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety"

I am writing this on my BlackBerry as I sit on the sidelines of my daughter's soccer game. My wife, her mother, is off in Indiana on business. And this pretty much captures life in Elsewhere USA, where professional couples with children feel the pressures of work 24/7 and solve their multiple commitment conflicts by doing all at once with partial attention. We are afraid to stop working (or perhaps can't) since, though in objective terms we may be doing better, rising inequality makes us feel as if we are falling behind...It struck me that as of 2007, when I set out on this project, no one had yet written a book that captured the subtle but unmistakable ways that everyday life has changed for this class of Americans--or, for that matter, the socioeconomic roots of such changes, above and beyond the obvious technological advances that have besieged us over the last two decades...

There had once been an esteemed tradition among sociologists to try to crystallize a historical moment, in order to reflect it back to those living it in the hope that one could put words to something that was felt by many but not articulated. The 1950s were filled with such classics like, THE ORGANIZATION MAN; WHITE COLLAR; THE LONELY CROWD; and THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY, to name a few.

So I decided to try to swing for the fences, so to speak, and put into words what I -- as a sociologist and victim of the elsewhere ethic -- saw happening around me. The economic red shift (anxiety caused by rising inequality at the top), the price culture (the spread of markets into every nook and cranny of daily life), coinvestment (investment + consumption), weisure (work + leisure), the portable workshop (what I am writing this on), intravidualism (an ethic of fragmented selves replacing the modern ethic of individualism), and, of course, the Elsewhere Society (the inter-penetration of spheres of life that were once bounded from each other). All these terms were attempts to describe the gradual -- yet fundamental -- ways that life has changed beneath our feet since those 1950s classics. The organization man is gone, replaced by the elsewhere dad, the blackberry mom and various other figures have come into our new social landscape. Or so I claim... It's up to you to tell me if I've struck out or connected...