I enjoyed this post and was thinking particularly of this statement : "Man thus "exists only part time" (47) during our class discussion regarding how our happiness is subordinated to our work. When Professor Long posed the question (paraphrased) "if you found out you only had a year to live, would you be doing what you're doing?" I sensed a murmur in the room ( I think I heard people saying "hell no" under their breaths. .. I may have been one of them...) At any rate it occurred to me that many people who might, faced with their own impending demise, wish to quit their jobs and travel the world, would be precluded from doing so because their jobs are what provide them with their health insurance and the means to buy medicine or food or to pay their bills. No one needs additional stress when facing terminal illness. Facing such illness may make one long for liberation from the "golden handcuffs," and also prove the truth that no one's last deathbed whisper is ever "I wish I had worked more hours..." But the sad truth is at that moment of clarity, one's enslavement to the work might be guaranteed by the need for health care and income.

I have not read the Question Concerning Technology, although I recently purchased the Basic Writings! I was wondering do you think this would be a good reading to suggest for our student directed readings? I wonder what he means when he writes that "the revealing that rules modern technology is a challenging." The whole concept of revealing sounds intriguing.

I always think of the the slogan "NEW and IMPROVED!!!" when thinking of planned obsolescence. In order to address the problem of overproduction marketing strategists devised a way of creating dissatisfaction in consumers to encourage them to keep buying. There is an interesting post on this titled Disposable Personality on PopMatters . Here's the link: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/tools/print/33921.

"The story of planned obsolescence is old and familiar, a cornerstone of the critique of consumerism since the advent of mass production and the establishment of shopping as a leisure activity rather than a chore. It appears in John Kenneth Galbraith’s assessment of the “affluent society” and received an alarmist, muckraking treatment in The Waste Makers, by Vance Packard, a journalist who rose to prominence with his ominous exposé of psychological advertising, The Hidden Persuaders. Giles Slade’s Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America is a recent look at how the concept has evolved and been deployed historically by American industry."

I am wondering could you say a little more about why you say: "I, however, do not see any way to achieve liberation without the application of such technology: a society free of needless and stultifying repression would perforce necessitate a greater reliance on technology"? " How would it necessitate a greater reliance on technology?

I am not familiar with de Certeau, but this very interesting to me. I will vote for The Practice of Everyday Life if you suggest it as a reading! Thanks!

I never thought I'd be so excited to suggest additional reading for a class. A number of these suggestions sound really interesting. I initially suggested One Dimensional Man, but as was pointed out, it's long. SO I offer this shorter article by Marcuse as an alternative: Some Social Implications of Modern Technology. The article Investigates the "fetish of technique or technical efficiency which represents for Marcuse the key ideological replacement of the commodity fetish under modern industrialized authoritarian states. It may be a good alternative to One Dimensional Man as it's only 25 pages long and it is available online. Thanks, Margaret