“post-industrialism can be defined as the convergence of the information age and the service economy”
In today’s day and age our 21st century civilization is largely run by a post-industrial sense of dependency. We have reached a point where technology is increasing faster than we have the means to keep up and is continuously evolving to a point where it is taking over our everyday life. For instance, being an architecture student my dependency on technology is strongly apparent, to the point where I have my i-pod playing…at the same time it is changing into my laptop…which is fighting my piers over the closest outlet…then I plug in my digital camera to upload pics to the laptop…while trying to talk on my cell phone at the same time. After juggling this combination of battery-powered technologies for the past two years I would strongly agree that we are living in a post-industrialism reality.
One element that the article strongly focuses on is how this post-industrial era has led to a world, which is “designed to be consumed and therefore is inherently of temporary value”. Now I was completely interested in this element of the discussion because it is in fact a largely recognized problem that has to be dealt with. Not only is this in regards to architecture and design as the author focuses on, but also most consumerism products today have the same constraints. For example look at all the technological products that I discussed above:
a. they are all items which become outdated almost directly upon purchase and are superseded by newer versions
b. their lifetime span and level of quality is constantly diminishing to the point that most only last a few years at the most
c. even the software programming that runs these products is updated
So basically I couldn’t agree more with the author because almost everything in our everyday lives is on some what of a short scale expectancy level and this makes me think, have we merely become acceptable of these conditions or rather are we just living for the here and now? Do humans prefer to ignore the inevitable until the point of enactment, rather than trying to deal with the problems that we are continuously faced with? This is a little off topic, but a friend was telling me the other day that there is proven information that global warning is basically at the tip of an iceberg and in years to come it will continue to worsen, but people have essentially chose to hold off of facing the inevitable. So this makes me question even further if our society is one to marginally ignore issues as long as possible, rather then taking initiative towards potentially changing the outcome? I think this is the ultimate question, regardless of the medium they are essentially all viewed the same.
In today’s day and age our 21st century civilization is largely run by a post-industrial sense of dependency. We have reached a point where technology is increasing faster than we have the means to keep up and is continuously evolving to a point where it is taking over our everyday life. For instance, being an architecture student my dependency on technology is strongly apparent, to the point where I have my i-pod playing…at the same time it is changing into my laptop…which is fighting my piers over the closest outlet…then I plug in my digital camera to upload pics to the laptop…while trying to talk on my cell phone at the same time. After juggling this combination of battery-powered technologies for the past two years I would strongly agree that we are living in a post-industrialism reality.
One element that the article strongly focuses on is how this post-industrial era has led to a world, which is “designed to be consumed and therefore is inherently of temporary value”. Now I was completely interested in this element of the discussion because it is in fact a largely recognized problem that has to be dealt with. Not only is this in regards to architecture and design as the author focuses on, but also most consumerism products today have the same constraints. For example look at all the technological products that I discussed above:
a. they are all items which become outdated almost directly upon purchase and are superseded by newer versions
b. their lifetime span and level of quality is constantly diminishing to the point that most only last a few years at the most
c. even the software programming that runs these products is updated
So basically I couldn’t agree more with the author because almost everything in our everyday lives is on some what of a short scale expectancy level and this makes me think, have we merely become acceptable of these conditions or rather are we just living for the here and now? Do humans prefer to ignore the inevitable until the point of enactment, rather than trying to deal with the problems that we are continuously faced with? This is a little off topic, but a friend was telling me the other day that there is proven information that global warning is basically at the tip of an iceberg and in years to come it will continue to worsen, but people have essentially chose to hold off of facing the inevitable. So this makes me question even further if our society is one to marginally ignore issues as long as possible, rather then taking initiative towards potentially changing the outcome? I think this is the ultimate question, regardless of the medium they are essentially all viewed the same.
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