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July 10, 2010
The inner city professional is a fixture of the political landscape, especially for those right wing conservatives and populists --eg., those in The Australian--- who dismiss this new class as cosmopolitan elitists disconnected from the common sense and working lives of the ordinary battling Australians who are the salt of the earth.
If we step behind this stereotypical thinking of the us versus them" cultural conflicts of the cultural wars, which divide up the population into warring tribes that then demonize each other, then what do we find?
One answer is this review of Dalton Conley's "Elsewhere, USA. This text refers to a class of people in fast capitalism who live their lives buffeted by the many streams of information coming to them via their BlackBerries (iPhones?) and laptops, where the old boundaries of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are shattered, and where work and leisure combined, and the e new ‘portable office’ is the norm. This is the lifestyle of white collar professionals employed in the knowledge and information economy at the beginning of the 21st century.
This is a completely different world to that of breadwinner husbands and breadmaker wives—as depicted in the television series Mad Men, which successfully dispels the conservative myth of the 1950s suburban picket fence as a golden age. It is one where all the spheres – home, work, social life – have collapsed into each other.
Today workplaces with in-house kitchens, gymnasiums and an assortment of personal services are standard fare in the corporate world (especially Google). This world is a whirlpool of constantly intersecting activities in which workers multi-task their way through every minute of the day, feeling ever pressed for time and on the move that is premised on the increased labor force participation of women. That increased participation is an enormous cultural shift.
Life today for this class is to be overscheduled, behind on work, and managing multiple data streams. Conley argues that by being multiple places at once—online, on the phone, where we physically are, on the worry list in our heads—toggling back and forth, we get no time to be “alone” and get to know ourselves. With the erosion of privacy comes the erosion of the private self.
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Once we had a coherent, private self that we had to discover and then use to guide our choices, values and actions, . Now we are learning how to manage multiple selves and respond to multiple data streams in virtual places. The idea is not to find a core of authenticity but to learn to balance.