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October 3, 2005
When I was in walking around the global city of Sydney a month or so ago I realized just how much the market ruled everyday life in terms of work, leisure and happiness. Work and play is now enframed by the market.
I then realized just how postmodernity meant that consumption has become our primary language. Literacy now increasingly involves a visual literacy concerned with the interpretation of commercial signs, such as advertising. The act of consumption is now our primary mode of insertion into the public world and our experience of participation in something beyond ourselves and our private lives.
Consequently, we internalize the act of purchasing, and we then translate this experience into all other human activities and aspects of our social existence. It has beccome habitual.
The contrast could not be greater with Indonesia.
As the Petty cartoon shows the tourist bars and nightclubs are seen as immoral fleshpots that are deeply offensive to many Indonesian Islams.
Similar sentiments can be found amongst puritanical Christains in Australasia, but these are marginalized voices decry consumer society.
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I just realize, reading your posts, how much i miss Auz, and the time i've spent in Sydney, some 18 years ago....:)