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Research for week of 10/1/2018: Perceptions and Ideals of Modern Culture

This website is for exchange students and it shows some of the main cultural values and norms to expect in everyday life of the U.S.
Daniel Bell on the Post-Industrial Society
Changes that have happened in the post industria
Properties that stood out ot me and what I want to portray in my project:
  • Property and education: The traditional mode of gaining place and privilege in the society was through inheritance—of a family farm, a family business, or a family occupation … Today education has become the basis of social mobility, especially with the expansion of professional and technical jobs, and even entrepreneurship requires a higher-education background.
  • . Financial capital and human capital … In economic theory, until only the past thirty or so years, capital was regarded principally as financial capital amassed as money or land … [H]uman capital is now regarded as an essential feature in understanding the strength of a society … More recently, the concept of social capital [or] … the extent to which one has access to opportunities and social networks
  • Technology and intellectual technology: [W]hat comes to the fore is ‘intellectual technology’ (based on mathematics and linguistics) which uses algorithms (decision rules), programming (software) models and simulations, in running the new ‘high technology’.
  • Infrastructure: The infrastructure of industrial society was transportation … The infrastructure of the post-industrial society is communication …
  • A knowledge theory of value: An industrial society … is based on a labor theory of value, and the development of industry proceeds by labor-saving devices, substituting capital for labor. Knowledge is the source of invention and innovation. It creates value-added and increasing returns to scale and is often capital-saving.
Thoughts on modern society

  • From Daniel Bell (above): “To be modern is to embrace ‘the proposition that there are no ends or purposes  given in nature. That the individual, and his or her self-realization, is the new standard of judgement. And that one can remake one’s self and remake society in an effort to achieve those goals”
  • “Each individual is the sovereign maker of meaning”
  • Modern society rejects the idea that there is an order created by a greater being that everyone must follow, and that each person must instead create his or her own order.
  • Cultural Consequences
    • Reorientation of purpose of cultural institution
      • Historically, cultural institutions created order based on the belief about the nature of things
      • Since there is no longer and overarching “nature” to guide us in the ideas of modern culture, cultural institutions are meant to guide each individual with as much freedom and power as possible so that they can still be individual.
      • Modern culture works on a system of liberation, rather than a system of strength
      • Philip Reef characterized modern culture as an “anti-culture”
        • Others say “post-cultural”
        • Culture has become less communal, and more optional
        • Discard concern for sustaining normative, objective, trans generational order and promotes the individual creation of meaning, or at least experiences that feel vaguely meaningful.
        • Freedom= central concern
      • Freedom has a new meaning
        • Freedom used to mean that you lived in the objective order of creation and to escape the “bondage of one’s own passions”
        • Social and psychic space to indulge one’s passions, which are mostly self-justified
      • Commitment to Controlling Nature
        • We don’t live in meaningful order, we live in a shapeless mass of raw materials that we can use, called “nature”

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