Microsoft Research Audio 103523: Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from Company Man, Family Dinners and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms and Economic Anxiety

Welcome to Elsewhere, USA where the American individual has become extinct. Our culture is populated by “intraviduals”, fractured people who struggle to juggle professional, familial and personal pursuits. The division between home and office has been all but demolished; our weightless, wireless economy urges us to work 24/7; marketing has invaded the most intimate aspects of our lives; leisure has become a lost art. Much of these changes can be connected to relatively invisible sociological changes: women’s increasing participation in the labor force; rising economic inequality generating anxiety; the idea of the “individual” being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one’s existence.

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