Author: Dalton Conley
Over the past three decades, our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically. Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. How many of us now work from home, our wireless economy allowing and encouraging us to work 24/7? How many of us talk to our children while scrolling through e-mails on our BlackBerrys? How many of us feel overextended, as we are challenged to play multiple roles–worker, boss, parent, spouse, friend, and client–all in the same instant?
Dalton Conley, social scientist and writer provides us with an X-ray view of our new social reality. In Elsewhere, U.S.A., Conley connects our daily experience with occasionally overlooked sociological changes: women’s increasing participation in the labor force; rising economic inequality generating anxiety among successful professionals; the individualism of the modern era–the belief in self-actualization and expression–being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one’s existence. In this groundbreaking book, Conley offers an essential understanding of how the technological, social, and economic changes that have reshaped our world are also reshaping our individual lives.
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In a book that he describes as social criticism rather than social science, he underscores that privileged, present-day Americans (this study’s narrow yet book-buying constituency) can only be “convinced that they’re in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time, when they’re on their way to the next destination.” He postulates reasons for this phenomenon. But he cannot offer a coherent overview.
“This very book intends to serve as the first-edition guidebook to this new world we have created,” he trumpets about the putative Elsewhere that some of us inhabit. That’s a tall order, especially since Mr. Conley spends part of his time out on a limb, sawing.
Some of the claims made in “Elsewhere, U.S.A.” have become badly dated, whether by recent circumstances (“it is not true that firings or layoffs have increased”; “when we look at the economy as a whole, we find that volatility has greatly decreased over the last 25 years”) or by dated research (Google’s stock is said to have peaked at “over $500,” though it hit the $750 range). When Mr. Conley speaks of economic anxiety, he refers to awkward differences in status rather than a more timely fear of being out on the street.
But this book’s greater problem is the thin, iffy nature of its extended arguments. To back up the familiar claim that we have allowed merchandising to invade our private lives, he invokes (in no particular order) the selling of formerly free snacks on airplanes, slogans on T-shirts (with a thumbnail history of the T-shirt thrown in for filler) and the perils created by the bottling and marketing of water. A section on the changing nature of theft in a time when many goods are no longer worth stealing but social security numbers are extremely valuable, he describes an episode in which “fake” Yahoo operatives appeared to be scamming him. That these operatives turned out not to be fraudsters and were trying to reach him about legitimate business does not keep this story out of Mr. Conley’s book.
He is on more solid ground when his anecdotes are nothing but colorful. Though people rarely carry much cash in a world full of ATM machines, diminishing the likelihood of muggings, he writes, “That said, it would seem easier to pick people’s pockets these days, or just conk them on the head with a club like so many baby seals as they cruise down the street, clicking away on their BlackBerrys totally unaware of their surroundings.” That there is nothing newsworthy about excessive BlackBerry use — or workaholic parents, children burdened with too many after-school activities, hedge fund managers who work from home in their pajamas and so on — does not lessen that passage’s colloquial appeal.
But Mr. Conley has no big new point to make. He awkwardly coins new locutions (“weisure” to conflate work and leisure, “convestment” to do the same with consumption and investment). He struggles with jargon while trying to interject the term “intravidual” into our collective conversation. Beware an “of course” when a point is anything but self-evident: “The irony, of course, is that the intravidual is just as much an ‘intervidual’ (inter meaning ‘between’), since it is the networked nature of our new, Elsewhere economy and the penetration of others into us that shatters the individual.”
Mr. Conley dutifully travels out to Mountain View, Calif., to note the Orwellian nature of life at Googleplex, Google’s corporate headquarters. A pox on Mountain View: it is now the destination of choice for writers seeking to pad books with sci-fi visuals and newish-sounding but already conventional wisdom.
Otherwise the source material for “Elsewhere, U.S.A.” (beyond Mr. Conley’s own colorful experiences, like the time he watched a British otter movie thanks to the recommendation of Netflix) is either weak (YouTube videos) or unhelpful. In citing “The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work,” the 1997 book by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Mr. Conley is simply emphasizing that some of his insights are old news.
Yet he buries in a lengthy footnote one of the most intriguing points that he might have explored: the connection between the social disembodiment described in “Elsewhere, U.S.A.” and rising rates of autism, a condition that defies the conventions of social networking. Mr. Conley might really have taken himself elsewhere had he pursued the question of how autism and our isolating, newly normal adult behavior are related.