blips

Ersatz engagement IS numbing — from sports on television (except, perhaps, with a crowd of fans who share your passion) to pre-cooked meals.

The entire purpose of a true liberal arts education is to awaken us to the pleasures of understanding and appreciating that which takes time to accustom one’s self to: fine art; good writing; critical thinking. In a democracy, the encouragement of laziness by the purveyors of goods and slickly-phrased buzz concepts for the public’s consumption and regurgitation (witness the health care mobs) threatens not only personal satisfaction, but the vitality of our government itself.

via The Knack … and How to Forget It: An Inquiry into Consumption Deskilling « Generation Bubble.

A comment by a reader on a post about consumption and deskilling.  An interesting argument in the context of impending liberal arts curriculum upending at my school.

More interesting to me though, in terms of moving liberal arts forward, is this argument of the blog post’s author, about craft:

Resisting the deskilling process means giving up pleasure that we experience as real — the pleasure of eating Doritos is no less real than the pleasure of making enchiladas from scratch. There are many reasons to prefer the latter form of pleasure, but those reasons are not necessary hedonic — it may not be more intensely pleasurable to exhibit our skills than to passively engorge ourselves on consumer goods. Personal pleasure, the invocation of quality, cannot be the basis for ethics here; in fact it’s in the interests of a consumer system to make it appear that it is. Individualist ideology finds such rich and compelling expression throughout the various discourses of American society, from advertising to taste-based criticism to democratic politics, in part because it echoes the consumerist premise that life is mainly a matter of detecting quality in the marketplace. Reskilling consumption cannot be about teaching people to strive for the “good things” in life. Rather, it will probably have to champion a different form of identity altogether that supplants connoisseurship and the curatorial identity with that of the craftsperson, wholly engrossed in their work and more or less indifferent to the world.

Craft, the joy of making and using, is what, for me, techne and new media are all about.