The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class

'When I was your age,' my father was fond of telling me, 'I used to walk 5 miles through a foot of snow just to go to school.' I was impressed for a while, until I noticed that, as he got older, the distance got longer and the snow got deeper. Eventually, he claimed to have walked 20 miles through 6 feet of snow. I became even more suspicious when I found out from my grandmother that they had lived three blocks from school.

In an age of school buses and car-pooling parents, such stories, whether believable or not, conjure up visions of a world almost beyond the imaginations of today's children. I was reminded of that today by an email from my friend and Brandeis colleague Tom Pochapsky, who directed my attention to a fascinating article on the website of Beloit College (http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2014.php). Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, which provides a look at the cultural background of the students entering college that fall. The creation of Beloit's Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to the Beloit faculty to be aware of dated references. As the website notes, 'it quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation.'

So what's the worldview of the class of 2014? According to the latest list, here are a few of the things these 18-year-olds, born in 1992, have experienced - and not experienced:

• Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

• They find that email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail. They text. Oh, God, do they text.

• To them, Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive film director than as vigilante cop Dirty Harry.

• For them, Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

• They've never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.

• In their world, Czechoslovakia has never existed. There was no Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain is a meaningless phrase, and Russia has never had a Communist government.

• There has never been a world without AIDS.

• The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are classical music.

• Toothpaste tubes have always stood up on their caps.

• There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church.

• Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing good to watch has always been the norm.

• The US public has never approved of the job the US Congress is doing.

• Most of them have never seen a long-playing record, or even a tape drive. If they have ever seen a typewriter, it was in a museum, possibly alongside a dial telephone.

• They have never lived in a world without personal computers, the Internet, CD-ROMs or laser printers.

There are, of course, many things they have experienced that we also experienced at the same age. Among these are automobiles, jet airplanes, color television sets, and the Chicago Cubs not having won the World Series. Another commonality has been the enduring hostility between the English and the French.

But they couldn't imagine life without PopTarts, juice boxes, and movies you can have on your home TV, and they have no idea how we could have survived in a world that required carbon paper.

All of which got me wondering: what would the scientific worldview be like for someone, let's say, just starting graduate school today (and therefore about 22 years of age)? Born in 1988, how would their scientific lives differ from the lives of the generations preceding them (including mine, which is the only one I really care about)? It makes for some interesting speculation:

• For today's budding biologists, DNA fingerprinting would have always existed. Actual fingerprinting would have been a recent invention, used primarily to secure laptop computers.

• Protein crystal structure determination would for them never be anything but a routine tool.

• Molecular biology would never have been a discipline in its own right. Instead, it would always have been a set of techniques, introduced to students in better high schools.

• They cannot imagine a world without kits to make experiments virtually automatic.

• Since the first free-living organism had its genome sequenced when they were 7 years old, they have grown up in the age of genomics. They have had access to the complete sequence of the human genome since they were in middle school.

• They have never attended a lecture given with slides from a carousel projector, and they may not have ever seen one given from overhead transparencies either. PowerPoint has been in use for virtually their entire lives.

• In their lifetime, no one has ever pipetted anything by mouth.

• DNA sequencing, peptide synthesis, chemical analysis, and gene synthesis have always been farmed out to specialty companies rather than done in one's own lab.

• They have almost certainly never seen anyone blow glass. In fact, many of them may not know that test tubes were ever made of anything but plastic.

• They have always had the option of going into the biotechnology industry.

• The term 'enzyme' has always referred to both protein and RNA.

• Evolution has always been under attack, and science and religion have largely been seen as incompatible.

• There have always been 'big science' projects in biology.

• Chemistry has always been a declining field in terms of student interest, and physics has always been the province of a small number of practitioners.

• Believe it or not, they have never known a world without cDNA microarrays.

• For them, 'Xerox' is a verb, Polaroid makes LCD TVs, and every piece of equipment is computer-controlled.

• They have never requested a reprint. They probably don't know what one is.

• They believe that no science was done before 2000. Any science not indexed on PubMed was not done either, even if it was done yesterday.

• They cannot imagine that there once was only a single Cell journal, and just one Nature as well.

I'm sure you could think of lots more. I know I could, but we had 10 feet of snow last night, and that 50-mile walk to school is going to take me a while.

The past is a foreign country.

본 연구는 21세기 기업경영의 가장 중요한 트렌드인 진정성의 효과를 조직-공중 관계성, 기업명성, 공중의 구매행동 차원에서 고찰하였다 특히, 이들 간의 관계에 대한 실증적 검증을 통해 PR학의 중심을 차지하고 있는 관계관리와 명성관리 논의를 확장시키고, 진정성의 결과로 조직효과 차원의 공중의 구매행동을 살펴봄으로써 기업경영에서 진정성의 실질적 중요성을 입증해내고자 하였다 연구결과, 공중은 진정성이 있다고 인식하는 기업과의 관계에 더 만족하는 것으로 나타났으며, 조직-공중관계의 질은 진정성이 구매행동의도에 미치는 영향에 있어 매개적 역할을 하는 것으로 검증되었다 또한 기업의 진정성은 공중의 기업명성에도 유의미한 영향을 미치고 이것이 구매행동이나 추천의도와 같은 행동적 결과로 이어져 조직효과성을 높이는 것으로 나타났다 반면 구매행동의도에 대한 진정성의 효과는 유의미하지 않아 기업의 진정성 그 자체가 바로 구매행동으로 이어지지 않는 것으로 입증되었다 즉, 진정성이 구매행동의도에 미치는 영향에 있어 조직-공중관계성, 기업브랜드의 명성이 완전 매개의 역할을 하는 것으로 나타나 기업의 재무적 경영성과와 효과창출에 있어 진정성의 실천을 통한 공중관계 관리와 기업명성의 구축이 무엇보다 중요함이 입증되었다 또한 본 연구는 제시한 모델의 설명력이 710%로 나타나 조직-공중관계성의 질, 기업명성을 매개로 하는 진정성의 효과 모델이 재무적 성과 측면에서의 조직효과 창출에 적용할 수 있는 모델임을 보여주고, 진정성의 상업화에 대한 주의와 함께 실무적 시사점을 제시하였다

진정성 (authenticity) 효과

Notes on Contributor

The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill

Our understanding of authenticity in the material world is characterized by a problematic dichotomy between materialist and constructivist perspectives. Neither explains why people find the issue of authenticity so compelling, nor how it is experienced and negotiated in practice. There is strong evidence supporting the view that prevailing materialist approaches to authenticity are a product of the development of modernity in the West. The result has been an emphasis on entities and their origins and essences. However, when we look at how people experience and negotiate authenticity through objects, it is the networks of relationships between people, places and things that appear to be central, not the things in themselves. The author argues that these inalienable relationships between objects, people and places underpin the ineffable, almost magical, power of authenticity and explain why people employ it as a means of negotiating their place in a world characterized by displacement and fragmentation. She...

/pdf/negotiating-authentic-objects-and-authentic-selves-beyond-mu2jlnerlw.pdf

Negotiating authentic objects and authentic selves: Beyond the deconstruction of authenticity

In this article I consider the problems, dilemmas and opportunities surrounding approaches to social value in heritage conservation and management. Social value encompasses the significance of the historic environment to contemporary communities, including people's sense of identity, belonging and place, as well as forms of memory and spiritual association. These are fluid, culturally specific forms of value created through experience and practice. Furthermore, whilst some align with authorized heritage discourses, others are created through unofficial and informal modes of engagement. I argue that traditional, expert-driven modes of significance assessment fail to capture the dynamic, iterative and embodied nature of social value. Social research methods, such as qualitative interviewing and rapid ethnographic assessment, are more suited to assessing social values. However, these are best combined with community participatory practices, if we wish to capture the fluid processes of valuing the historic en...

/pdf/wrestling-with-the-social-value-of-heritage-problems-2gtsypo4fs.pdf

Wrestling with the Social Value of Heritage: Problems, Dilemmas and Opportunities

This article explores how authenticity is produced through different forms of expertise and skill, as they are negotiated and aligned in the daily practices of conservation. Focusing on the traditi...

/pdf/crafting-authenticity-an-ethnography-of-conservation-1dlqx95l18.pdf

Crafting authenticity: An ethnography of conservation practice

This article summarizes the results from recent research focusing on the experience and negotiation of authenticity in relation to the historic environment. I argue that approaches to authenticity are still hampered by a prevailing dichotomy between materialist approaches (which see authenticity as inherent in the object) and constructivist approaches (which see it as a cultural construct). This dichotomy means that we have a relatively poor understanding of how people experience authenticity in practice at heritage sites and why they find the issue of authenticity so compelling. Drawing on ethnographic research in Scotland and Nova Scotia, I show that the experience of authenticity is bound up with the network of tangible and intangible relationships that heritage objects invoke with past people and places. I argue that it is these inalienable relationships between objects, people, and places that underpin the ineffable power of authenticity, and this also explains why people use ideas about auth...

/pdf/experiencing-authenticity-at-heritage-sites-some-38z6d2w3mv.pdf

Experiencing Authenticity at Heritage Sites: Some Implications for Heritage Management and Conservation

https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/23718/1/douglas-jones-etal-JCH-2016.pdf

Siân Jones

Papers

Negotiating authentic objects and authentic selves: Beyond the deconstruction of authenticity

Wrestling with the Social Value of Heritage: Problems, Dilemmas and Opportunities

Crafting authenticity: An ethnography of conservation practice

Experiencing Authenticity at Heritage Sites: Some Implications for Heritage Management and Conservation

Science, value and material decay in the conservation of historic environments