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heatherdbooks 's review for:
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture
by Jenny Odell
A very interesting book/set of essays taking aim at Western culture's preoccupation with measuring time in terms of economic productivity. Her discussion is very wide ranging (at times it seems too wide ranging) but so philosophical with an extraordinary bibliography. For a visual artist she describes geological processes a lot:)
Key discussions - the history of time management, linking it to industrialization and the tension between capital and workers; who get to control their time versus those do not (yet even many of those with control find themselves racing); leisure - including issue of whether leisure is at the expense of another, and who has been able to use public spaces; "alternative" views of time - those observed in nature (geological process, plant growth, animal behaviour) and cultures (esp. indigenous) that have adopted those viewpoints; and valuation of human worth not just as economic being.
The book isn't perfect (it is unwieldy) and I don't buy all her arguments but I liked being prodded to think about of these issues.
Key discussions - the history of time management, linking it to industrialization and the tension between capital and workers; who get to control their time versus those do not (yet even many of those with control find themselves racing); leisure - including issue of whether leisure is at the expense of another, and who has been able to use public spaces; "alternative" views of time - those observed in nature (geological process, plant growth, animal behaviour) and cultures (esp. indigenous) that have adopted those viewpoints; and valuation of human worth not just as economic being.
The book isn't perfect (it is unwieldy) and I don't buy all her arguments but I liked being prodded to think about of these issues.