Books

[snowps]

"Globalization, advanced by technologies of production and information, created seamless world markets with profound impacts on the world economy. Vast amounts of wealth have been created, but that wealth has been unequally distributed. Such inequality has meant that large numbers of young people have not been able to find the kinds of jobs and careers that provide the “goods” life extolled in a consumer society. Nor do the dominant values of rationality, neo-liberalism or secularism hold much appeal. These conditions have encouraged the emergence of a number of subcultures of transgression, identity-granting communities of meaning which provide members with a sense of community with recognition and empowerment. As many such subcultures repudiate dominant norms, we note how they resemble the medieval carnival, which Bahktin showed was a time and place of inversion, transgression, and celebration of the grotesque. It allowed the common people encapsulate realms of agency to articulate disdain and resistance. Yet this served to reproduce the dominant system."

"The City as an Entertainment Machine", Terry Nichols Clark