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(More customer reviews)I'm a big fan of Grant McCracken's blog, so I was eagerly anticipating his new book, which postulates that, as he titles his preface, "Entertainment is dead, long live Transformation". Instead of passively watching entertainment, people have become active consumers of the world around them, using ideas from all cultures to drive change within themselves. McCracken traces transformation possibilities throughout history, starting with tribal ritualistic transformations of rites of passage, passing through the industrial conception of working to improve one's social status by imitating the upper class, on to the 50s warring transformations of beatnik dropout culture vs. technophilic "brightwork" culture, and then to the postmodern transformations available to us today. We have moved from a world where one's birth determined one's destiny (sons of tailors became tailors) to one where we reinvent ourselves on an ongoing basis. McCracken takes the reader on a tour of several categories of postmodern transformations, including the capitalistic swift self and the Eastern-philosophy leaning radiant self. I highly recommend this book - it's so dense with new ideas and incisive observations that every few pages I would have to put it down and think for a while.
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Self reinvention has become a preoccupation of contemporary culture. Inthe last decade, Hollywood made a 500-million-dollar bet on this idea with moviessuch as Multiplicity, Fight Club, eXistenZ, and Catch Me If You Can. Selfreinvention marks the careers of Madonna, Ani DiFranco, Martha Stewart, and RobinWilliams. The Nike ads of LeBron James, the experiments of New Age spirituality, themores of contemporary teen culture, and the obsession with "extreme makeovers" areall examples of our culture's fixation with change. In a time marked by plenitude,transformation is one of the few things these parties have incommon.Although transformation is widely acknowledged as adefining characteristic of our culture, we have almost no studies on what it is orhow it works. Transformations offers the first comprehensive and systematic view. Itis an ethnography of the contemporary world.
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