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Art Colony: they were bashing blogs
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
› by victoria
Today was a mad departure for my adpr 150 class: they were bashing blogs, instead of the usual "let's figure out how to exploit them for corporate purposes." today my adpr 150 (advertising public relations & the internet) professor led us on a merry half-hour discussion of how much money blogging/blog reading at work cost American businesses. Apparently it's some outrageously inflated sounding amount like $1 billion plus a day (maybe he confused the cost of inept bureaucracy with blogging). He and a couple of other business-people types in the class were getting all up on soapboxes about how awful this was. I said that if blogging/reading blogs helps people to vent & find out new information, then it's not as awful as they were making it out to be. I mean, basically every other industrialized nation has more mandatory vacation time than the American worker. I think it's ridiculous.
To quote a cool website that i just found:
In the last twenty years the amount of time Americans have spent at their jobs has risen steadily. Each year, the change is small, amounting to about nine hours, or slightly more than one additional day of work. In any given year, such a small increment has probably been imperceptible, but the accumulated increase over two decades is substantial....
The rise of worktime was unexpected. For nearly a hundred years, hours had been declining. When this decline abruptly ended in the late 1940s, it marked the beginning of a new era in worktime. But the change was barely noticed. Equally surprising, but also hardly recognized, has been the deviation from Western Europe. After progressing in tandem for nearly a century, the United States veered off into a trajectory of declining leisure, while in Europe work has been disappearing. Forty years later, the differences are large. U.S. manufacturing employees currently work 320 more hours -- the equivalent of over two months -- than their counterparts in West Germany or France.
~Juliet Schor, The Overworked American
Medieval peasants worked less than we do. On average, as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich points out, we Americans work 350 hours... nearly one year more every five years. Thus, during an average work life, western Europeans enjoy nearly ten years more free time than do their American counterparts. In Europe, workers receive an average six weeks of paid vacation. We Americans average two. And 26% of us got no vacation at all last year.
~John De Graaf
Dude, medieval peasants worked less??!! That's incredible.
Blaming "loss of working productivity" on blogging just seemed really irritating to me. I hate the self-righteous stance people get when they're defending business, as a whole.
Business is the new religion. It's okay to endorse it and give your soul to it, and oh boy, do people ever.
Anyways, it's tuesday and I hate tuesdays because they're the most damn long day for me ever. At least I don't have to get up earlier than 7:30 on tuesdays....and I was able to pick up a coffee (and another coffee for Biff) before I went to class. Playing Falstaff went really well. The german guy who sits next to me said that we had the most fun presentation. (I really hammed it up; the fake mustache was kinda falling off, and I had a pillow tucked inside a big linen shirt that was barely held up by the belt).
Now I have to go read some Kant.
This blog was brought to you by Anodyne coffee and listening to the CD Planet Yoga, second disk last night before falling to sleep.
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