Critical Readings 2017

An easier read this week! It's more of a descriptive story than a factual analysis. Written by art critic who talks about his 'home', Las Vegas. Dave Hickey has a completely different background to any of the previous authors we have looked into, Hickey was a drug user who liked to travel (not in a desirable fashion) and has used his drug use to survive through life in his home of Las Vegas. He talks about Las Vegas being his home in a way that not many other people would, Vegas to most people is a place to go to get away from your own 'reality' of what we all call home, a place to go for fun, gambling, partying and mystery. Dave Hickey saw all this, but it was this setting that allowed him to feel comfortable in, a place that represented his values and didn't feel alienated, this was his home in the desert. He describes Vegas as a social scene, a place where people became free spirits, a place where outsiders can get work. People wouldn't feel alienated i...

After our group discussion regarding reading this piece of text, it is clear to see that this was written by somebody in a labouring job (blue collar) and not an office worker (white collar). The name of the book's title, 'The Case of Working with your Hands', along with the chapter we read, 'The Separation of Thinking from Doing' is clearly derived from the authors background. An opposite perspective to that of last week with Paul Mason. Matthew Crawford makes a point about, as we get older as a human race, each generation becomes more and more stupid because we become increasingly narrow minded. This links back to the Facebook article a few weeks ago. As a generation, we are now stuck to our phones, wanting to feel connected, technology 'educates and informs' us with these personalised news feeds which was discussed in a previous blog, this then leads to us becoming very narrow minded as we as a 'technologically evolved generation' only read what...

So I have been putting off writing a review for this chapter, purely because, if I'm honest, I didn't really get it. I'm not economically minded, economic and finances normally go way over my head in every day life. Once I sat down with my tutor and we discussed what we all thought about this chapter, it started to make some logical sense, but even then, I'm still no expert at what capitalistic or non-capitalistic approaches are. I believe not one member of our group was overly keen on this reading. Once the topic was brought up with our tutor, however, it started to make a bit of sense, maybe because he was explaining it in an easier way than this book seems to do. Coming from someone like me who isn't familiar and tends to avoid any governmental or economic talk, its not the easiest of reads. Constant numbers and facts went straight over my head, but when explained in a simpler and more educational way and when explained with regards to every day life I got the...

Before reading this article, I had never thought of Facebook as anything more than a social media hub for photo sharing and messaging with friends and family. But if your eyes are opened in a different perspective by somebody like John Lanchester, you can see what has been happening in front of our eyes from the day your social media account was created. Once you take in the fact that Facebook to all of us is free, we never think of how a company like that becomes so wealthy. Lanchester explains that we are constantly being sold from under our keyboards. We are being sold to various advertisements and Facebook had created algorithms to 'work out' each individual person, or 'product' in their eyes and these algorithm use our information it is has gathered from 'search engines' or 'likes' to manipulate and mislead us to articles they know we will want to open. They seem to know more about us than our own government; which is terrifying to say the least. ...