Given what Culture on the Edge is all about, I was thinking, the other day, about this now common notion of “identity theft” — and the way in which it signifies a rather dramatic narrowing of how, at least in this one setting, we use that word, “identity.” Continue reading “The Monetized Self”
“What’s Regular For You?”
A few years ago, when our main annual conference was held in Toronto, I walked into a Starbucks downtown, on my way to the convention centre (yes, that’s how Canadians spell it — deal with it). Apart from the curious (though once familiar) experience of all of us standing in a single line and then moving to one of the three open registers each in our turn (instead of my experience here in Tuscaloosa, where it’s each consumer for him/herself once a cashier opens), there was another moment in which the practical conditions of day-to-day life in TO (yeah, that’s what people in the know call it) made evident that a rather different sense of the the subject — of the individual-in-relation-to-the-group — was in operation north of the border.