How Work Became Fun - Rachel Maines

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Rachel Maines is a Technology Historian and the author of Hedonizing Technologies. In this video she is talking about how work became fun. From the old times, for example, when professionals could only do Cake Decorating, Gardening, Gourmet Cooking, Hunting, Fishing and Needle work. However, everything has been made simple, because people can have fun and experiment with whatever they want to do.

For example with Cake Decorating, directions are usually given, you can also find it online; with gardening, we have our own lawns where we can have fun gardening using tools, and/or machines; with Gourmet Cooking, both men and women can enjoy cooking or people can choose to not cook at all and eat outside if they choose to; for hunting you can apply for a license and start hunting; for fishing, there are fishing hooks, reels, lakes to fish on; Needle work such as knitting has evolved into the use of machines. Even sex has changed from how it was in the mid evil times, with more options such as the use of sex toys, and movies to watch.

The point is not the evolution, instead, the fact that there are so many options available to do things these days, that we can choose anything that is most pleasurable to us, or even learn something difficult and turn into a fun activity. One of the interesting examples Rachel Maines mentions is use of lithography, "Print Making -when lithography was use by professionals, but when Lithography became obsolete as a production printing technology the artisans seized on it, making the tamarind workshop, which is a famous historical print making workshop used my many famous artists." This goes to show that when something is invented for a certain use, it doesn't take long to figure out other ways of using the invention. Especially these days, one example is the use of Global Position System (GPS) - which are used in cars, cell phones, and tool technologies such as trackers to name a few.

What do you think are some of the hedonizing technologies of these times?

References:

"GPS tracking is nowadays used for many different applications." GPS navigation and other GPS applications. Web. 05 Jan. 2010. .

"How Work Became Leisure | Rachel Maines |." Big Think. Web. 05 Jan. 2010. .