Anomie
Anomie is a concept developed by Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) to describe an absence of clear societal norms and values. Individuals lack a sense of social regulation: people feel unguided in the choices they have to make. Anomie can occur in several different situations. For example, the undermining of traditional values may result from cultural contact. The concept can be helpful in partially understanding the experience of colonized Aboriginal peoples as their traditional values are disrupted, yet they do not identify with the new cultural values imposed upon them: they lose a sense of authoritative normative regulation. Durkheim was also concerned that anomie might arise from a lack of consensus over social regulation of the workplace. American sociologist Robert Merton (1910- ) used the term more narrowly to refer to a situation where people's goals - what they wanted to achieve - were beyond their means. Their commitment to the goal was so strong that they would adopt deviant means to achieve it. He argued that American society - perhaps more strongly than other capitalist societies - held out the goal of personal wealth and success to all its citizens. It placed extremely high value on the attainment of wea
As would be expected, Karl Marx had something to say about this: he felt that people in a market-based society come to be judged by their position in the market rather than as individuals. Individuals then become alienated from each other, separated by the reifications of a dehumanising system. Marx later abandoned this description of anomic individual alienation in favour of a more systemic theory of exploitation. Although he did eventually become a best-seller in some Asian markets, it must be noted that Marx (who spent a lot of time in Paris but was not French) never made much money. And today, like the profitability of the self-destructive rock star, the related conditions of alienation and anomie in contemporary techno-capitalist society are accepted as axiomatic givens. But not all technophiles have been so dogmatic about the negatives of decentralization. Dr. Vannevar Bush -- even came up with an idea to make the decentralized individual researcher into the very tool for the reintegration of social knowledge. He described the "memex" as a device, which would use individual, will as its sole indexing principle -- almost a paradigmatically anomic device. But in Bush's vision, these trails of individually linked knowledge would be woven into pattern, swapped and intermingled. Rather than simply kill one's self as a Durkheimian social scientist might, the researcher could go study ways of killing one's self and then trade it with another researcher for, say, nudie pictures. Anomie baseball cards. All very sci-fi sounding in 1947, but people eventually latched on to the idea, particularly after that quirky little Internet thing took off.
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2511
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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