Theoretical perspectives from existential psychology suggest that accepting personal vulnerabilities, facing death, and experiencing the potential reality of our own death leads to a process of transformation including fundamental values in the ways in which we experience our sense of self. Change in this context is understood in terms of a process of transformation resulting in a life lived more fully and with greater authenticity. The term transformation is seen as particularly appropriate, in that it is derived from the Latin, transformatio, referring to “change of shape.” The shape of one’s life is thus changed in that the experience leads to a full and authentic life, where authenticity is understood as taking responsibility for one’s own existence rather than following the crowd, even though this might create discomfort. Being authentic is not an isolated end point but experienced as a process of becoming more true to oneself and accepting limitations and possibilities.
Imagine a world without money where all goods were exchanged or traded by barter—by trading goods for goods. If you worked in a computer factory, you might be paid in keyboards, which would not only be difficult to exchange for other goods and services but also rather inconvenient to carry around. To buy groceries, for example, you would have to persuade the grocer to accept your keyboards for payment. There would be no reason for the grocer to do so, unless she had a use for additional keyboards or knew someone else who did. Finding such a double coincidence of wants, the situation when the grocer has what you want (groceries) and you have what she wants (keyboards), would often be extremely difficult. Thus, exchange under a barter system is costly in terms of search time—the time spent looking for someone who has groceries and wants computer keyboards. In general, the time and effort associated with barter make it a cumbersome and inefficient way to conduct transactions. It raises transactions costs, which are all costs involved with making exchanges. In turn, higher transactions costs hold down the volume of exchange in the economy.
In many ways it is understandable that there is opposition to the use of certain songs being used in advertising. People bring specific meaning to pieces of music and can attach their own personal feelings and emotional connections to them. It makes sense that if you have associated a piece of music with loved ones, a marriage, a memory or a significant life experience, you may not specifically want a car, van, yoghurt, breakfast cereal or other product to be associated with this mix. One song will mean many different things to different viewers and listeners. There is not just one reading of a piece of music, it is polysemic, and like most art forms it is open to various different, subjective and cultural interpretations. Perhaps this is what jars. Advertisements are less open to this kind of interpretation. Advertisements primarily distribute messages about products and services—there is less ambiguity and ambivalence. The rich experience of listening to and interpretation of music is perhaps narrowed by association with an advertisement.
* polysemic 다의(多義)의 ** jar 거슬리다, 어긋나다 *** ambivalence 양의성(兩義性), 양면 가치
Sociology presumes studying social life and institutions in an objective and impartial way. This perspective often means that what is taken to be ‘common-sense’ in a particular social context is in fact either invalid or too ambiguous to really offer a satisfactory explanation of a particular activity. Robert K. Merton pointed out that common sense explains little or anything most of the time. The reason is that common-sense sayings are usually employed after the event, depending upon what seems to have taken place. Suppose someone makes an investment on the stock market and it goes disastrously wrong. His or her friend might say ‘Look before you leap!’ However, if the move had been successful, the investor might admonish those who urged caution, declaring: ‘He who hesitates is lost!’ The explanations are of no value, because all the options are covered.
In the 1950s, Herbert Simon and James March introduced one decision-making framework for understanding organizational behavior. Although they elaborated on the bureaucratic model by emphasizing that individuals work in rational organizations and thus behave rationally, their model, which eventually won them the Nobel Prize in Economics, added a new dimension, that is, the idea that a human being’s rationality is limited. By offering a more realistic alternative to classical assumptions of rationality in decision making, this model supported the behavioral view of individual and organizational functioning. The model suggested that when individuals make decisions, they examine a limited set of possible alternatives rather than all available options. Individuals “satisfice,” that is, they accept satisfactory or “good enough” choices, rather than insist on optimal choices. They make choices that are good enough because they do not search until they find perfect solutions to problems. Thus, purely scientific or structural views of management are inappropriate.
Museums have been a form of “public education” in Europe since the eighteenth century. They are situated in different buildings, exhibiting different materials. But when you look at them in Vienna, Seoul, Paris, and New York or in other parts of the world, you will find there, for example, fragments. Different materials were used for the original objects, but the function in the everyday life of human beings remains the same. This also holds true for tools and other objects. They have variations in their shape and in the materials used, and also in the selection of exhibition objects. It is interesting that one part of the National Museum in Seoul is reserved for Kimchi (and there are more than a hundred recipes for preparing this typical Korean food). But they show that there is a similar practice of human beings worldwide to hunt, to preserve food, and so on. Thus, even if these museums were built to show the “national character” of a country or a state, they also show the unifying elements of cultures.
As the celebrity industry has grown economically, so too has access to the lives of the stars we follow. Even before the rise of social media, celebrity magazines and television shows covered every detail of stars’ romantic relationships, shopping habits, and family vacations. Sociologist Joshua Gamson calls this the rise of “unreality,” as consumers began to pay less attention to their own social lives than to the twists and turns of stars’ careers. We are attracted not only by the power and beauty that famous people project and make accessible through consumption but also by the pleasure of sharing a world in which familiarity exists without responsibility. The investment in unreality is mutual, as celebrities and their representatives have much to gain from keeping this world spinning. Fans’ loyalty to and emotional investment in their favorite celebrities are powerful commercial forces, as consumers look to the stars to learn which brands of automobiles, clothing, and makeup are most valuable and glamorous.
When in March 2014 Los Angeles Times reported a 4.7 magnitude earthquake in the city three minutes after the rumbling stopped, no one could imagine the news story was written by a robot. However, the information that had been reported by nobody, written by nobody and published by nobody, was the news everyone was reading. Since then, many news organizations around the world have embraced automated news writing technologies. The system behind these technologies is the natural language generation, which involves the automatic creation of text from digital structured data, a technology that has been developed and commercialized over the past decade. Today, the most obvious examples of automated journalism are in routine sports and financial news. Several reasons explain why robotic journalism has not expanded yet to other topics and to even more complex journalistic writing. One of these reasons is the absence of appropriate data in those topics, which so far has put up a barrier in the development of this technology. This limitation might be soon overcome with the advent of IoT and AI to the news industry.
* magnitude (지진의) 진도(震度), 지진 규모 ** rumbling 우르릉거리는 소리 *** IoT(Internet of Things) 사물 인터넷
