A piece on IDEA explores how free time and space would be turned into an entirely different none from the perspective of one self and the mass people. It also explores the paradoxical notion of free time and mass leisure time, while the former one is essentially work-free, absolutely and exclusive personal time, the latter is, to be exactly, the mass ‘leisure space’ in urban city in fact consumes rather than serves free time as city space canalises the masses (exploits its energy, movement& free time).
Additionally, it pointed out how our social system and society discourages loneliness, how one spending free time alone would be considered very suspicious, and engaging in art (reading a book) would be seen as an antisocial act. As society sees free time= consume= happiness
Free time has ceased to be a noble
privilege and has become some kind of mass nobility certificate in modern
times. Modern “mass” free time is however a paradoxical notion. “Free” is in
fact and essentially the individual time, the time when not only you don’t have
to work and painfully make a living but also you don’t have to conform in any
way to others, that is to get into the environment of the surrounding people.
Free time is something personal – absolutely and exclusively personal –
otherwise it is not free.
Nothing makes the paradox “mass leisure
time” more visible than the metamorphosis undergone by its spatial support:
the mass urban space, the “leisure” space of the modern city to be exact. Time is an abstract dimension, but the urban space is
concrete, present and extremely efficient. Apparently, an increasing number of
people with more and more spare time require the city to provide adequate
space, and the requirement was answered. In fact, the answer came about long
before the issue. The space is the one to impose itself onto the mass. Left to
its own freedom of time, the mass would move exactly like a lot of Brownian
particles in disorder, filled with energy but not with sense. The city space
canalizes the mass movement and exploits its energy in direct ratio with its
free time. Urban space doesn’t serve free time but consumes it.
Utopia (indifferent space)
Free time is by definition
the time of pleasure and, if possible, even the time of happiness.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
described a perfect modern society. Free time meant there especially two
things: free sex (children were conceived in vitro anyway) and official drug
use. Drugs had a perfect chemical composition so that no unhealthy outcome
existed. Except for addiction of course – but pleasure as such is the one to
create the addiction. The fact that getting high (merely killing time) was
extremely time consuming also determined the space planning. To be precise, the
way in which the city space was organized wasn’t very important. Besides the
strict functionality of the social system, the only clear requirement was that
of not encouraging loneliness (getting high doesn’t mean loneliness but evasion
even from the personal condition). To spend your free time alone was considered
very suspicious. To read books, for instance, was an antisocial act – but for a
reason that sounds foretelling today coming from Huxley: because if you spend
your time reading you don’t have enough time left to consume, and to consume is
compulsory in the industry’s best interest. Art was also excluded – happiness
should always be preferred to art, Huxley1 points out. Modern society was
imagined as a society of generalized happiness.
On one condition though: not to be
different. For as precise as in vitro technology may be, by mistake, alas,
people different from the mass would be born. Unfortunately there was no place
for them in the “brave new world” (consequently they were deported on an
island in the ocean). The space of perfect modernity was exclusively reserved
to mass-people, a space wherein individual time simply didn’t take place.’
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