Leisure is what people do in their spare time, it is usually considered to be of a relaxing or enjoyable nature. However within the Information Society this may not always be the case. Within the past few decades there has been a shift in the definition of what leisure is, and how much time is allocated towards it.
The life of someone living in the Information Society does not leave much time for leisure. Balancing paid work, housework and exercise leaves little down time to just do nothing (Boldt, 1999). Relaxation is more often than not replaced by other activities.
The most praised form of leisure is exercise. Exercise exists in many forms such as sports like ball games; physical training such as weight lifting or jogging; and low impact exercises like yoga or Tai chi. While exercise is often performed during leisure time, it is more often than not though of as another job to do.
Another leisure activity is the spending of money. The Information Society encourages people to be a ‘consumer’, that is one who consumes goods, which they are lead to believe that they ‘need’ to be happy, successful or attractive. While in most cases this is not the case, they are also encouraged to live the dream that is portrayed by these products and earn enough money to spend on products to help them become like the people they see in the Youth Culture and New Technologies - Advertising.
Computer Games - Overview are an increasingly popular form of leisure. They involve sitting in one place and maintaining a strong mental focus for several hours while pressing a combination of buttons to achieve a goal within the game. Some of these games require long hours of play in return for some reward, often the longer you play the greater the reward. These games are very similar to work in that you must complete a number of monotonous tasks in order to gain access to certain features or rewards.
The Information Society has brought about the blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure. Where traditionally work and leisure were kept separate, now it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between the two. An example of this blurring is the growing number of people who work from home.
Historically, people went to work because they had to. What they did after work was designated as "pleasure". Now, both work and leisure were pleasurable - or torturous - or both. Some people began to enjoy their work so much that it fulfilled the functions normally reserved to leisure time. They are the workaholics. Others continued to hate work - but felt disorientated in the new, leisure-like environment. They were not taught to deal with too much free time, a lack of framework, no clear instructions what to do, when, with whom and to what end. (Vaknin, 2005)
Daniel Cotter 15:49, 16 Oct 2005 (EST)
