Cocooning ou a socialização pelo isolamento !!!

Cocooning versus convivialidade social

Segundo a Wikipedia designa-se o cocooning como aquela atitude que consiste em ficar por casa, só saindo a título excepcional para a rua a fim de satisfazer necessidades vitais. O cocooning significa pois um estilo de vida caseiro, doméstico (domesticado ?) subentendendo uma desconfiança adquirida face ao convívio social com os outros, e temor e antipatia para com a vida social nos espaços públicos.
Significa, além disso, um novo tipo de socialização, por mais paradoxal que pareça ser: a socialização ou integração social por via do isolamento individual da pessoa que, atomisticamente, e encerrada na sua «casa-cela» se conecta com o mundo por intermédio da tecnologia.


Costuma-se apontar a uma guru das modernas tendências sociais, Faith Popcorn, a autoria e a invenção do neologismo cocooning nos anos 1990 ao pretender exprimir a disposição das pessoas de se protegerem face às realidades cruéis e imprevisíveis do mundo exterior, como seria supostamente o caso da actual geração que – segundo aquela autora – teria tendência de se refugiar no abrigo do conforto e do calor da casa, e não em empreender um estilo de vida convivial e sociável. A isso não seria certamente estranho a crescente presença da Internet no quotidiano dos indivíduos, que lhes permitiria estarem conectados , ainda que estando encerrados em casa.

Precursor desta atitude seria o autor inglês E.M.Forster que no seu livro de ficção científica teria prevista pela primeira vez a generalização da atitude típica do cocooning. Com efeito, ele imagina um mundo onde os indivíduos ficariam encerrados na sua célula hexagonal, pouco dispostos a manterem contactos humanos directos ou a empreenderem viagens, por mais curtas ou próximas que fossem, e que não comunicam senão por via dos aparelhos electrónicos. Forster descreve, de forma pessimista, uma humanidade que se caminha para a sua própria perda, pois vai perdendo o gosto pela acção, rendendo-se ao fatalismo e à indiferença.

Se é verdade que a visão futurista de Forster não encontrou cabimento ao longo do século XX, durante o qual a mobilidade das pessoas não parou de crescer, e as viagens e o turismo se tornaram numa realidade social e económica indesmentível, também não é menos verdade que no dealbar do século XXI os avanços tecnológicos e a indústria electrónica se tem vindo cada vez mais a impor às sociedades e aos indivíduos, moldando o seu quotidiano e as suas atitudes para com os outros e para consigo mesmo. Assim factores de várias ordem ( Internet, videoconferência, multimedia, aumento do petróleo, pânico do terrorismo, etc, etc) têm levado nos últimos tempos ao reforço do cocooning que mais não significa a morte da vida social e do convívio humano tal como os conhecemos

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Cocooning is the act of insulating or hiding oneself from the normal social environment, which may be perceived as distracting, unfriendly, dangerous, or otherwise unwelcome, at least for the present. Technology has made cocooning easier than ever before. The telephone and the Internet are inventions that made possible a kind of socialized cocooning in which one can live in physical isolation while maintaining contact with others through telecommunication.

The term was popularized in the 1990s by marketing consultant Faith Popcorn in her book The Popcorn Report: The Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life. Popcorn suggested that cocooning could be broken down into three different types: the socialized cocoon, in which one retreats to the privacy of one's home; the armored cocoon, in which one establishes a barrier to protect oneself from external threats; and the wandering cocoon, in which one travels with a technological barrier that serves to insulate one from the environment.

A common example of home-based cocooning is staying in to watch videos instead of going to the movies. Wandering cocooning is evident in those who exercise or walk around the city while being plugged in with earphones to a private world of sound. Wireless technologies such as cell phones and PDAs have added a new dimension of social cocooning to wandering cocooning by allowing people to include selected others in their mobile cocoon.

Examples of armored cocooning include network firewalls, virtual private networks (VPNs), surveillance cameras, and spyware-blocking software applications.

When it comes to watching movies, Internet households in North America prefer to stay at home while similar European households prefer the cinema, according to Global Digital Living™, a multinational consumer study by Parks Associates that provides comparative data from 13 nations, identifying the relative rates of adoption of digital living technologies.

For North America, the gap between renting versus going out is particularly pronounced in Canada, where 54% of all Internet households rent movies each month but just 29% go out to the movies at the same rate. Conversely, European Internet households prefer the cinema over renting movies. In France, for example, 36% of all Internet households go to the cinema every month while just 21% rent movies.

“The practice of ‘cocooning’ or surrounding your personal living space with everything you want appears to be stronger in North America than in Europe,” said John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates. “North American households are much more likely to use pay-per-view or have a subscription TV service, and the difference in film viewing habits is an extension of this trend.”
In addition, Global Digital Living found that Asian Internet households generally follow their North American peers and rent movies more often than go to the cinema. South Korea was a notable exception, however, with 43% going to the movies monthly and 35% renting movies monthly.
“This finding in Korea is partially due to the increasing use of the Internet to watch movies,” Barrett said. “Forty-eight percent of Korean Internet households download or stream video every month, a number that surpasses both their rental and movie-going rates. Korea has always had a weak movie rental market, which ironically has helped boost the demand for online distribution.”The Global Digital Living project is a study of worldwide consumer technology trends. It surveyed Internet households in thirteen nations: France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, India, China, South Korea, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States

O declínio da gravata

A proporção dos homens que compram uma gravata para ir trabalhar diminuiu consideravelmente ( de 70% em 1996 para os actuais 56%) revela um relatório citado pela jornalista Kathryn Hughes num seu artigo publicado no jornal britânico The Guardian acerca do declínio deste apêndice de vestuário que a crer nas suas observações se encontra completamente em desuso, e que é herdeiro de uma fase recuada da evolução social.
A recusa da gravata simbolizará segundo aquela jornalista a saída do homem do terreno de combate para uma posição de maior neutralidade. É nos ambientes de equipa e camaradagem, onde as pessoas não se sentem em duelo, que é mais visível o abandono da gravata. E ao recusar essa peça de vestuário os elementos das profissões pós-industriais estariam também a pugnar por uma maior interactividade e um ambiente laboral não hierárquico.


Reproduz-se a seguir o artigo original, recentemente editado pelo The Guardian (4 de Set.) e da autoria de Kathryn Hughes e sob o título «Uncool under the collar»

Uncool under the collar

The decline of the tie reflects a refusal to be defined by class - and a reluctance to point rudely

There is, apparently, consternation in the world of tie manufacturers. The proportion of men in professional jobs who buy ties, a report says, has dropped from 70% in 1996 to just 56% today. And, to break that down (pay attention at the back, please), only 28% of office managers have bought a tie in the past 12 months. It is, however, floppy-collared architects and surveyors who are the biggest slackers: last year only a paltry 16% of them bothered to purchase a thin string of fabric to tie around their necks at 7 o'clock every morning.

These architects and surveyors are doubtless responding to the realisation that the tie is the sartorial equivalent of an appendix - an entirely redundant bit of kit left over from a much earlier phase of evolution. Just as it is several millennia since our digestive systems were required to deal with grass, it is at least a couple of centuries since men felt it necessary to protect their throats in the street from anyone making a lunge at the jugular with a sword (although nostalgia freaks will be queasily pleased to note that those times may be returning in certain parts of our inner cities).
Rejecting the tie, then, takes a man out of the symbolic combat zone and places him permanently in a "stand down" position. This might be a disadvantage in a court of law, which is why solicitors and barristers buy more ties than anyone else. However, in the team-based environment of an advertising agency, or even a call centre, it's probably a good idea if individuals don't feel permanently poised to fight a duel (at one point in history merely touching another man's tie knot was an invitation to trek out to a heath and start trading pot shots, which must have played havoc with staffing rotas).

What's more, by rejecting the tie, architects, surveyors and engineers (only 13% of whom managed to buy one last year) are also making a strong statement about not wanting to be defined by class. Ever since 1880, when the jaunty rowers of Oxford's Exeter College removed the ribbon bands from their hats and tied them round their necks, the tie has become a virtual microchip of information about where you come from and, by implication, where you are going. Schools, clubs, regiments and colleges all signal their specialness with a complicated pattern of spots and stripes that can only be decoded by those in the know. By refusing to be tied down in this way, members of what might be termed the post-industrial professions (financial advisers are also low on the tie-buying scale) signal that they hail from a world of flattened hierarchies and democratic interaction.

There is, finally, another very good reason for men to reject the symbolic freight of a tie. For while the necktie started off as a dandified bit of kit (as near as dammit to tucking a lace hanky into the top of your shirt), from Victorian times onwards it became austerely and dominatingly male. As a result, any woman wearing a tie in the 20th century was either very obviously in drag for her own pleasure or was being forced to send a slightly humiliating signal to the world that she wished to be viewed as a neuter (it's for that reason, surely, that disturbingly luscious adolescent girls are still obliged to wear a tie to school).

In these metrosexual days, however, for a man to insist on wearing a tie does not speak of a casual and unforced masculinity, but suggests instead a nagging worry about where the proper markers lie. For, viewed against a crisp white shirt, the classic dark tie forms an urgent pointing finger, dragging the viewer's eye straight towards the wearer's genitals. "Look," the tie seems to shout, like an embarrassing drunk in the pub, "there's no doubt about it, he's definitely all man."

· Kathryn Hughes's most recent book is The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1864023,00.html