「経験欠乏の現代」の根本問題 : 提供の可能性の視点から
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概要
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These last years, the educational discourse has been focusing on the "experience loss" problem and its consequences. It pointed out the fact that today's environment and lifestyle does no longer yield the experience opportunities it once had, and worried about the consequences of such deprivation. Various activity programs have been ran in schools since the late 1990s until now, with the aim to provide the above "lost experiences". Through this paper, it will be shown that the state of experience in our time can be seen as a two-sided phenomenon, according to the context it refers to. Provided experiences are a response to a lack in the educational context, but far before that, it has appeared as a product of the service industry, offering experience opportunities that are now saturating our everyday life like never before. What is the relation between this contemporary redundancy of experience and the "experience loss" problem? More specifically, what has been lost? This paper aims to reconsider the key questions of this much decried problem, arguing that it may not be so much about a loss of experience opportunities, but about a shift in the attitude toward experience. To explain this change, I will first define experience as a relation with the unknown through two distinctive phases, process and outcome. Any person living an experience has to pass through its process, the encounter and relation with the unknown, to be able to speak about it or share it as an outcome. But with a closer look on the structure of today's provided experiences, one will notice, as a typical trait, that the outcome is known before the experience itself did occur. Encounter and process have been erased and the individual becomes a mere passive spectator of a thoroughly planned event. This argument will be illustrated through a review of the changes in attitudes toward travel experience, and will be extended to a wider reflection on the later rise of experience provision as a mass product of the service industry, which cuts the relation between experience (as encounter) and the individual. Replacing educational discourse about "experience loss" in a larger social context, its experience provision programs may prove to be a misleading solution. Nevertheless, other responses to the problem are possible. As a conclusion, an alternative interpretation of the meaning of "sharing an experience" is proposed.
- 2006-03-24