LEISURE AND TECHNOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION.

The new environment of man in industrialized societies is characterized by an increasingly extensive and tightly woven web of techniques, of which, industrial mechanization the whole complex of production machinery and equipment contained in workshops and offices of industrial enterprises is a part. Technical environments in differently organized societies posses, despite disparities, certain analogous features, both in the functioning of their institutions and in individual behavior patterns. It is from the sum total of cultural traits that a civilization is built up. In the present day world it is the combination of culture traits. Besides providing increasing quantities of more and more highly perfected productive machinery and goods, a technological civilization also gives rise to what is called spare time, i.e. time that is spared and, at least on the face of it, clearly differentiated from working time. Technical change brings in its wake, everywhere, spare time, all possibilities of leisure and the pursuit of happiness, of the good life as expressed in terms of the material and moral conditions of the new environment.