ABSTRACT
The mention about emotions brings us neatly to the topic of the present one. It is especially some types of service work that may exemplify Erich Fromm's notion of a market-oriented person. In this orientation, a given individual experiences herself as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. She does not experience herself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. She is alienated from these powers. Her aim is to sell herself successfully on the market. Historian John Kasson has argued that "places such as Coney Island allowed working-class people a release from the cares and the pressures of an industrializing society". The same technologies and capitalist system that generated the plaguing uncertainties of their lives could be harnessed to deliver a pleasing combination of certain pleasure and imagination-stimulating surprise. The type of commodification described above intersects with the particular commodification of those high-risk, high-adrenalin activities known collectively as "extreme sports."
