Assignments Assignment 1 The formal requirements for Paper 1 are simple: 1200 words But beyond these formal requirements things do get more complicated. I would like you to base your paper in some way shape or form upon the materials discussed, viewed, and read during these first three weeks of class. This though is not a memory class. Do not view your paper as a review of the material or a way of showing me what you have read. I am impressed when people have read well and closely, but reading well and closely requires also that one do some thinking about what one has read. That's the hard part...the thinking part. This will require some engagement on your part, some desire to express a view for example, or to analyze something not quite clear, or to explain something that needs explaining, or to reflect on how the materials may have changed however slightly your view of things. Mostly I want to hear YOUR response to the topic under discussion as you understand that topic and as you think, reflect, and feel upon it. Because I want YOUR response, I can tell you exactly what to write because I do not know what YOUR response. Hell, I don't even know at this moment what MY response is. I have covered the materials we have covered in class a couple of times now and each time I find myself thinking about what I have seen, read, and discussed in a slightly different way. The way I try to find out what I might be thinking is to write and see what comes out. So, that I guess is what I am asking you to do. For example, this time I find myself thinking more about the "expressive self." This is mentioned in the video and the readings. What is that exactly. I am not sure, I would have to think about it. But for the time being I will not try to define it, but just say that the video and the readings suggest this "expressive self" was created and produced by social forces, by what I call the consumer society. People like Bernay and Lehman and Herbert Hoover quite consciously saw advertising--the executive arm of the hidden govenment--as an attempt to create something called, not the worker, or laborer, or thinker, or artist, but the consumer. I find this a little freaky because it means that the very way I experience my self as a self is not my self precisely but a socially created self-view. At other times, people apparently did not experience themselves as consumers; this is hard to get to or understand because we tend to project on the whole history of the world the view of the world that we know, the one we have grown up with. That's sort of what I am thinking about at this point. If I were to write a four page paper, it would be devoted to saying more clearly by analysis, example, quotations, personal examples what I mean by these foggy thoughts and what they might mean for my understand of myself and the world in which I live. Something like that. More on paper 1... As indicated paper 1 is not a report but a response (that might include analysis, argument, narrative, etc) to the topic. Along those lines I was thinking about the idea of expressive individual, and it came to me that I had seen a Comerica back in the sixties, or early seventies that clearly illustrates this idea (in the commercial!). I forget the product. But this was during the cold war and feature Russia. The Russians didn't have the thing being advertised (who knows what) and as a consequence of that they were the dullest looking people in the world. In the ad, all the women wore drab green smocks and all the men look like idiots. These people were a dull uniform horde because they lacked the product. We americans however were lively and colorful and expressive because we had the product. As Berney would say this advertisement was pure propaganda. A product was associated with the expressive individualism of capitalist consumer society, and those Russians, who were socialists, were consequently projected as dull and idiotic. So in this ad, the product was associated with patriotism, capitalism, consumerism and all were projected as superior to the dull idiocy of the the Russians. I don't know if I would use this example in my paper or not. Maybe I would use it in the first paragraph as a way to get things going.
Also to show how this theme of expressive individualism is still being used in ads I might write about those Mac/PC ads.
But there a good number of ideas or themes that one might draw from the readings and look at in more detail, by analyzing the article or the idea and by drawing upon your own experience. David Suzuki starts off his chapter, "The True Cost of Gadgets" with a little thought experiment. He writes:
I think one could mull over this quotation in many ways. I was alive in 1995 and I didn't feel back then that my life was impoverished or somehow not complete because I didn't have a DVD player or an Ipod. Of course, the DVD player or Ipod had not been invented or marketed yet. Now, Suzuki says a person might be seen as nuts if he or she went back to living in 1995. This suggests how much we are creatures of our social world; this social world changes and we change with it. Suddenly something that didn't even exist in 1995 because part of everyday reality and a person might feel impoverished or incomplete without a cell phone or a DVD player. But are these upgrades really upgrades. Do we need them? Or do we want them and is this desire for these things something that comes from the individual or something created in the individual by marketing and social pressure. A deeper question, of course, is buried here. Is there such a thing as an individual separate from his or her social conditions? More on paper 1. I got my Ph.D. in English Literature. I spent a good deal of time reading complicated stuff and then trying to interpret it. Not, in other words, just trying to summarize what it said; but trying to figure out what it meant. Actually, though, these two things cannot be separated. Figuring out what something says usually means one already has some idea what it means; and what it means of course is very much related to a clear statement of what it says. Over all, I think this way of writing is related to analysis and, through that, to interpretation (or here is what I think it means on the basis of what I think it says). So one way to think about writing paper 1 and organizing it would be to locate in a couple of the articles some quotations that you think are important. You would then try to relate the quotations, show how they are alike, and pull out of them a common idea that unites them both, and then go on to elaborate upon that key idea through further quotes and examples from the world of advertisements, for example, or from your own personal experience. I am thinking about interpretation right now because I just finished re-reading Lasch's piece on Narcissism and Consumerism. It's a bit of a tough go; I am not sure a what he means exactly. But as I read, I keep thinking about the idea of identity in consumer society. He brings it up quite a bit. He seems to suggest that in consumer society one is encouraged and socialized to believe that identity is very, very fluid. He even seems to say that now the surface is the self or in other words it is now possible to tell a book by its cover. I think this idea--the idea of self or identity--in consumer society might be a central idea around which to build a paper. This is of course something one could think about in a personal way--to test the idea against one's experience to help you figure out further what Lasch might mean. Say, one tends to feel that the ills of consumerism are the result of individual greed or selfishness or pleasure seeking hedonism. Reading Lasch might cause you to rethink (though not necessarily to discard) that view. He doesn't seem to want to hold individuals responsible for there actions; rather, as a social thinker, he argues that we (and this ties to the Cushman article and the social construction of self) live in a social world, a consumer world, that shapes for us, whether we like it or not, or even if we are conscious of it or not, a certain view of identity or self (and it's really impossible to think one's self out of the clutches of this view). He writes:
Here I think of the documentary, and the Cushman article especially. These suggest the ways consumer society sets up self-scrutiny of an uneasy kind (do I have bad breath, am I overweight? and then tries to sell us solutions to these nagging self doubts). These solutions, as he argues, are frequently sold to us by "experts," that we tend to believe because we, of course, are not "experts." Lasch continues:
Here "identity" or self is reduced to its surface presentation. Indeed, Lasch argues, that in consumer society "...the self becomes almost indistinguishable from the its surface." Naturally, then, if the self is to fit in or keep up or be accepted, it must buy those things that allow it to fit in, or keep up, or be accepted. But, as Lasch point out, this constant need, promoted by the consumer society, to update or upgrade one's self, makes selfhood or identity "problematic" or as Cushman puts it, the self becomes or is constructed as "empty." And this is not a good feeling. That's enough. I just wanted to suggest how by looking closely at quotations, and weaving a few of them together one might, but does not have to write a paper, trying to clarify for one's self as best one can a central thought or idea. Assignment 2 Assignment 2 will be a research proposal. You will tell me what exactly you intend to research. The proposal will have three basic parts. Introduction: what do you intend to research and why is this research important for an understanding of consumer society. Assignment 3: your final research paper will be about 12 pages long, with a works cited page containing a minimum of 8 citations. Examples of Research Papers Assignment 4: An oral report on your research to be delivered some time during the last three weeks or so of class. Assignment 5: brief blog entries on selected subjects as assigned. Assignment 7: please do not text message or communicate via any electronic means to persons not in the classroom. Details concerning each of these assignments will be filled in as the course goes along. |
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