Using social media
Which social network(s) do you use? Why do you use them?
Which social network(s) so your peers use, and your family? Do you
communicate differently with your peers and family? What are some of the
differences in communication?
For “International Center for Media and Public Agenda/Students Addicted to
Social Media”:
1. What, according to the International Center for Media and Public Agenda,
are the symptoms of addiction to social media? What do you make of their
findings? Do you agree/disagree/would like to modify? How so? Provide
specific ideas and examples in your response.
2. What is the primary reason for the use of digital media for the students in
this study? How does it compare to YOUR reasons for such use?
3. Do you think people get addicted to social media? Do you see it in your
peer group?
4. What are some of the benefits of using social media? Are they sufficiently
beneficial to outweigh the risks they present?
For “If We’re All so Sick of You Facebook…”:
1. What evidence does the author present to demonstrate the “Facebook-isin-trouble” story?
2. In your own words, how does Facebook “stalk” users? Do you think it
does? How does this compare to the way other networks and platforms
engage their users?
3. What implications does Dumenco see for Facebook, given the history of
MySpace, etc.?
4. What do Facebook and other networks provide for business and
organizations? Do they use them as much, and in the same way, as
individuals, in your opinion?
Baskind
English 122
Short Writing Assignment 3
Length: 1-2 pages
Due: Sunday March 3, by midnight, California time
In 2-3 paragraphs explore the following questions:
1. How do you define “social media network”? What makes a social media
network a network?
2. Do you have s social media account? More than one? How many?
3. If you use multiple networks, do you use each network the same, or do
they fulfill different functions for you? If different, how so, and which
functions?
4. Critics of networking on such sites are concerned that “excessive online
networking will diminish participants’ ability to socialize normally in face-toface environments. What do you think about these concerns? What
examples/reasons do you have for your opinion above?
Required reading:
SoL “The Cloud: Semiotics and the New Media” pp. 383-392, “Students Addicted to
Social Media”, and “If We’re All So Sick of You, Facebook, Why Can’t We Quit You”
by Dumenco.
EIGHTH
EDITION
Did your instructor assign LaunchPad Solo
for Signs of Life in the USA?
Where Students Learn
macmillanhighered.com/signsoflife8e
Signs of Life in the USA includes cross-references to LaunchPad Solo
with video, audio, and practice activities that give you immediate feedback.
If your book did not come packaged with an access code, you can purchase
access to LaunchPad Solo for Signs of Life in the USA at
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e-book formats. For details, visit macmillanhighered.com
/signsoflife/catalog.
SIGNS OF
LIFE IN
THE USA
READINGS ON
POPULAR CULTURE
FOR WRITERS
MAASIK
SOLOMON
Signs of Life in the USA is available in a variety of
Cover image: © Simon Evans/Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai
How has niche advertising been used to develop a highly detailed profile
of your consumer habits? Why are Americans so transfixed by “bad guys”?
Signs of Life in the USA helps you master the expectations of college by
providing you with an academic framework to talk about our common cultural
experiences. Extensively updated to account for the rapid evolution of
contemporary trends, the text’s themes feature provocative and current
reading selections that ask you to think analytically about America’s impressive
popular culture. This book includes the readings and assignments you need.
Your fellow students know you can’t pass your course without it.
SIGNS OF LIFE IN THE USA
See how pop culture can help you in college.
EIGHTH EDITION
SONIA MAASIK
JACK SOLOMON
Mech_MaasikSolomon-SignsOfLife8e-SE-111914
Brief Contents
Popular Signs: Or, Everything You Always Knew about
American Culture (but Nobody Asked)
Writing about Popular Culture
Conducting Research and Citing Sources
1 Consuming Passions: The Culture of American Consumption
2 Brought to You B(u)y: The Signs of Advertising
3 Video Dreams: Television and Cultural Forms
4 The Hollywood Sign: The Culture of American Film
5 The Cloud: Semiotics and the New Media
6 Heroes and Villains: Encoding Our Conflicts
7 My Selfie, My Self: Ma(s)king Identity in the New Millennium
Mech_MaasikSolomon-SignsOfLife8e-SE-111914
Signs of Life in the U.S.A.
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Eighth Edition
Signs of Life in the U.S.A.
Readings on Popular Culture for Writers
Sonia Maasik
University of California, Los Angeles
Jack Solomon
California State University, Northridge
BEDFORD/ST. MARTIN’S
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Boston ◆ New York
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For Bedford/St. Martin’s
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ISBN: 978-1-4576-7025-1
Acknowledgments
Text acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on pages 565–68,
which constitute an extension of the copyright page. Art acknowledgments and copyrights
appear on the same page as the art selections they cover. It is a violation of the law to
reproduce these selections by any means whatsoever without the written permission of
the copyright holder.
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Preface for Instructors
T
he more things change, the more they . . . intensify. For in the years since
the publication of the seventh edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A., two profound interventions in American history — the Great Recession and the Digital Revolution — have only increased their influence on American culture
and consciousness. Years of diminishing opportunities, of un- and underemployment, stagnant wages, and economic disruption persistently erode
the national spirit, even as the explosive growth of digital technology continues its transformation of our culture into a vast social network: an always-on
virtual society that has recast Marshall McLuhan’s global village into a global
hive. And there is little reason to believe that either of these forces will be
abating in the foreseeable future.
In the midst of such interventions, the role of popular culture in our lives
has equally intensified. No longer a mere cultural embellishment or ornament, popular culture now permeates almost everything we do even as it
reflects back to us what we are becoming as a society and who we are. With
digital technology blurring beyond recognition the line between everyday life
and entertainment, transforming the traditional work spaces of school and
office into virtual play stations and shopping malls, if we wish to understand
America today we must learn to think critically about the vast panoply of
entertainments and commodities that were once condescendingly dismissed
as elements of “mass culture.” And that is what Signs of Life in the U.S.A. has
always been designed to teach your students to do.
v
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P RE FAC E FO R IN ST RU C T O R S
Then and Now
The importance of thinking critically about popular culture has not always
been apparent to the academic world. When the first edition of Signs of
Life appeared, the study of popular culture was still embroiled in the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a struggle for academic legitimacy in which the adherents of popular cultural studies ultimately prevailed.
Since then, more and more scholars and teachers have come to recognize the
importance of understanding what Michel de Certeau has called “the practice of everyday life” and the value of using popular culture as a thematic
ground for educating students in critical thinking and writing. Once excluded
from academic study on the basis of a naturalized distinction between “high”
and “low” culture, which contemporary cultural analysis has shown to be historically contingent, popular culture has come to be an accepted part of the
curriculum, widely studied in freshman composition classrooms as well as in
upper-division undergraduate courses and graduate seminars.
But recognition of the importance that popular culture has assumed in
our society has not been restricted to the academy. Increasingly, Americans
are realizing that American culture and popular culture are virtually one and
the same, and that whether we are looking at our political system, our economy, or simply our national consciousness, the power of popular culture to
shape our lives is strikingly apparent. That is why, unlike most other popular
cultural texts, Signs of Life adopts an interpretive approach — semiotics — that
is explicitly designed to analyze that intersection of ideology and entertainment that we call popular culture. We continue to make semiotics the guiding methodology behind Signs of Life because semiotics helps us, and our
students, avoid the common pitfalls of uncritical celebration or simple trivia
swapping.
The Critical Method: Semiotics
The reception of the first seven editions of this text has demonstrated that the
semiotic approach to popular culture has indeed found a place in America’s
composition classrooms. Composition instructors have seen that students
feel a certain sense of ownership toward the products of popular culture and
that using popular culture as a focus can help students overcome the sometimes alienating effects of traditional academic subject matter. At the same
time, the semiotic method has helped instructors teach their students how to
analyze the popular cultural phenomena that they enjoy writing about, and
through these methods students have learned the critical thinking and writing
skills that their composition classes are designed to impart.
Reflecting the broad academic interest in cultural studies, we’ve assumed
an inclusive definition of popular culture. The seven chapters in Signs of
Life in the U.S.A. embrace everything from the marketing and consumption
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vii
of the products of mass production to the television programs and movies
that entertain us. We have chosen semiotics as our approach because it has
struck us that while students enjoy assignments that ask them to look at popular cultural phenomena, they often have trouble distinguishing between an
argued interpretive analysis and the simple expression of an opinion. Some
textbooks, for example, suggest assignments that involve analyzing a TV
show or film, but they don’t always tell a student how to do that. The semiotic method provides that guidance.
As a conceptual framework, semiotics teaches students to formulate
cogent, well-supported interpretations. It emphasizes the examination of assumptions and of the way language shapes our apprehension of the world.
And, because semiotics focuses on how beliefs are formulated within a social
and political context (rather than just judging or evaluating those beliefs), it’s
ideal for discussing sensitive or politically charged issues. As an approach
used in literature, media studies, anthropology, art and design coursework,
sociology, law, and market research (to name only some of its more prominent field applications), semiotics has a cross-disciplinary appeal that makes
it ideal for a writing class of students from a variety of majors and disciplines.
We recognize that semiotics has a reputation for being highly technical or
theoretical; rest assured that Signs of Life does not require students or instructors to have a technical knowledge of semiotics. We’ve provided clear and
accessible introductions that explain what students need to know.
We also recognize that adopting a theoretical approach may be new
to some instructors, so we’ve designed the book to allow instructors to use
semiotics with their students as much or as little as they wish. The book
does not obligate instructors or students to spend a lot of time with semiotics — although we do hope you’ll find the approach intriguing and provocative.
The Editorial Apparatus
With its emphasis on popular culture, Signs of Life should generate lively class
discussion and inspire many kinds of writing and thinking activities. The
general introduction provides an overall framework for the book, acquainting students with the semiotic method they can use to interpret the topics
raised in each chapter. It is followed by the section “Writing about Popular
Culture” that not only provides a brief introduction to this topic but also features three sample student essays that demonstrate different approaches to
writing critical essays on popular cultural topics. The introduction concludes
with “Conducting Research and Citing Sources,” a section to help your students properly document the research they’ve done for their writing assignments, including three articles that guide students in the appropriate use of
the Internet as a research tool.
Each chapter starts with a frontispiece, a provocative visual image related
to the chapter’s topic, and an introduction that suggests ways to “read” the
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P RE FAC E FO R IN ST RU C T O R S
topic, provides model interpretations, and links the issues raised by the reading selections. Every chapter introduction contains three types of boxed questions designed to stimulate student thinking on the topic. The Exploring the
Signs questions invite students to reflect on an issue in a journal entry or
other prewriting activity, while the Discussing the Signs questions trigger
class activities such as debates, discussions, or small-group work. Reading
Online questions invite students to explore the chapter’s topic on the Internet, both for research purposes and for texts to analyze.
Two sorts of assignments accompany each reading. The Reading the Text
questions help students comprehend the selections, asking them to identify important concepts and arguments, explain key terms, and relate main
ideas to one another and to the evidence presented. The Reading the Signs
questions are writing and activity prompts designed to produce clear analytic
thinking and strong persuasive writing; they often make connections among
reading selections from different chapters. Most assignments call for analytic
essays, while some invite journal responses, in-class debates, group work,
or other creative activities. Complementing the readings in each chapter are
images that serve as visual texts to be discussed. We also include a glossary
of semiotic terms, which can serve as a ready reference to key words and
concepts used in the chapter introductions. Finally, the Instructor’s Manual
(Editors’ Notes for Signs of Life in the U.S.A.) provides suggestions for organizing your syllabus, encouraging student responses to the readings, and using
popular culture and semiotics in the writing class.
What’s New in the Eighth Edition
Popular culture evolves at a rapid pace, and the substantial revision required
for the eighth edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. reflects this essential mutability. First, we have updated our readings, including more than twenty-five
new selections focusing on issues and trends that have emerged since the last
edition of this book. We have also updated the exemplary topics in our introductions, which are used to model the critical assignments that follow, and
have adjusted the focus of some chapters to reflect the changing conditions
of students’ lives and the ways they consume popular culture. Two new chapters, “Heroes and Villains: Encoding Our Conflicts” and “My Selfie, My Self:
Ma(s)king Identity in the New Millennium,” explore the ways in which the
conflicts and contradictions in American society are reflected in video entertainments awash in heroes, antiheroes, and villains, even as our sense of our
selves is being reshaped in an era of online profiling and self-advertising.
From the beginning, Signs of Life in the U.S.A. has been based on the
premise that in a postindustrial, McLuhanesque world, the image has come
to supplant the printed word in American, and global, culture. That is yet
another of the reasons we chose semiotics, which provides a rational basis for
the critical analysis of images as the guiding methodology for every edition
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P R E F A C E F O R I NS T R UC T O R S
ix
of our book. Each edition of Signs of Life has accordingly included images
for critical analysis; the eighth edition continues this tradition. The images
included in the text supplement the readings, offering a visual perspective
designed to enhance the critical understanding modeled by the texts. Yet the
images are not meant to replace the texts — we strongly believe that while
the semiotic interpretation of images can help students hone their writing
skills, it should not be a substitute for learning critical thinking through the
analysis of written texts.
At the same time, the way that students consume images has been revolutionized by digital and mobile technologies, and Signs of Life in the U.S.A.
reflects this new reality both through the offering of an e-book version of the
main text and through LaunchPad Solo for Signs of Life in the U.S.A., a collection of digital resources referenced throughout the print book that includes
reading and writing tutorials, quizzing on rhetorical and grammatical topics,
and e-readings — from vintage TV ads and films to documentary clips that
elaborate on the topics covered by the reading selections. LaunchPad Solo for
Signs of Life in the U.S.A. is available as a free package.
Even as we revise this text to reflect current trends, popular culture continues to evolve. The inevitable gap between the pace of editing and publishing, on the one hand, and the flow of popular culture, on the other, need not
affect the use of popular culture in the classroom, however. The readings in
the text, and the semiotic method we propose, are designed to show students how to analyze and write critical essays about any topic they choose.
They can choose a topic that appeared before they were born, or they can
turn to the latest box-office or prime-time hit to appear after the publication
of this edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. Facebook and Twitter may well
have been replaced by such more recent sites as Snapchat, Pinterest, and
Instagram within the life span of this edition (indeed, Facebook obliterated
MySpace shortly after the publication of the sixth edition of this book), but
such changes are opportunities for further analysis, not obstacles. To put it
another way, the practice of everyday life may itself be filled with evanescent
fads and trends, but daily life is not itself a fad. As the vital texture of our
lived experience, popular culture provides a stable background against which
students of every generation can test their critical skills.
Acknowledgments
The vastness of the terrain of popular culture has enabled many users of the
seventh edition of this text to make valuable suggestions for the eighth edition. We have incorporated many such suggestions and thank all for their
comments on our text. We are also grateful to those reviewers who examined
the book in depth: Anna Alessi, Saddleback Community College; Suzanne Arakawa, California State University — San Bernardino; Nick Brittin, Lake Michigan
College; Mary Ann Bushman, Illinois Wesleyan University; Jane Christensen,
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P RE FAC E FO R IN ST RU C T O R S
University of Nebraska at Kearney; Amy Corey, Gonzaga University; Patricia
Cullinan, Truckee Meadows Community College; Nicole Denner, Stetson University; Sarah Duerden, Arizona State University; Catherine Gillis, Napa Valley
College; Lynda Glennon, Rollins College; Christi Hein, Colorado Mesa University; Shawne Johnson, Community College of Philadelphia; Terry Krueger,
Central Oregon Community College; David McCracken, Coker College; Laurie
Vickroy, Bradley University; Chris Warnick, College of Charleston; Edward
Wesp, Western New England University; Paula White, Community College of
Philadelphia; Eve Wiederhold, George Mason University; Joshua Woodfork,
American University; and John Ziebell, Florida State College Jacksonville.
If we have not included something you’d like to work on, you may still
direct your students to it, using this text as a guide, not as a set of absolute
prescriptions. The practice of everyday life includes the conduct of a classroom, and we want all users of the eighth edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A.
to feel free to pursue that practice in whatever way best suits their interests
and aims.
Once again, we wish to thank heartily the people at Bedford/St. Martin’s
who have enabled us to make this new edition a reality. We especially want
to thank our editor, Adam Whitehurst, a real partner in our work who brings
to the eighth edition of Signs of Life both a fresh perspective and a storehouse
of creative energy that, in the tradition of our collaboration with Bedford’s
editors, has left its own imprint on the book. Jessica Gould ably guided our
manuscript through the rigors of production, while Kathleen Wisneski handled the numerous questions and details that arose during textbook development. Susan Doheny expertly researched and obtained permissions for art,
and Margaret Gorenstein cleared text permissions. Our thanks go as well to
Jennifer Greenstein for her fine copyediting of this book.
Get the most out of your course with Signs of Life in the U.S.A.
Bedford/St. Martin’s offers resources and format choices that help you and
your students get even more out of your book and course. To learn more
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Martin’s sales representative, e-mail sales support (sales_support@bfwpub
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LAUNCHPAD SOLO FOR SIGNS OF LIFE IN THE U.S.A.: WHERE STUDENTS LEARN
LaunchPad Solo provides engaging content and new ways to get the most
out of your course. Get unique, book-specific materials in a fully customizable course space; then assign and mix our resources with yours. Visit
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• Curated content — including readings, videos, tutorials, and more — is
easy to adapt and assign by adding your own materials and mixing
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P R E F A C E F O R I NS T R UC T O R S
xi
them with our high-quality multimedia content and ready-made assessment options, such as LearningCurve adaptive quizzing. LaunchPad Solo
for Signs of Life in the U.S.A. lets students make connections between
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• LaunchPad Solo also provides access to a gradebook that provides a clear
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• A streamlined interface helps students focus on what’s due, and social
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To get the most out of your course, order LaunchPad Solo for Signs of Life in
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CHOOSE FROM ALTERNATIVE FORMATS OF SIGNS OF LIFE IN THE U.S.A.
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• Paperback. To order the paperback edition, use ISBN 978-1-4576-7025-1.
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• Other popular e-book formats. For details, visit macmillanhighered.com
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PACKAGE WITH ANOTHER BEDFORD/ST. MARTIN’S TITLE AND SAVE
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SELECT VALUE PACKAGES
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P RE FAC E FO R IN ST RU C T O R S
LearningCurve for Readers and Writers, Bedford/St. Martin’s adaptive
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practice what they don’t yet understand. Gamelike quizzing motivates students
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To order LearningCurve packaged with the print book, contact your sales
representative for a package ISBN. For details, visit learningcurveworks.com.
i-series. This popular series presents multimedia tutorials in a flexible format —
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• ix visualizing composition 2.0 helps students put into practice key rhetorical and visual concepts. To order ix visualizing composition packaged with
the print book, contact your sales representative for a package ISBN.
• i-claim: visualizing argument offers a new way to see argument — with six
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Portfolio Keeping, Third Edition, by Nedra Reynolds and Elizabeth Davis,
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INSTRUCTOR RESOURCES
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You have a lot to do in your course. Bedford/St. Martin’s wants to make it
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Editors’ Notes for Signs of Life in the U.S.A. is available as a PDF that can
be downloaded from the Bedford/St. Martin’s online catalog at the URL above.
In addition to chapter overviews and teaching tips, the instructor’s manual
includes a sample syllabus, assignment and course organization ideas, and
additional advice using semiotics in your writing course.
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xiii
Teaching Central offers the entire list of Bedford/St. Martin’s print and online
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Bits collects creative ideas for teaching a range of composition topics in an easily
searchable blog format and includes “Teaching Popular Culture Semiotics,”
the blog by Signs of Life in the U.S.A. author Jack Solomon. A community of
teachers — leading scholars, authors, and editors — discuss revision, research,
grammar and style, technology, peer review, and much more. Take, use,
adapt, and pass the ideas around. Then, come back to the site to comment or
share your own suggestion. Visit bedfordbits.com.
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Contents
Preface for Instructors v
INTRODUCTION
Popular Signs: Or, Everything You Always Knew about
American Culture (but Nobody Asked) 1
Dawn of the Living Droid 1
From Folk to Fab 2
Pop Culture Goes to College 7
The Semiotic Method 8
Abduction and Overdetermination 12
Interpreting Popular Signs: Androids and Zombies
and Vampires, Oh My! 12
The Classroom Connection 16
Of Myths and Men 17
Getting Started 19
Writing about Popular Culture 21
Using Active Reading Strategies 22
LaunchPad Solo for Signs of Life in the U.S.A. takes advantage of what the Web can do, at
macmillanhighered.com/signsoflife8e.
xv
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xvi
CONTENTS
Prewriting Strategies 24
Developing Strong Arguments about Popular Culture
Conducting a Semiotic Analysis 28
Reading Visual Images Actively 31
Reading Essays about Popular Culture 34
26
AMY LIN: Barbie: Queen of Dolls and Consumerism [STUDENT ESSAY]
35
ROSE SOROOSHIAN: The Walking 99 Percent: An Analysis of The Walking
Dead in the Context of the 2008 Recession [STUDENT ESSAY] 41
RYAN KIM: A Reading of Gran Torino [STUDENT ESSAY]
49
Conducting Research and Citing Sources 56
SCOTT JASCHIK: A Stand against Wikipedia
57
PATTI S. CARAVELLO: Judging Quality on the Web
60
TRIP GABRIEL: For Students in Internet Age, No Shame in Copy and Paste 62
Chapter 1.
Consuming Passions: The Culture of American Consumption 71
LAURENCE SHAMES: The More Factor
80
“Frontier; opportunity; more. This has been the American trinity from the very start.”
PAIRED READINGS: UNDERSTANDING SHOPPING
ANNE NORTON: The Signs of Shopping
87
“Everyone, from the architecture critic at the New York Times to kids in the hall of
a Montana high school, knows what Ralph Lauren means.”
MALCOLM GLADWELL: The Science of Shopping
93
“Retailers don’t just want to know how shoppers behave in their stores. They
have to know.”
Credit Card Barbie [PHOTOGRAPH]
101
A popular play figure for girls makes a purchase.
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JON MOOALLEM: The Self-Storage Self
xvii
102
“Maybe the recession really is making American consumers serious about scaling
back, about decluttering and de-leveraging. But there are upward of 51,000
storage facilities across this country — more than seven times the number of
Starbucks.”
STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and QUENTIN HARDY: Attention, Shoppers: Store Is
Tracking Your Cell 110
“If a shopper’s phone is set to look for Wi-Fi networks, a store that offers Wi-Fi
can pinpoint where the shopper is in the store, within a 10-foot radius, even if
the shopper does not connect to the network.”
THOMAS HINE: What’s in a Package
113
“Packages serve as symbols both of their contents and of a way of life.”
JAMES A. ROBERTS: The Treadmill of Consumption
123
“Status consumption is the heart and soul of the consumer culture, which
revolves around our attempts to signal our comparative degree of social power
through conspicuous consumption.”
PHYLLIS M. JAPP and DEBRA K. JAPP: Purification through Simplification:
Nature, the Good Life, and Consumer Culture 128
“The good life utilizes natural environments as a stage-set for a lifestyle that continues to valorize commodity culture.”
STEVE MCKEVITT: Everything Now
143
“Needs are rational and permanent. We have always needed — and will always
need — food, water and shelter. . . . Wants, on the other hand, are emotional,
ephemeral and ever changing.”
THOMAS FRANK: Commodify Your Dissent
150
“We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock
’n’ roll rebels.”
GENE BROCKHOFF: Shop ’Til You Drop [DOCUMENTARY FILM CLIP]
Chapter 2.
Brought to You B(u)y: The Signs of Advertising
When You Come Home [ADVERTISEMENT]
157
165
“The thought of what might have happened, is followed by a deep gratitude for
what did happen.”
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JACK SOLOMON: Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising 166
“The logic of advertising is entirely semiotic: It substitutes signs for things,
framed visions of consumer desire for the thing itself.”
PAIRED READINGS: CREATING CONSUMERS
JAMES B. TWITCHELL: What We Are to Advertisers
177
“Mass production means mass marketing, and mass marketing means the
creation of mass stereotypes.”
STEVE CRAIG: Men’s Men and Women’s Women
182
“What might have been a simple commercial about a man ordering and drinking
a beer becomes an elaborate sexual fantasy, in many respects constructed like a
porn film.”
JENNIFER L. POZNER: Dove’s “Real Beauty” Backlash
194
“Even though Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ ads play to and subtly reinforce the stereotypes they claim to be exposing, it’s impossible not to feel inspired by the sight
of these attractive, healthy women smiling playfully at us from their places of
billboard honor.”
GLORIA STEINEM: Sex, Lies, and Advertising
197
“What could women’s magazines be like if they were as editorially free as good
books?”
JULIET B. SCHOR: Selling to Children: The Marketing of Cool
218
“Cool has been around for decades. Back in the fifties, there were cool cats and
hipsters. In the sixties, hippies and the Beatles were cool. But in those days, cool
was only one of many acceptable personal styles. Now it’s revered as a universal
quality — something every product tries to be and every kid needs to have.”
JOSEPH TUROW: The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is
Defining Your Identity and Your Worth 228
“Every day most if not all Americans who use the internet, along with hundreds
of millions of other users from all over the planet, are being quietly peeked at,
poked, analyzed, and tagged as they move through the online world.”
JULIA B. CORBETT: A Faint Green Sell: Advertising and the Natural
World 235
“It matters not whether an ad boasts of recyclability or quietly features pristine mountain meadows in the background; the basic business of advertising is
brown. Perhaps the only truly Green product is not only one not produced, but
also one not advertised.”
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FORD MOTOR COMPANY: Two-Ford Freedom [VINTAGE ADVERTISEMENT]
Portfolio of Advertisements
Bose
Buffalo Exchange
California Walnuts
Johnson’s Baby
Limbo
Sanuk
Shinola
Chapter 3.
Video Dreams: Television and Cultural Forms
NICK SERPE: Reality Pawns: The New Money TV
255
268
“On Storage Wars, naked economic warfare takes a . . . central role, but the family unit and flights of whimsy intervene to prevent the characters from looking
like complete sociopaths.”
PAIRED READINGS: SOUTHERN WOMAN
CLAIRE MIYE STANFORD: You’ve Got the Wrong Song: Nashville and Country
Music Feminism 276
“As a show . . . Nashville — in its unapologetically pure focus on female characters, its self-aware examination of the struggles of female artists, and its critique
of male-dominated industries — is one of the most feminist television shows on
television.”
MICHELLE DEAN: Here Comes the Hillbilly, Again
283
“Hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of ‘that kind’ of person.”
CARL MATHESON: The Simpsons, Hyper-Irony, and the Meaning of Life 287
“The lifeblood of The Simpsons, and its astonishing achievement, is the pace of
cruelty and ridicule that it has managed to sustain for over a decade.”
NATASHA SIMONS: Mad Men and the Paradox of the Past
300
“Conservatives and liberals just can’t help but see Mad Men differently: the former with apprehension, the latter with anticipation.”
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JANE HU: Reality Hunger: On Lena Dunham’s Girls
304
“What is seen as realism in Girls is exactly what we would not expect to be able
to see in our everyday interactions with others: uncomfortable scenes involving
food and sex.”
WILLA PASKIN: Devious Maids Skewers the One Percent
312
“The message of Devious Maids is not quite that the rich are no better than anyone else, but that anyone else — in this case, five maids — would make for better
rich people than the already rich, which also happens to be one of the guiding
fantasies of American life.”
NEAL GABLER: The Social Networks
315
“On television friends never come in pairs; they invariably congregate in groups
of three or more.”
THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES: Getting Settled [TV EPISODE]
Chapter 4.
The Hollywood Sign: The Culture of American Film
321
LINDA SEGER: Creating the Myth 334
“Whatever our culture, there are universal stories that form the basis for all our
particular stories. . . . Many of the most successful films are based on these universal stories.”
PAIRED READINGS: GENDER AND RACE IN FILM
JESSICA HAGEDORN: Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck
343
“Because change has been slow, The Joy Luck Club carries a lot of cultural
baggage.”
HELENA ANDREWS: The Butler versus The Help: Gender Matters
352
“From Hattie McDaniel onward, the debate about whether or not black actors
and actresses (along with screenwriters, directors and producers) should ever
play the roles of the maid or the butler has been ongoing.”
Lee Daniels’ The Butler [MOVIE POSTER]
355
The poster for the film.
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: The Offensive Movie Cliché That Won’t Die
356
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“The Magical Negro . . . is a glorified hood ornament attached to the end of a car
that’s being driven by white society, vigorously turning a little steering wheel
that’s not attached to anything.”
MICHAEL PARENTI: Class and Virtue
361
“The entertainment media present working people not only as unlettered and
uncouth but also as less desirable and less moral than other people.”
DAVID DENBY: High-School Confidential: Notes on Teen Movies
366
“In these movies . . . the senior prom is the equivalent of the shoot-out at the
O.K. Corral.”
MICHAEL AGRESTA: How the Western Was Lost — and Why It Matters
372
“For a century plus, we have relied on Westerns to teach us our history and
reflect our current politics and our place in the world. We can ill afford to lose
that mirror now, especially just because we don’t like what we see staring back
at us.”
CHRISTINE FOLCH: Why the West Loves Sci-Fi and Fantasy: A Cultural
Explanation 378
“The simplest conclusion . . . is that Bollywood doesn’t produce science fiction
and fantasy because Indian audiences aren’t as keen on it. Local cultural production doesn’t just result from economic wherewithal; desires and needs also matter. And desires and needs are cultural.”
LOUIS J. GASNIER and ARTHUR HOERL: Reefer Madness, and GEORGE A.
ROMERO and JOHN A. RUSSO: Night of the Living Dead [FILM CLIPS]
Chapter 5.
The Cloud: Semiotics and the New Media 383
S. CRAIG WATKINS: Fast Entertainment and Multitasking in an Always-On
World 393
“Like fast food, fast entertainment is easy to get, all around us, and typically
cheap, but not always good for you.”
PAIRED READINGS: FACING FACEBOOK
INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC AGENDA:
Students Addicted to Social Media 403
“‘Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,’ wrote
one student. ‘When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and
secluded from my life.’”
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SIMON DUMENCO: If We’re All So Sick of You, Facebook, Why Can’t We
Quit You? 407
“You know the Morrissey song ‘The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get’? That’s
Facebook’s modus operandi.”
danah boyd: Implications of User Choice: The Cultural Logic of “MySpace or
Facebook?” 410
“We’re experiencing a social media landscape in which participation ‘choice’
leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions, which already pervade society.”
SALVADOR RODRIGUEZ: In the Digital Age, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
415
“I’m finding out — as many others have in the age of smartphones and social networks — that connecting is easy, but severing ties online is nearly impossible.”
RICHARD RUSHFIELD: Toward a Unified Theory of How the Internet Makes
Everything Terrible 418
“In our desperation to make a community out of watching an episode of a TV
show, we pour more of our hopes and desires into that show than any hour of
entertainment can bear. We meme the life out of whatever is original and striking about a work within minutes, overexposing it so much it becomes noxious.”
DANIEL D’ADDARIO: Everything Is “Trolling” Now
420
“Trolling is bad. Trolling provokes a reaction, usually negative. Trolling is apparently quite easy to do. But, if only to better gird one’s own defenses against
it — what is trolling?”
HENRY JENKINS: Convergence Culture
423
“In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand
gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms.”
Navigating On- and Offline Lives [PHOTOGRAPH]
438
Decals on every kind of real-world establishment ask you to “like” them online.
NANCY SCHWARTZMAN and ISAAC MATHES: xoxosms [DOCUMENTARY FILM
TRAILER]
Chapter 6.
Heroes and Villains: Encoding Our Conflicts
ROBERT B. RAY: The Thematic Paradigm
441
450
“To the outlaw hero’s insistence on private standards of right and wrong, the
official hero offered the admonition, ‘You cannot take the law into your own
hands.’”
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STEVIE ST. JOHN: Wonder Woman’s Strength Is Her Compassion — What
Happened? 459
“The impact of 9/11 on comics went further than a single issue: Villains were
more likely to be killed than reformed, and superheroes — including Wonder
Woman—became ‘harder.’”
PAIRED READINGS: LOVING THE SINNER
HEATHER HAVRILESKY: No Sympathy for the Devil
465
“In truth, the likability of any given protagonist represents one of the most subjective assessments you can make about a TV show.”
LAURA BENNETT: Against Antiheroes
471
“The sheer volume of antihero references . . . seems like evidence of a current
tendency in cultural criticism to rely too heavily on pre-established archetypes.
At this point, ‘antihero’ barely means anything at all.”
GEORGE PACKER: Celebrating Inequality
474
“What are celebrities, after all? They dominate the landscape, like giant monuments to aspiration, fulfillment and overreach. They are as intimate as they are
grand, and they offer themselves for worship by ordinary people searching for a
suitable object of devotion.”
NOAH GITTELL: The Lone Ranger Seals It: America’s New Favorite Villain
Is a Rich Guy 477
“You can learn a lot about a film’s values from examining the motivations of
its villains, and you can learn a lot about a society — or at least what Hollywood
thinks society wants to hear — when it produces three mainstream movies in a
few months that give its villains the exact same motivation.”
TIM LAYDEN: A Patriot’s Tale
480
“People are coming down the stairs. They’re saying, ‘You guys are so brave,
thank you, thank you.’”
LORRAINE DEVON WILKE: Snowden’s a Hero, Obama’s a Villain
485
“To believe Edward Snowden, to define him as a hero, one must conversely
believe that Obama and his administration are villains, as, it seems, Snowden
supporters, by and large, do.”
UNITED STATES IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT: iGuardians
[VIDEO]
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Chapter 7.
My Selfie, My Self: Ma(s)king Identity in the
New Millennium 491
RACHEL LOWRY: Straddling Online and Offline Profiles, Millennials Search
for Identity 500
“Millennials, the term given for those born between 1980 and 2000, may be suffering from an identity crisis as they search for their authentic self.”
PAIRED READINGS: PERFORMING GENDER
AARON DEVOR: Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes
504
“Persons who perform the activities considered appropriate for another gender
will be expected to perform them poorly; if they succeed adequately, or even
well, at their endeavors, they may be rewarded with ridicule or scorn for blurring
the gender dividing line.”
DEBORAH BLUM: The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take
Over? 511
“How does all this fit together — toys and testosterone, biology and behavior, the
development of the child into the adult, the way that men and women relate to
one another?”
Gender Identity Online [PHOTOGRAPH]
518
Facebook broadens its gender options.
KEVIN JENNINGS: American Dreams
519
“I pursued what I thought was ‘normal’ with a vengeance in high school.”
MARIAH BURTON NELSON: I Won. I’m Sorry.
524
“If you want to be a winner and you’re female, you’ll feel pressured to play by
special, female rules.”
ALFRED LUBRANO: The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts
531
“‘Every bit of learning takes you farther from your parents.’”
MICHAEL OMI: In Living Color: Race and American Culture
538
“Popular culture has been an important realm within which racial ideologies have
been created, reproduced, and sustained.”
DANI MCCLAIN: Being “Masculine of Center” While Black
550
“Somewhere at the intersection of blackness, gender expression and sexual orientation is a heightened risk for harassment and bias-driven violence.”
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THERESA CELEBRAN JONES: Sanjay and Craig: Nickelodeon’s Hilarious New
Mixed-Race Heroes 554
“We need more mixed-race families and kids on television. Nickelodeon is
leading the way.”
AYMAR JEAN CHRISTIAN: The End of Post-Identity Television
556
“Quite simply, we, or the media, have been forced to realize that identity
matters — still.”
SUT JHALLY: The Codes of Gender [DOCUMENTARY FILM CLIP]
Glossary 561
Acknowledgments 565
Index of Authors and Titles 569
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Introduction
POPULAR SIGNS
Or, Everything You Always
Knew about American Culture
(but Nobody Asked)
Dawn of the Living Droid
“HARDER. BETTER. FASTER. STRANGER.”
With these words, Marvel Comics introduced its new series, Avengers A.I.,
in 2013, the same year that Iron Man 3 busted the box office, Daft Punk’s
Random Access Memories topped the charts, and Google Glass became available in a $1,500 version for selected consumers.
And so, even as World War Z and The Walking Dead continued to demonstrate that the reign of the undead was far from over, American popular
culture began to show signs of the advent of a new empire of the unliving,
of intelligent machines whose long-anticipated arrival would push the world
ever closer to the apocalyptic event that futurists have called “the Singularity”: that posthuman moment when human intelligence will be surpassed by
artificial intelligence and humanity itself will be replaced by robotic androids.
Now, whether the Singularity ever comes to pass (frankly, we are skeptical), it appears that after years of fascination with the living dead — first with
vampires and then with zombies, who completed their migration from the
margins of fantasy fiction to pop culture’s center stage in the first decade of
the new millennium — American popular culture is now preparing a similar
movement for the figures of the cyborg and the android. This emergence of
the man-machine — as with the zombies and vampires before him — is not an
overnight occurrence (Iron Man, for example, was created half a century ago,
and the Six Million Dollar Man was a creation of the 1970s), but it is picking up steam as we write these words. While you might easily assume that
this development is natural and inevitable and has no particular significance,
1
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IN T RO DU C T IO N
there is actually quite a lot of cultural meaning behind it. One of the purposes
of this book is to help you find such meanings.
Indeed, the foundational principle of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. is that human
behavior has meaning and that popular culture is particularly meaningful and
should never simply be taken for granted. Treating popular cultural behavior
as a system of signs, this book will teach you how to read — or interpret —
these signs, while at the same time teaching you the critical thinking skills
necessary to write strong university-level arguments. Accordingly, each chapter in this book focuses upon a particular segment of American popular culture and, through readings, images, and assignments, guides you through the
process that will help you analyze the significance of the full range of our
everyday lives, behaviors, and entertainments. We will return shortly in this
Introduction to the prevalence of such inhuman, or even posthuman, figures
as androids, zombies, and vampires as a prominent example of a popular
cultural sign, but first we will look at just what we mean by the term “popular
culture” and why it is important to think critically about it.
From Folk to Fab
Traditionally, popular or “low” culture constituted the culture of the masses. It
was set apart from “high” culture, which included classical music and literature,
the fine arts and philosophy, and the elite learning that was the province of the
ruling classes who had the money and leisure necessary to attain it — and who
were often the direct patrons of high art and its creators. Low culture, for its
part, had two main sides. One side, most notoriously illustrated by the violent
entertainments of the Roman Empire (such as gladiatorial contests, public executions, and feeding Christians to lions) continues to be a sure crowd-pleaser
to this day, as demonstrated by the widespread popularity of violent, erotic,
and/or vulgar entertainment (can you spell Jackass?). The other side, which we can
call “popular” in the etymological sense of being of the people, overlaps with
what we now call “folk culture.” Quietly existing alongside high culture, folk
culture expressed the experience and creativity of the masses in the form of
ballads, agricultural festivals, fairy tales, feasts, folk art, folk music, and so on.
Self-produced by amateur performers, folk culture is exemplified by neighbors
gathering on a modest Appalachian front porch to play their guitars, banjos,
dulcimers, zithers, mandolins, and fiddles to perform, for their own entertainment, ballads and songs passed down from generation to generation.
Folk culture, of course, still exists. But for the past two hundred years it
has been dwindling, with increasing rapidity, as it becomes overwhelmed by
a different kind of popular culture, a commercialized culture that, while still
including elements of both the folk and the vulgar traditions, represents the
outcome of a certain historical evolution. This culture, the popular culture that
is most familiar today and that is the topic of this book, is a commercial, forprofit culture aimed at providing entertainment to a mass audience. Corporate
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AP Photo/Richard Drew
Popular Signs
Traditional high culture: Deborah Voigt in performance at the
Metropolitan Opera in New York.
rather than communal, it has transformed entertainment into a commodity to
be marketed alongside all the other products in a consumer society.
The forces that transformed the low culture of the past into contemporary popular culture arose in the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century and its accompanying urbanization of European and American
society. Along with the rise of corporate capitalism and the advent of electronic technologies, these four, essentially interrelated, historical forces —
industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, and electronic technology — shaped the
emergence of the mass cultural marketplace of entertainments that we know
today. To see how this happened, let’s begin with the industrial revolution.
Prior to the industrial revolution, most Europeans and Americans lived
in scattered agricultural settlements. While traveling entertainers in theatrical
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IN T RO DU C T IO N
troupes and circuses might have visited the larger of these settlements, most
people, especially those with little money, had little access to professional
entertainment and so had to produce their own entertainment. But with the
industrial revolution, masses of people who had made their living through
agriculture were compelled to leave their rural communities and move to the
industrial towns and cities where employment could increasingly be found.
Populations began to concentrate in urban centers as the rural countryside
emptied, leading to the development of mass societies.
With the emergence of mass society came the development of mass
culture. For just as mass societies are governed by centralized systems of
governance (as the huge expanse of the United States is governed by a federal government concentrated in Washington, DC), so, too, are mass cultures
entertained by culture industries concentrated in a few locations (as the film
and TV industries are concentrated in Hollywood and its immediate environs). Thanks to the invention of such technologies as the cinema, the phonograph, and the radio at the end of the nineteenth century, and of television
and digital technology in the mid to late twentieth century, the means to disseminate centrally produced mass entertainments to a mass society became
possible. Thus, whether you live in Boston or Boise, New York or Nebraska,
the entertainment you enjoy is produced in the same few locations and is the
same entertainment (TV programs, movies, DVDs, or Netflix series) no matter where you consume it. This growth of mass culture has been fundamentally shaped by the growth of a capitalist economic system in America, which
has ensured that mass culture would develop as a for-profit industry.
To get a better idea of how the whole process unfolded, let’s go back to
that Appalachian front porch. Before electricity and urbanization, folks living
in the backwoods of rural America needed to make their music themselves if
they wanted music. They had no radios, phonographs, CD players, iPods, iPads,
smartphones, or even electricity, and theaters with live performers were hard
to get to and expensive. Under such conditions, the Appalachian region developed a vibrant folk musical culture. But as people started to move to places
like Pittsburgh and Detroit, where the steel and auto industries began to offer
employment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the conditions
under which neighbors could produce their own music decayed, for the communal conditions under which folk culture thrived were broken down by the
mass migration to the cities. At the same time, the need to produce one’s own
music declined as folks who had once plucked their own guitars and banjos
could simply turn on their radios or purchase records to listen to professional
musicians perform for them. Those musicians were contracted by recording
companies that were in business to turn a profit, and their music, in turn, could
be heard on the radio because corporate sponsors provided the advertising that
made (and still makes) commercial radio broadcasting possible.
Thus, the folk music of the American countryside became country music.
An amalgamation of the traditional songs that a predominantly Scots-Irish
immigrant population brought over from the British Isles with such American
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AP Photo
Popular Signs
Traditional folk culture in transition: Bill Monroe is known as the father of
bluegrass music.
traditions as “white” gospel music, cowboy songs, and rock ’n’ roll, contemporary “country” preserves the rural working-class perspective of folk music
even as it is performed by wealthy professionals. (Country music’s workingclass roots explain why it is so often filled with the broken romances and
broken-down cars of the poor.)
So the performance of folk music, which had once been an amateur,
do-it-yourself activity, became a professional, for-profit industry with passive consumers paying for their entertainment either by directly purchasing a commodity (for example, a CD) or by listening to the advertising that
encouraged them to purchase the products that sponsored their favorite radio
programs. It is still possible, of course, to make one’s own music, but most
people find it easier and perhaps more aesthetically pleasing to listen to a
professional recording. Today we are, in effect, constantly being trained to be
the sort of passive consumers who keep the whole consumer-capitalist system going. Without that consumption, the economy might totally collapse.
This is hardly an exaggeration, for postindustrial capitalism is making
popular culture all the more dominant in our society with every passing year.
With the American economy turning further away from industrial production
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IN T RO DU C T IO N
and increasingly toward the production and consumption of entertainment
(including sports), entertainment has been moving from the margins of our
cultural consciousness — as a mere form of play or recreation — to its center
as a major buttress of our economy. A constant bombardment of advertising
(which, after all, is the driving force behind the financing of digital media,
just as it was for radio and television a generation or two ago) continually
prods us to consume the entertainments that our economy produces. That
bombardment has been so successful that our whole cultural consciousness is
changing: We are becoming more concerned with play than with work, even
while at work. (Tell the truth now: Do you ever tweet, or post something to
Tumblr or Instagram, during class?)
The result of the centuries-long process we have sketched above is
the kind of culture we have today: an entertainment culture in which all
aspects of society, including politics and the traditional elite arts, are linked
by a common imperative to entertain. Indeed, as traditional high culture
shrinks in social importance and becomes part of what might be called a
museum culture (which is quietly marginalized and mostly ignored), popular culture itself has assumed its own “high” and “low” strata, with television programs like Mad Men and Game of Thrones enjoying a kind of high
cultural status, while Here Comes Honey Boo Boo profitably entertains at the
low end.
Jewel Samad
Congressman Paul Ryan poses with Duck Dynasty stars Willie and Korie Robertson at
the 2014 State of the Union address.
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Popular Signs
7
Pop Culture Goes to College
Far from being a mere recreational frivolity, a leisure activity that our society
could easily dispense with, popular cultural entertainment today constitutes
the essential texture of our everyday lives. From the way we entertain ourselves to the goods and services that we produce and consume, we are enveloped in a popular cultural environment that we can neither do without nor
escape, even if we wanted to. To see this, just try to imagine a world without
cloud computing, TV, movies, sports, music, shopping malls, or advertising.
The study of popular culture has accordingly taken a prominent place in American higher education — not least in American composition classrooms, which
have taken the lead in incorporating popular culture into academic study, both
because of the subject’s inherent interest value and because of its profound
familiarity to most students. Your own expertise in popular culture means not
only that you may know more about a given topic than your instructor but that
you can use that knowledge as a basis for learning the critical thinking and
writing skills that your composition class is intended to teach you.
Signs of Life in the U.S.A., then, is designed to let you exploit your knowledge of popular culture so that you may grow into a better writer, whatever
the subject. You can interpret the popularity of a TV program like The Walking
Dead, for example, in the same manner as you would interpret, say, a short
story, because The Walking Dead, too, constitutes a kind of sign. A sign is
something, anything, that carries a meaning. The familiar red sign at an intersection, for instance, means exactly what it says: “Stop.” But it also carries
the implied message “. . . or risk getting a ticket or into an accident.” Words,
too, are signs: you read them to figure out what they mean. You were trained
to read such signs, but that training began so long ago that you may well take
your ability to read for granted. Nevertheless, all your life you have been encountering and interpreting other sorts of signs. Although you were never formally
taught to read them, you know what they mean anyway. Take the way you
wear your hair. When you get your hair cut, you are not simply removing
hair; you are making a statement, sending a message about yourself. It’s the
same for both men and women. Why was your hair short last year and long
this year? Aren’t you saying something with the scissors? In this way, you
make your hairstyle into a sign that sends a message about your identity. You
are surrounded by such signs. Just look at your classmates.
The world of signs could be called a kind of text, the text of America’s
popular culture. We want you to think of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. as a window onto that text. What you read in this book’s essays and Chapter Introductions should lead you to study and analyze the world around you for
yourself. Let the selections guide you to your own interpretations, your own
readings, of the text of America.
In this edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A., we have chosen seven “windows” that look out onto separate, but often interrelated, segments of the American scene. In each chapter, we have included essays that help you think about
a specific popular cultural topic and guide you to locate and analyze related
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examples of your own. Each chapter also includes an Introduction written to
alert you to the kinds of signs you will find there, along with model analyses
and advice on how to go about interpreting the topic that the chapter raises.
We have designed Signs of Life in the U.S.A. to reflect the many ways in
which culture shapes our sense of reality and of ourselves, from the products
we buy to the way culture, through such media as television and the movies,
constructs our personal identities. This text thus introduces you to both the
entertainment side and the ideological side of popular culture — and shows how
the two sides are mutually dependent. Indeed, one of the major lessons you
can learn from this book is how to find the ideological underpinnings of some
of the most apparently innocent entertainments and consumer goods.
Signs of Life in the U.S.A., accordingly, begins with a chapter called “Consuming Passions.” Because America is a consumer culture, the environment
in which the galaxy of popular signs functions is, more often than not, a consumerist one. This is true not only for obvious consumer products like clothes
and cars but for traditionally nonconsumer items such as political candidates,
who are often marketed like any other product. It is difficult to find anything
in contemporary America that is not affected somehow by our consumerist
ethos or by consumerism’s leading promoter, the advertiser. Thus, the second chapter, “Brought to You B(u)y,” explores the world of advertising, for
advertising provides the grease, so to speak, that lubricates the engine of
America’s consumer culture. Because television and film are the sources of
many of our most significant cultural products, we include a chapter on each.
Chapters on the digital cloud, American heroes and villains, and personal
identity round out our survey of everyday life.
Throughout, the book invites you to go out and select your own “texts”
for analysis (an advertisement, a film, a fashion fad, a TV show, and so on).
Here’s where your own experience is particularly valuable, because it has
made you familiar with many different kinds of popular signs and their backgrounds, as well as with the particular popular cultural system or environment to which they belong.
The seven “windows” you will find in Signs of Life in the U.S.A. are all
intended to reveal the common intersections of entertainment and ideology
that can be found in contemporary American life. Often what seems to be
simply entertainment, like an action-adventure movie, can actually be quite
political (consider the Native American response to The Lone Ranger), while
what is political can be cast as entertainment as well — as in House of Cards.
The point is that little in American life is merely entertainment; indeed, just
about everything we do has a meaning, often a profound one.
The Semiotic Method
To find this meaning, to interpret and write effectively about the signs of
popular culture, you need a method, and part of the purpose of this book is
to introduce such a method to you. Without a methodology for interpreting
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signs, writing about them could become little more than producing descriptive reviews or opinion pieces. Although nothing is wrong with writing
descriptions and opinions, one of your goals in your writing class is to learn
how to write academic essays — that is, analytical essays that present theses
or arguments that are well supported by evidence. The method we use in this
book — a method known as semiotics — is especially well suited for analyzing
popular culture. Whether or not you’re familiar with this word, you already
practice sophisticated semiotic analyses every day of your life. Reading this
page is an act of semiotic decoding (words and letters are signs that must be
interpreted), but so is figuring out just what a friend means by wearing a particular shirt or dress. For a semiotician (one who practices semiotic analysis),
a shirt, a haircut, a TV image, anything at all, can be taken as a sign, as a message to be decoded and analyzed to discover its meaning. Every cultural activity leaves a trace of meaning for semioticians, a kind of blip on the semiotic
Richter scale that remains for them to read, just as geologists “read” the earth
for signs of earthquakes, volcanic activity, and other geological phenomena.
Many who hear the word semiotics for the first time assume that it is the
name of a new and forbidding subject. But in truth, the study of signs is neither
new nor forbidding. Its modern form took shape in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries through the writings and lectures of two men. Charles
Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher who first coined the
word semiotics, while Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist
whose lectures became the foundation for what he called semiology (which was
later developed under the rubric of linguistic structuralism). Without knowing
of each other’s work, Peirce and Saussure established the fundamental principles that modern semioticians or semiologists — the terms are essentially
interchangeable — have developed into the contemporary study of semiotics.
Reduced to its simplest principles, the semiotic method carries on Saussure’s argument that the meaning of a sign lies, in part, in the fact that it can
be differentiated from any other sign within the system, or code, to which it
belongs. For example, in the traffic code, being able to distinguish the difference between green, red, and amber lights is essential to understanding the
meaning of a traffic signal. But that’s not all there is to it, because it is only
within the code that green, red, and amber signify “go,” “stop,” and “caution.” So in order to interpret a traffic signal correctly, you need to be able to
associate any particular red light you see with all other red traffic lights under
the concept “stop” that the code assigns to it, and any green light with all
other green lights under the concept “go,” and so on.
But outside of the traffic code, the same colors can have very different
meanings, always depending upon the system in which they appear. For
example, in the codes of American politics, green signifies not only a political
party but an entire worldview in support of environmentalist policies, while
red, rather paradoxically, can signify either communist sympathies or the
conservative politics of the so-called “red states,” depending upon the context. Amber, for its part, has no significance within the codes of American
politics.
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The fact that the color red has gained a new significance in the codes
of American politics demonstrates the fact that systems, and the meanings
encoded within them, can change — an important principle when you are
interpreting popular cultural signs, because their meanings are constantly
changing, unlike the more or less fixed signs of the traffic code. Here is where
Peirce’s contribution comes in, because while Saussure’s structural semiology is static in its interpretational orientation, Peircean semiotics is dynamic,
situating signs within history and thus enabling us to trace the ways in which
meaning shifts and changes with time.
But neither Saussure nor Peirce applied their methodologies to popular
cultural signs, so to complete our description of the semiotic method, we must
turn to the work of French semiologist Roland Barthes (1915–1980), who, in
his book Mythologies (1957), pioneered the semiotic analysis of everything
from professional wrestling to striptease, toys, and plastics. It was Barthes,
too, who established the political dimensions of semiotic analysis, revealing
how phenomena that may look like mere entertainments can hold profound
political or ideological significance. Since “politics” is something of a dirty word
in our society, Barthes’s politicization of pop culture may make you feel a little
uneasy at first. You may even think that to find political meaning in popular
culture is tantamount to reading something into it that isn’t really there. But
consider the way people responded to Batman: The Dark Knight Rises in 2012.
Many conservative commentators were upset that the villain of the movie was
named Bane — they insisted that this was an allusion to Bain Capital, the former
employer of then–presidential candidate Mitt Romney. For them, the movie
was a piece of liberal propaganda. Conversely, liberal commentators saw Bane’s
revolution as an insidious allusion to the Occupy Wall Street movement and
complained that it demonized a legitimate desire for greater economic equality.
In other words, the political interpretation of popular culture, even when
it is not conducted under the name of semiotics, is already a part of our culture. The semiotic method simply makes it explicit, pointing out that all social
behavior is political because it always reflects some subjective or group interest. Such interests are encoded in the ideologies that express the values and
opinions of those who hold them. Politics, then, is just another name for the
clash of ideologies that takes place in any complex society where the interests of those who belong to it constantly compete with one another.
While not all popular cultural signs are politically controversial, careful analysis can uncover some set of political values within them, although
those values may be subtly concealed behind an apparently apolitical facade.
Indeed, the political values that guide our social behavior are often concealed
behind images that don’t look political at all. But that is because we have to
look beyond what a popular cultural sign denotes, or directly shows, to what
it connotes, or indirectly suggests. The denotation of a sign is its first level
of meaning, and you have to be able to understand that meaning before you
can move to the next level. The connotation of a sign takes you to its political or cultural significance.
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Take, for instance, the depiction of the “typical” American family in the
classic TV sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s, which denoted images of happy,
docile housewives in suburban middle-class families. At the time, most viewers did not look beyond their denotation, so to them those images looked
“normal” or natural — the way families and women were supposed to be.
The shows didn’t seem a bit ideological. But to a feminist semiotician, the old
sitcoms were in fact highly political, because from a feminist viewpoint the
happy housewives they presented were really images designed to convince
women that their place was in the home, not in the workplace competing with
men. Such images — or signs — did not reflect reality; they reflected, rather,
the interests of a patriarchal, male-centered society. That, in effect, was their
connotation. If you disagree, then ask yourself why programs were called
Father Knows Best, Bachelor Father, and My Three Sons, but not My Three
Daughters. And why did few of the women characters have jobs or ever seem
to leave the house? Of course, there was I Love Lucy, but wasn’t Lucy a screwball whose husband, Ricky, had to rescue her from one crisis after another?
Such an interpretation reflects what the English cultural theorist Stuart
Hall (1932–2014) called an oppositional reading. Such a reading of a cultural
text like a sitcom challenges the “preferred reading,” which would simply
take the program at face value, accepting its representation of family life as
normative and natural. The oppositional reading, on the other hand, proposes
an interpretation that resists the normative view, seeking to uncover a political subtext that often contradicts any particular intended “message.” The fact
that so many cultural signifiers appear normative and natural, as transparent images of an apolitical social reality, can make oppositional reading look
The Kobal Collection at Art Resource, NY
The popular television show Leave It
to Beaver (1957–1963) exemplified
traditional family values of the 1950s.
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“unnatural,” or like “reading into” your topic a meaning that isn’t there. After
all, isn’t a sitcom simply a trivial entertainment that distracts viewers from
the concerns of everyday life? But given the commercial foundation of our
popular culture, the fact that something is entertaining is itself significant,
because only those scripts that are calculated to be popular with a mass audience make it to the screen (whether digital, “silver,” or TV). In other words,
popular culture appeals to audience desire, and so the fact that something is
entertaining raises a fundamental semiotic question: Why is it entertaining,
and what does that say about those who are entertained by it?
Abduction and Overdetermination
You may think that a semiotic analysis resembles sociological interpretation,
and indeed cultural semiotics and sociology do not significantly differ. The
differences are largely methodological. Sociology tends to be highly statistical in its methodology, often working with case studies, surveys, and other
quantifiable evidence. Cultural semiotics primarily works by looking at broad
patterns of behavior and seeking what Charles Sanders Peirce called abductive explanations for them. Abduction is the process of arriving at an interpretation by seeking the most plausible explanation for something. No one
can absolutely prove a semiotic interpretation, but the more material you can
bring into your systems of related and differentiated signifiers, the more convincing your movement from denotation to connotation will be.
As you build up your interpretation of a cultural signifier, you can often
find more than one explanation for it. Is that a problem? Are you just having
trouble deciding on a single argument? No, because cultural signs are usually
overdetermined: That is, they can have more than one cause or explanation
(another word for this is polysemous). This is especially true for what we consider “rich” cultural signs, ones that have had a long-standing effect on our
tastes and habits. As we will see in the analysis that follows, the popularity of
the “unliving” is especially overdetermined, with many interpretive explanations converging. Indeed, the more causes behind a cultural phenomenon,
the more popular it is likely to be.
Interpreting Popular Signs: Androids and Zombies
and Vampires, Oh My!
The essential approach to interpreting popular cultural signs is to situate signs
within systems of related phenomena with which they can be associated and
differentiated. Being attuned to the history that provides the background for
a sign is also essential. To see how this works in practice, let’s return now to
those unliving protagonists of so many currently popular entertainments.
Now, the fact that vampires peaked in the first decade of the twentyfirst century and were overtaken by zombies (who are very likely to have
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peaked and similarly declined by the time this book is published) not only is
not a reason to dismiss them as yesterday’s fad but, quite conversely, raises a
number of interesting questions in itself: Why did vampires become so popular in the 1990s and 2000s? Why did zombies take over? And why does it
appear that androids are next in line?
To answer such questions, let’s first ask another very basic one: What do
vampires, zombies, and androids all denote? There is a very simple answer
to this question: unliving humanoids (there are, of course, some differences
between them that we will return to shortly, but this is their basic common
ground). The task of a semiotic interpretation is to move from such a denotational significance to a connotational one, and in order to do that, we must
determine whether the popularity of all three of these beings reveals any pattern or system.
The fact that vampires, zombies, and androids all denote unliving humanoids provides us with the basis for such a system because it enables us to associate them together in a single category. So in what kind of stories do we find
unliving humanoids as characters? This one is easy: in fantasy stories — stories
that, like fairy tales, are about things that are not found in ordinary reality.
Ordinary reality is the subject of a very different variety of story called literary realism, and this difference is highly significant. To see this significance,
however, we have to turn to some history.
A little research will reveal that until the latter part of the 1960s, fantasy
stories in America (including fairy tales, science fiction, cartoon superheroes,
and horror tales) were regarded as kid’s stuff: something for B movies, comic
books, Sunday matinees, and children’s literature. Literary realism, on the other
hand, was for grown-ups. This distinction effectively marginalized fantasy as
nonserious and trivial; thus, the relation between fantasy and literary realism
was not unlike the traditional relation between low culture and high culture.
But with the appearance of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek in 1966, along
with the popular revival of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and The
Hobbit at the same time, the hierarchical relationship between realism and
fantasy began to change. Add to this the appearance of George Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the makings of a cultural revolution were
at hand, a revolution that was sealed in the 1970s with the enormous successes of George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) and Anne Rice’s Interview with the
Vampire (1976). Suddenly fantasy wasn’t mere kid’s stuff anymore.
This shift of fantasy from marginal to central cultural status has only
intensified in the decades since it began, with realism being increasingly marginalized in a popular culture dominated by the many descendants of Tolkien, Roddenberry, Romero, Lucas, and Rice. Thus, we now have a striking
historical difference to consider.
So let’s ask: Is there any possible significance in this shift from realism
to fantasy? To answer this question, we can go back to the years in which
it all began, the decade when America’s baby-boom generation first began
to come of age. The first generation in history to be raised on television, the
boomers were provided with a source of constant daily entertainment heavy
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on children’s fantasy. As a result, they were responsible for the creation of
the youth culture that has been inherited, and enhanced, by every succeeding generation in America, from Gen X to the millennials. And it is within the
context of an emerging youth culture that we can situate the rise of fantasy.
The values of a youth culture include not only a preference for prolonging childhood and clinging to the physical appearance of being young, but
also a desire to maintain the tastes of childhood, which include a strong
attraction to the sort of fantasies with which the young have been traditionally raised. These fantasies provide an alternative to the realities of adult
life: the dull grind of making a living, of raising families rather than having
adventures, of not being free to do whatever one likes. In other words, we
can abductively argue that the triumph of fantasy connotatively signifies a
culture-wide rejection of the realities of everyday life in America, a disillusionment (or simple boredom) with what ordinary experience has to offer and a
desire to escape into the imaginative fairylands of infancy.
But while this can explain why such fantasy figures as vampires, zombies,
and androids are so popular today in mainstream entertainment, it doesn’t
explain why zombies surpassed vampires in popularity in the second decade
of the new millennium, or why androids are a likely contender to supplant
zombies in the near future (with such films as Her and a remade Robocop
leading the way, along with TV’s Almost Human). And here is where overdetermination comes in, because the popularity of vampires, zombies, and
androids is not solely explained by the rise of fantasy in American youth culture; there are other determinants as well, specific to each. The way in which
an overdetermined set of phenomena can branch out into further systems
with their own meanings is one of the key elements of a semiotic analysis.
It would be beyond the scope of this Introduction to provide a separate
interpretation of all three of these figures (a full analysis of vampires, for its part,
would focus on their transition from hideous monsters to romantic and sympathetic lovers and high schoolers, and you can find an interpretation of zombies
in Chapter 3). But to show how the differences within a system lead to further semiotic meanings, let’s return to androids for a moment. The key difference between androids and the other fantasy figures we have looked at is that
androids are machines while the others are, in some way or another, biological.
That is, if vampires and zombies denote the “living dead,” androids aren’t alive
at all — they are only “powered on or off.” But there is a more important difference to consider here: Unlike zombies and vampires, who don’t exist and
won’t ever exist, androids are actually close to existing. What is science fiction
or mere fantasy today could be reality in some not so very distant future.
The development of androids was a lot farther off in the days of R2-D2,
C-3PO, HAL 9000, and Roy Batty, as was the prospect of real biomechanical
men like Iron Man and the Six Million Dollar Man. But now, with Google Glass
portending the arrival of real-life vision-enhanced Riddicks (the protagonist in
a series of Vin Diesel films), and AI researchers coming ever closer to the creation of independently functioning intelligent machines by downloading human
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Photofest
Popular Signs
The poster for the film Her (2013).
minds into computers, the android/cyborg is transitioning from fantasy to real
possibility, a prospect at once glamorously exciting and naggingly worrisome.
In short, when we situate the android in the larger context of the growing
dominance of technology in our lives, an abductively plausible interpretation
emerges. That is, as “socializing” becomes “social networking,” university
classes become massive open online courses (MOOCs), cars become selfpropelled robots, and the Singularity comes ever closer to arrival, the line
between human and machine is becoming blurred. With our lives increasingly being conducted via cloud computing, just who we are as human beings
is becoming less and less clear. In such an environment, we should not be
surprised to see a host of androids storming the center stage of popular culture both as superheroes and as perplexed not-quite-humans who resent their
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Photofest
16
The poster for the film reboot of Robocop.
subservience to their creators, signifying at once a fascination with a looming
brave new world of posthuman existence and a nervousness over what it all
may lead to.
The Classroom Connection
This analysis of androids in popular culture could be extended further, but
we will leave that for you to consider for yourself. The key point is that while
the popularity of any particular fantasy characters, like androids or zombies,
is evanescent, what such characters signify is not. The vampire fad is still
significant, even if vampires today are old hat. The zombie fad is significant
and will remain so after it has passed. All the fads of an ever-shifting popular
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cultural terrain remain significant, just as all the historical events in an everchanging world are significant. In fact, performing a popular cultural analysis
is essentially equivalent to writing interpretive history, but it is an interpretive
history of the present.
Thus, semiotic analyses of popular culture are not different from the
more conventional interpretive analyses you will be asked to perform in your
college writing career. It is in the nature of all critical thinking to make connections and mark differences in order to go beyond the surface of a text or
issue toward a meaning. The skills you already have as an interpreter of the
popular signs around you — of images, objects, and forms of behavior — are
the same skills that you develop as a writer of critical essays that present an
argued point of view and the evidence to defend it.
Because most of us tend to identify closely with our favorite popular cultural phenomena and have strong opinions about them, it can be difficult to
adopt the same sort of analytic perspective toward popular culture that we do
toward, say, texts assigned in a literature class. Still, that is what you should
do in a semiotic interpretation: You need to set your aesthetic or fan-related
opinions aside in order to pursue an interpretive argument with evidence to
support it. Note how in our interpretation of the android story we didn’t say
whether or not we like it: Our concern was with what it might mean within
a larger cultural context. It is not difficult to express an aesthetic opinion or a
statement of personal preference, but that isn’t the goal of analytic writing and
critical thinking. Analytic writing requires that you marshal supporting evidence,
just as a lawyer needs evidence to argue a case. So by learning to write analyses
of our culture, by searching for supporting evidence to underpin your interpretive take on modern life, you are also learning to write critical arguments.
“But how,” you (and perhaps your instructor) may ask, “can I know that
a semiotic interpretation is right?” Good question — it is commonly asked by
those who fear that a semiotic analysis might read too much into a subject. But
then, it can also be asked of the writer of any interpretive essay, and the answer
in each case is the same. No one can absolutely prove the truth of an argument
in the human sciences; what you can do is persuade your audience by including pertinent evidence in an abductive reasoning process. In analyzing popular
culture, that evidence comes from your knowledge of the system to which the
object you are interpreting belongs. The more you know about the system,
the more convincing your interpretations will be. And that is true whether you
are writing about popular culture or about more traditional academic subjects.
Of Myths and Men
As we have seen, in a semiotic analysis we do not search for the meanings of
things in the things themselves. Rather, we find meaning in the way we can
relate things together through association and differentiation, moving from
objective denotation to culturally subjective connotation. Such a movement
commonly takes us from the realm of mere facts to the world of cultural
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values. But while values often feel like facts, from a semiotic perspective, they
derive from cultural systems that semioticians call cultural mythologies.
A cultural mythology is not some fanciful story from the past; indeed,
if the word mythology seems confusing because of its traditional association
with such stories, you may prefer to use the term “value system” or “ideology.” Consider the value system that governs our traditional thinking about
gender roles. Have you ever noticed how our society presumes that it is primarily the role of women — adult daughters — to take care of aging and infirm
parents? If you want to look at the matter from a physiological perspective, it
might seem that men would be better suited to the task: In a state of nature,
men are physically stronger and so would seem to be the natural protectors
of the aged. And yet, though our cultural mythology holds that men should
protect the nuclear family, it tends to assign to women the care of extended
families. It is culture that decides here, not nature.
But while cultural mythologies guide our behavior, they are subject to
change. You may have already experienced a transitional phase in the myths
surrounding courtship behavior. In the past, the gender myths that formed
the rules of the American dating game held that it is the role of the male to
initiate proceedings (he calls) and for the female to react (she waits for the
call). Similarly, the rules once held that it is invariably the responsibility of the
male to plan the evening and pay the tab. These rules are changing, aren’t
they? Can you describe the rules that now govern courtship behavior?
A cultural mythology or value system, then, is a kind of lens that governs
the way we view our world. Think of it this way: Say you were born with rosetinted eyeglasses permanently attached over your eyes, but you didn’t know
they were there. Because the world would look rose colored to you, you would
presume that it is rose colored. You wouldn’t wonder whether the world might
look otherwise through different lenses. But in the world there are other kinds
of eyeglasses with different lenses, and reality does look different to those
who wear them. Those lenses are cultural mythologies, and no culture can
claim to have the one set of glasses that reveals things as they really are.
The principle that meaning is not culture-blind, that it is conditioned by
systems of ideology and belief that are codified differently by different cultures, is a foundational semiotic judgment. Human beings, in other words,
construct their own social realities, so who gets to do the constructing
becomes very important. Every contest over a cultural code is, accordingly,
a contest for power, but the contest is usually masked because the winner
generally defines its mythology as the truth, as what is most natural or reasonable. Losers in the contest become objects of scorn and are quickly marginalized and declared unnatural, deviant, or even insane. The stakes are high
as myth battles myth, with truth itself as the highest prize.
This does not mean that you must abandon your own beliefs when conducting a semiotic analysis, only that you cannot take them for granted and
must be prepared to argue for them. We want to assure you that semiotics will
not tell you what to think and believe. It does assume that what you believe
reflects some cultural system or other and that no cultural system can claim
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absolute validity or superiority. The readings and Chapter Introductions in this
book contain their own values and ideologies, and if you wish to challenge those
values, you can begin by exposing the myths that they may take for granted.
Thus, everything in this book reflects a political point of view. If you hold
a different view, it is not enough to presuppose the innate superiority of your
own perspective — to claim that one writer is being political while you are
simply telling the truth. This may sound heretical precisely because human
beings operate within cultural mythologies whose political invisibility is guaranteed by the system. No mythology, that is to say, begins with “This is just
a political construct or interpretation.” Every mythology begins, “This is the
truth.” It is very difficult to imagine, from within the mythology, any alternatives. Indeed, as you read this book, you may find it upsetting to see that
some traditional beliefs — such as “proper” roles of men and women — are
socially constructed and not absolute. But the outlines of the mythology, the
bounding (and binding) frame, can be discerned only by first seeing that it is
a mythology, a constructive scaffolding upon which our consciousness and
desires are constituted.
Getting Started
Mythology, like culture, is not static, and so the semiotician must always keep
his or her eye on the clock, so to speak. History and the passing of time are
constant factors in a constantly changing world. Since the earlier editions of
this book, American popular culture has moved on. In this edition, we have
tried to reflect those changes, but inevitably, further changes will occur in the
time it takes for this book to appear on your class syllabus. That such changes
occur is part of the excitement of the semiotic enterprise: There is always
something new to consider and interpret. What does not change is the nature
of semiotic interpretation: Whatever you choose to analyze in the realm of
American popular culture, the semiotic approach will help you understand it.
It’s your turn now. Start asking questions, pushing, probing. That’s what
critical thinking and writing are all about, but this time you’re part of the question. Arriving at answers is the fun part here, but answers aren’t the basis of
analytic thinking: Questions are. You always begin with a question, a query,
a hypothesis, something to explore. If you already knew the answer, there
would be no point in conducting the analysis. We encourage you to explore
the almost-infinite variety of questions that the readings in this book raise.
Many come equipped with their own “answers,” but you may (indeed you will
and should) find that such answers raise further questions. To help you ask
those questions, keep in mind the elemental principles of semiotics that we
have just explored:
1. Cultural semiotics treats human behavior itself — not what people say
about their behavior but what they actually do — as signs.
2. The meaning of signs can be found not in themselves but in their relationships (both differences and associations) w...
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