Frontline's documentary _The Persuaders_ is available online at this address:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/view/
The entire documentary is terribly interesting, but, for class this week, I'm most interested in segment three "The Times They Are A-Changin'". The video segment is about twelve minutes long, and it focuses mostly on "product placement" in film and television. The end of the segment features a brief commentary by Mark Crispin Miller (NYU) that includes this statement: "Once a culture becomes entirely advertising friendly, it ceases to be a culture at all, it ceases to be a culture worth the name." In the immediate context of the statement, Miller is referring to the "enertainment industry" (mostly television), but I think his anxiety can be extended to a much wider sweep of American culture: when our clothes, shoes, cell phone, eye glasses, notebook computer, water bottle, car, bike, and cup of coffee are all displaying (and essentially advertising for) the brands we buy, has culture at large become too advertising friendly? I use "too" advisedly: is this a real danger? Do we need to be alarmed? Can meaningful cultural production exist alongside and within the clutter of Madison Avenue, or is our culture dissolving entirely into capitalism?
product placement
Isn't the entire academic enterprise built on product placement? In the sciences, unlike the humanities, it is relatively easy to get work published. The key is to get it cited. Tenure decisions are made not on how much is published, but how many times a work is cited.
Increasingly this economy has spread to the humanities, where is is much more difficult to get something published. Still, most work that does get published isn't cited. So work that is cited is valued even more.
And the tools are now at the fingertips of administrators--even lay people with Google Scholar.
Question
I wonder, in response to your post, what meaningful cultural production might look like outside of advertising. Maybe we can discuss this in class, or if you have an answer you can post it here.
snooty, half-sarcastic one-word answer
Hamlet
George Saunders
I've been trying to get my hands on the text of a George Saunders story called "My Flamboyant Grandson" (in the collection _In Persuasion Nation_), but so far I haven't had any luck. I'll post a link here if I can find it online (for some reason PCL doesn't have it).
If you have a little extra time-- 20 or 30 minutes-- you might also watch the first and last segments of the Frontline piece. The former is about "clutter" and the latter "microcasting"; they're interesting on their own, but they'll be great if I can find the Saunders piece.
I Found It!
So, I found the Saunder's story, ran photocopies and will bring them to class tommorrow (it's about nine pages of fiction). Hopefully we can talk about some of the questions it raises on Thursday.