Manufacturing Desire

by Arthur Asa Berger
Manufacturing Desire
Author: Arthur Asa Berger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2017-07-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351507095
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The average person in America watches four hours of television per day and spends the equivalent of nine years of his or her life in front of the television set. If the attention most people devote to popular culture - listening to the news, watching soap operas, reading the comics-were added up, it would reveal that most people spend an enormous amount of time with popular culture which becomes in large measure, their culture. "Manufacturing Desire" is a study of how the mass media broadcast or spread various popular arts; further how the media and popular arts play a major role in shaping our everyday lives.The television shows we watch, the movies we see, the radio programs we listen to, and all the comic strips we read influence social behavior. They give us ideas about what is good and evil, about how to solve problems, and about how we should relate to others. If we understand this, says Berger, then the way we think about our media-influenced culture will be far different than if we see popular culture as mindless entertainment. Berger provides an analysis of the way popular culture and the mass media simultaneously reflect and affect various aspects of American culture and society. He examines commercials, television shows, comics, film, humor, and everyday life in terms of what beliefs and values are found in them, what attitudes toward ourselves, and our societies are contained in them, how they achieve their effects, and what they reflect about present-day American culture and society.This book is analysis of the impact mass media have across America, cross-culturally, and internationally. "Manufacturing Desire" will provide the general reader as well as specialists in communication and information, sociology, and psychology with a better understanding of the effects of mass media and popular culture on contemporary society.

Hooked

by Nir Eyal
Hooked
Author: Nir Eyal
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2014-11-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0698190661
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Revised and Updated, Featuring a New Case Study How do successful companies create products people can’t put down? Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model—a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior. Eyal provides readers with: • Practical insights to create user habits that stick. • Actionable steps for building products people love. • Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.

Manufacturing Happy Citizens

by Edgar Cabanas
Manufacturing Happy Citizens
Author: Edgar Cabanas
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-09-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781509537884
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The imperative of happiness dictates the conduct and direction of our lives. There is no escape from the tyranny of positivity. But is happiness the supreme good that all of us should pursue? So says a new breed of so-called happiness experts, with positive psychologists, happiness economists and self-development gurus at the forefront. With the support of influential institutions and multinational corporations, these self-proclaimed experts now tell us what governmental policies to apply, what educational interventions to make and what changes we must undertake in order to lead more successful, more meaningful and healthier lives. With a healthy scepticism, this book documents the powerful social impact of the science and industry of happiness, arguing that the neoliberal alliance between psychologists, economists and self-development gurus has given rise to a new and oppressive form of government and control in which happiness has been woven into the very fabric of power.

Stardom

by Christine Gledhill
Stardom
Author: Christine Gledhill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134940904
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In the past stars have been studied as cogs in a mass entertainment industry selling desires and ideologies. But since the 1970s, new approaches have reopened debate, as film and cultural studies try to account for the active role of the star in producing meanings, pleasures, and identites for a diversity of audiences. Stardom brings together for the first time some of the major writing of the last decade which seeks to understand the phemomenon of stars and stardom. Gathered under four headings - The System, Stars and Society, Performers and Signs, Desire and Politics - these essays represent a range of approaches drawn from film history, sociolgy, textual analysis, audience research, psychoanalysis, and cultural politics. They raise important issues about the politics of representation and the cultural limitations and possibilities of stars.

Threads of Global Desire

by Dagmar Schäfer
Threads of Global Desire
Author: Dagmar Schäfer
Publisher: Pasold Studies in Textile, Dress and Fashion History
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2018-05
Genre: Clothing and dress
ISBN: 9781783272938
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Considering silk as a major force of cross-cultural interaction, this book examines the integration of silk production and consumption into various cultures in the pre-modern world.

Capitalism and Desire

by Todd McGowan
Capitalism and Desire
Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231542216
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Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

Manufacturing Depression

by Gary Greenberg
Manufacturing Depression
Author: Gary Greenberg
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2010-02-02
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 141657008X
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Am I depressed or just unhappy? In the last two decades, antidepressants have become staples of our medicine cabinets—doctors now write 120 million prescriptions annually, at a cost of more than 10 billion dollars. At the same time, depression rates have skyrocketed; twenty percent of Americans are now expected to suffer from it during their lives. Doctors, and drug companies, claim that this convergence is a public health triumph: the recognition and treatment of an under-diagnosed illness. Gary Greenberg, a practicing therapist and longtime depressive, raises a more disturbing possibility: that the disease has been manufactured to suit (and sell) the cure. Greenberg draws on sources ranging from the Bible to current medical journals to show how the idea that unhappiness is an illness has been packaged and sold by brilliant scientists and shrewd marketing experts—and why it has been so successful. Part memoir, part intellectual history, part exposé—including a vivid chronicle of his participation in a clinical antidepressant trial—Manufacturing Depression is an incisive look at an epidemic that has changed the way we have come to think of ourselves.

Consciousness

by Neil Rossman
Consciousness
Author: Neil Rossman
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1991-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780791404072
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A central claim of this book is that the emergence of humanity involves a splitting of consciousness--the ability of consciousness to become reflectively aware of itself. But the splitting of consciousness is simultaneously the development of the possibility of fragmentation (incoherence within consciousness) and alienation (non-unity of consciousness with others and the world). Thus, through the growth of reflective consciousness, separation comes to permeate the whole of human experience. So understood, it creates the need for integration, and Rossman's discussion ultimately centers on its attainment. Within this perspective, various aspects of consciousness, including perception, organic sensation, desire, and belief, are explored. There is also extensive discussion of personal identity or the experience of being a self. Finally, the above analyses provide the ground for discussions of freedom, morality, and being religious.