Reading Questions, 9/7 - 9/21
Note: I understand that these readings are difficult. We will go over them to clarify any confusions that you may have about them in class. Also, I gave you a crowd of dense readings to start, not to torture you, but to establish the main themes of the course from the beginning. The readings for subsequent sections are not nearly as complex as these, so don't worry if some of these texts seem incomprehensible. As you will see in the course of the term, the issues they raise are, for the most part, simple and familiar.
Email answers to Susan_Gallagher@uml.edu on or before 9/13. Also, bring a copy of your email to class on 9/14.
The easiest way to complete the reading questions is to copy and paste them into the body of an email and then type or paste in the answers. By the way, don't worry if the spell checker on your email, which you should always use, gets rid of the British spellings in these texts.
According to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkhiemer in "Culture as Mass Deception," "Under monopoly all mass culture is _______, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer _______________. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the _____________________________ is removed.
According to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkhiemer in "Culture as Mass Deception," "The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in _______. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may ______.
According to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkhiemer in "Culture as Mass Deception," "Real life is becoming indistinguishable from _________. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for __________________________, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with _______.
According to George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language," "Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have ____________________: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts ___________, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have ____________. The point is that the process is reversible.
In "Politics and the English Language," after quoting five passages from various newspapers and academic journals, Orwell argued, "Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is _____________; the other is __________."
In "Politics and the English Language," Orwell listed some of the devices lazy writers use to avoid the effort involved in trying to convey accurate information. What did he include in his list?
According to Marshall McLuhan's "Classroom Without Walls," what is the current relationship between information received in school and information received outside of traditional educational settings?
According to McLuhan, reading a book feels like an individualistic experience, but this feeling is an illusion. Why is reading a book not a solitary activity?
According to McLuhan, "The movie, like the book, is a __________. TV shows to 50,000,000 simultaneously. Some feel that the value of experiencing a book is diminished by being extended to many minds. This notion is always implicit in the phrases "mass media," "mass entertainment"—useless phrases obscuring the fact that English itself is _________." (Fill in blanks.)
According to McLuhan (see list of quotes), "The ______ automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for ________, but is itself an immediate _______."
In his lecture on Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Michel Peillon observes that in post-industrial societies, "The production of goods is replaced by the production of services as the main source of __________. The service sector, which includes health, education, general administration etc., predominates in terms of employment. This implies that the post-industrial employee typically works in an ______ rather than a factory. Work consists less in controlling and exploiting nature (through technology and machinery) and more in _______________."
According to Peillon, the rise of the
post-industrial economy, "has also transformed the class structure of the
industrial society. The "______________"
has grown considerably, and it now occupies a strategic position. The
professional and technical categories (scientists, engineers, etc.) find
themselves at the centre of society and in many ways have replaced the
_______________. Even the skill component in the working class is upgraded.
In fact, class and class struggle are said to wane in such a society, mainly
because of the diminution in the strength of _____________.
In "The Cultural Contradictions of the American Media," David Schultz focuses on four social factors that help to define what is recognized and distributed as news. Name these four factors.
According to Shultz, "The point here is that the news Americans need to be informed citizens comes into conflict with the news the news industry _________________. What is news, then, is not simply "the unusual, the aberrant, the out of the ordinary, "an objective and trustworthy account of reality," or "an attempt to reconstruct the essential framework" of an event. News is increasingly what will ___________________________________________.
According to Jean Baudrillard in "The Murderous Capacity of Images," what are the "successive phases of the image" in postmodern culture and society?
Define the term "simulacrum."