Memo - Nov. 9 - Popular Culture in Our Own Time: Opiate, Stimulant, or Other? Our three readings this week explore the tension between action and inaction, involvement and passivity, in popular culture today. Is going to a rock concert in a stadium a form of making culture, or just consuming it? What about sitting in the bleachers at a ballgame, or watching television? Who decides what the meaning of a cultural commodity is, the producer or the consumer? As you think about these questions, consider one more thing as well. In class we will, as I mentioned, stage a debate. It will focus on this proposition: Popular culture today is a culture of inaction and passivity. How would you argue for or against this statement? Come to class prepared to take either side. Think about the issues raised in the readings, and how they are relevant. Reading One: Susan Douglas is a professor of media and American studies. This excerpt comes from her very entertaining memoir Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (1994) about pop music and television and the effect these had on her emerging ideas about feminism. Reading Two comes from Christopher Lasch's best-selling Culture of Narcissism: American Life in the Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), a sharp critique of what Lasch saw as the degradation of American culture in the twentieth century. Lasch, who died in 1994, was a well known social critic; he also taught history at the University of Rochester. The excerpt you'll read focuses specifically on sport and play. Readign Three: an excerpt from Society of the Spectacle (orig. 1967, in French), by the radical philosopher Guy Debord, whose critiques of capitalism and commodity culture exerted a strong influence on student radicals in the 1960s. The group he was affiliated with, called the Situationist International, sought to expose the superficiality of life within the consumer capitalist system, often using media and images to mock the status quo. He also died in 1994. (This text is written in a style that may be unfamiliar to you, but you'll get the hang of it.)