Memo - October 5 - Society of the Spectacle This week's reading focuses on the creation of what the French philosopher Guy Debord called the "society of the spectacle," by which he meant that modern capitalist social relations were inseparable from the culture of spectacle in which they were constituted. Debord focused his attention on capitalist relations in the post-World War Two era and was most concerned with visual imagery, but the cultural origins of the society he described lay in the historical context that we are reading about this week. Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1978) by John Kasson (a historian at the University of North Carolina) explores the history of America's most famous beach/amusement park and places it in the context of social relations in New York and in the United States in general at the turn of the century. Kasson is a lively storyteller, and the story he tells is about the seriousness of fun and frivolity in an age of dramatic social, technological, economic, and cultural change. Some questions to chew on: Who went to Coney Island, and why? How did the answer to both of these questions change over time? How did Coney Island cultivate new ideas of bodily freedom? We have spoken repeatedly about popular culture as a form of "struggle." Does this hold true for the millions of laughing, dancing, sunbathing, roller-coaster-riding men and women who went to Coney Island as well? How do you think Coney Island affected people's ideas about technology? How might these views have carried over (or not) into other parts of their lives? So much of Coney Island was designed to seem "exotic"? What political implications might this have? How might this exoticism have influenced how people thought about the United States in relation to the rest of the world? In the age of the Spanish-American War and World War One, how did Coney Island contribute to the shaping of distinctly "American" national identity?