Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
¶ … celebrates the Winter Olympics. There is an ad of page 19 with a hockey goalie guarding a Bank of America open safe. The slogan is "Bank of America does not embrace ambiguity." There are several subliminal messages in this ad that can be deciphered by cultural theories that certain writers have applied to "pop" culture. Not only does this photo promote a false sense of patriotism, capitalizing on the Olympics and the recent 9/11 events, but also it condones the uniformity of banking institutions.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno coined the phrase "the culture industry" to describe the processes and products of mass culture. They state that it is uniform, predictable, and, to the trained eye, transparent. In their essay, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception," Horkheimer and Adorno expound on the elements of the culture industry, and their observations can be applied to the Bank of America ad. This ad perpetrates the "false identity of the general and the particular" by blending the needs of a powerful institution and the common man. This striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm "presents men with a model of their culture." This unfeeling unity in the culture industry is indicative, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, of what will also happen in politics, as is apparent in this ad. It is pure political and social propaganda. While the ad purports to be defending people against possible fraud,...
Will patriotic Bank of America stop any "Other," whether it they be a con or a terrorist, from invading your account? This has yet to be proven. However, to capitalize on the vulnerability of the masses shows that not only is "its prime service to the customer is to do his schematizing for him," but to maintain power over every aspect of the consumer's life.
In John Storey's "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture," Antonio Gramsci discusses in his article "Hegemony, Intellectuals and the State," how the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in a couple of way. One is as "domination" and "intellectual and moral" leadership. A social group tends to dominate antagonistic groups, which it tends to "liquidate" and it leads allied groups. Currently, not only is the U.S. The dominant world power, but specifically, Anglo-white males. Hockey, which is dominated by anglo males, is cross-referenced with banking, which is also an institution dominated by white males. Basically, what this ad is saying is that anglo-white males will protect the U.S. masses from any outside forces. According to Gramsci, political hegemony is a matter of force and consent, with the force based on the consent of the majority. All American have superficially shown their patriotism by flag-waving and consumerism, so the masses would by into an ad like this in these times.
Structuralist Ferdinand de…
As Richard Polidoro and Uriel Simri (1996) write, " Most of the athletes participating in the Games of 676 BC probably came from various Peloponnesian districts and had a relatively short distance to travel. Some participants, however, may have traveled from communities located outside the immediate vicinity. Under the sacred truce, or ekecheiria, the athletes, officials, and spectators were guaranteed safe passage to and from Olympia." Another important factor to note
Rather than functioning solely as a sporting event, the '84 Summer Games delivered a broader scope of entertainment never before seen or attempted. The event encompassed entertainment not only in the form of sporting competition, but also in music and arts (Masterman, 2004). It is now understood that special events possess a powerful role in the society. 2012 Olympic closing ceremony will be a mega event as it will have
In June, 1966he first appeared in Covent Garden in another Donizetti role, Tonio in la Fille du Regiment and was so skilled at the difficult range of the role the press dubbed him the "King of the High C's" (Woodstra, Brennan and Schrott, iv; (Ah Mes Amis - Live at Covet Garden 1966). He began recording and adding to his repetoire; 1969 opposite Renata Scotto in I Lombardi, the rarely
However, when I visited Big Thicket National Preserve, I got an entirely different view of Texas, which actually seems to capture the essence of the state. Driving through Texas, I learned that it is an incredibly biologically diverse land, and nowhere is this biological diversity more evident than in the Big Thicket. At the park I learned that the Big Thicket has an extremely unusual level of biological diversity,
Olympic Games of Ancient Greece The legends surrounding the beginning of the Olympic games are many, but it is generally believed that Heracles, the son of Zeus, founded the ancient Greek Olympic games. There is some evidence that the games had been going on for longer than we have written records for. The first records of the games at Olympia are from 776 BC. The first Olympic games were not the
Path-Goal and Expectancy Theories During the 1980 Winter Olympic Games held in Lake Placid, New York, the United States Men's ice hockey team, comprised of predominantly college players with no experience in international play, performed one of the most celebrated feats in the annals of team sport. In the midst of an increasingly hostile Cold War with the Soviet Union, the underestimated U.S. team advanced through Olympic group play to play