Internet Exercises

Exercise 1

In your textbook, you read about the Frankfurt School Critique of the culture industry. The Frankfurt School believed that the culture industry controlled the minds of the masses. Do you think you are an exception? Are you a sophisticated consumer of the media and popular culture?

Go to the University of Chicago Press website and read the excerpt from the "Conquest of Cool" by Thomas Frank.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/259919.html

[If you like this essay, there’s more Thomas Frank at www.thebaffler.com.]

Answer the following questions.

1. What is the counter-cultural myth?
2. What does Frank mean by cooptation?
3. How do advertising agencies exploit the myth of the counterculture?
4. Could the sense of consumer freedom we sometimes have be an illusion created by the culture industry?

A key issue for understanding the consequences of modernity is to understand how tradition has been transformed. Go to Anthony Giddens’s homepage and view his lecture on "Tradition" in his Director’s Lectures on "The Runaway World Revisited."

http://www.lse.ac.uk/Giddens/pdf/24%20Nov%2099.pdf

This lecture, written for a general audience, provides an excellent introduction to the place of tradition in the contemporary world. Read the lecture and answer the following questions.

1. What are the elements of tradition?
2. What global processes affect tradition?
3. What does it mean to say we live our lives less and less as fate?
4. In what way is fundamentalism a product of global processes?