Introduction:
Sign Value, Appropriation, and Cultural Crisis
1. Sign Wars
2. Advertising in the Age of Hypersignification
3. Yo! Hailing the Alienated Spectator
4. The Flip Side of Jadedness: Memory and a Sense of Place
5. Authenticity in the Age of the Poseur
6. Green Marketing and the Commodity Self
7. The Corporate Politics of Sign Values
Conclusion
Robert L. Goldman, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology and
Anthropology at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR.
Stephen Papson, Ph.D, is Professor of Sociology at St. Lawrence
University in Canton, NY.
Sign Wars is a path-breaking analysis of contemporary advertising,
a work of sustained brilliance, rich in insight and imagination,
that will reward repeated readings. --John Wilson, Ph.D., Duke
University, Dept of Sociology
Goldman and Papson have performed a real service for scholars and
consumers alike. Their book tells us that images, like words, can
be read, understood, and judged true or false. In a world where MTV
competes with CNN and New York Times headlines with Nike slogans,
no lesson is more appropriate or important. Sign Wars is a great
leap forward in making America media literate. --Randall
Rothenberg, senior writer, Esquire, and author, Where the Suckers
Moon: An Advertising Story
The aptly titled Sign Wars offers an insightful and engaging
examination of some of our most familiar and pervasive images,
sounds, and messages. Goldman and Papson take readers inside the
logic and structure of contemporary commodity culture to show how
the economic interests of transnational corporations, the culture
of ad makers, and the strategies of ads themselves all work to
increase the intensity and velocity of corporate struggles for our
attention, identification, and loyalty to their logos and products.
Most importantly, Sign Wars convincingly uses ads and ad culture to
ponder the collective crisis of meaning in late capitalism (over
issues like gender, race, community, morality, the environment, and
citizenship), a crisis which they argue is increasingly expressed
in terms of a commodity culture where identification with and
fluency in advertising images are the markers of citizenship and
participation in society. To their credit, Goldman and Papson place
advertising front and center in contemporary debates about politics
and culture. --Herman Gray, Ph.D., Associate Professor, University
of California, Santa Cruz, author of Watching Race: Television and
the Sign of Blackness
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