SMC103Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Mass Production, Catchphrase, Mercantilism
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Published on 30 Jan 2013
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- Lecture 4: Capitalism and the Commodity Fetish
- Yes, We Can
- Speech following loss in the New Hampshire primary in 2008
- Set to music by will.i.am
- Video directed by Jesse Dylan
- Obama lost in this primary
- Catch phrase “yes, we can”
- Associated with the Obama campaign
- Released Feb. 2nd 2008
- 3 weeks 26 million people
- Questions for Discussion
- Message being conveyed by celebrities
- What does use of celebrities do to message?
- It attracts young people
- Allows us to identify with celebrities
- Unity with celebrities
- Celebrities authorize Obama as celebrity himself
- By engaging in this exercise (music video ad), when you advertise something you reduce it to a
commodity, it commodifies the message you are trying to convey
- Capitalism and Commodities
- Kidd: can’t have popular culture without capitalism
- Popular culture produces commodities
- Mercantilism
- Dutch East Asia Company (1602)
- British East India Company (1600)
- Hudson’s Bay Company (1670)
- Earliest form of Capitalism, benefited from state interest in colonial expansion in the age of
discovery
- Industrial Revolution
- Dynamic
- Focus on manufacturing of goods
- Machines increase quantity of product
- Increased product allowed for increased wealth
- Cost: displaced from homes and had to work in slum factories
- Wealthy benefit from industrial capitalism, increase in middle class
- 20th Century Capitalism
- Fordism
- 1903 Ford motor company
- Miller: discusses Taylorism.. managerial technique, more money for workers but alienated
workers
- Mass production and alienated workers form foundation of consumerism society
- The Single-Family Home
- The Commodification of Culture
- Post-Fordism
- Commodity Fetus: Marx- power that commodities have in our culture
- Commodification and Consumption
- Fiske- thinks about popular culture as a mixed culture of domination and resistant, it is culture,
active process of generating and associating pleasures, both top down and bottom up