GWST 1501 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Advertising Campaign, Erving Goffman, Charades

• School: York University
• Department: Gender and Women's Studies
• Course: GWST 1501
• Professor: Kristine Klement

Document Summary

Because we live inside the consumer culture, and most of us have done so for most of our lives, it is sometimes difficult to locate the origins of our most cherished values and assumptions. (1) Institutional structure of the consumer society orients the culture (and its attitudes, values, and rituals) more and more toward the world of commodities. The marketplace (and its major ideological tool, advertising) is the major structuring institution of contemporary consumer society. (1) More specifically, public discourse soon became dominated by the "discourse through and about objects. " (1) The further integration of first radio and then television into the advertising/ media complex ensured that commercial communication would be characterized by the domination of imagistic modes of representation. (1) Interestingly, in this stage we do not see representations of "real" people in advertisements, but rather we see representations of people who "stand for" reigning social values such as family structure, status differentiation, and hierarchical authority. (2)