The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates--the inhabitants of marketing zones in the con...sumer goods society, television audiences and news magazine readerships... vote with money at the cash counter rather than with the ballot paper at the polling booth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with obje...cts, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind--mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising..., the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, cons...umer goods, status--all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a... set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In fast-moving, progress-conscious America, the consumer expects to be dizzied by progress. If he could completely understand adve...rtising jargon he would be badly disappointed. The half-intelligibility which we expect, or even hope, to find in the latest product language personally reassures each of us that progress is being made: that the pace exceeds our ability to follow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... in a capitalist society a man is expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods, ...and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cassoulet, that best of bean feasts, is everyday fare for a peasant but ambrosia for a gastronome, though its ideal consumer is a ...300-pound blocking back who has been splitting firewood nonstop for the last twelve hours on a subzero day in Manitoba.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is odd that the NCAA would place a school on probation for driving an athlete to class, or providing a loan, but would have no ...penalty for a school that violates Title IX, a federal law.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »