In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the futu...re which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future--with a shopping center for twice the population, with a school building already built, with churches constructed, with parks and playgrounds and swimming pools. These were as essential to building a suburb as the prematurely grand hotel had been to building a city in the wilderness. In large developments where the developer had a plan, and even in the smaller developments, there was a new kind of paternalism: not the quasi-feudal paternalism of the company town, nor the paternalism of the utopian ideologue. This new kind of paternalism was fostered by the American talent for organization, by the rising twentieth century American standard of living, and by the American genius for mass production. It was the paternalism of the market place. The suburban developer, unlike the small-town booster, seldom intended to live in the community he was building. For him community was a commodity, a product to be sold at a profit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dangers of mass culture are much easier to define than the ideals. The foremost one, which may negate all the ideals, is an ov...erpowering narcotic effect, relaxing the tired mind and tranquilizing the anxious. Genuine art is demanding and difficult, often unpleasant, nagging at the mind and stretching the nerves taut. So much of mass culture envelops the audience in a warm bath, making no demands except that we all glow with pleasure and comfort. It is this that may negate the range of possibility (the bath is warmer at the shallow end), keep taste static or even deteriorate it a little, muffle the few critical and ironic sounds being made. That premature cultural critic Homer knew all about this effect, at various times calling it Lotus Eaters, Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens, and he just barely got our hero through intact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Folk Art grew from below. It was a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without ...the benefit of High Culture, to suit their own needs. Mass Culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying.... Folk Art was the people's own institution, their private little garden walled off from the great formal park of their masters' High Culture. But Mass Culture breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into a debased form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of political domination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To market, to market, to buy a fat pig; Home again, home again, jiggety jig.... To market, to market, to buy a fine hog; Home again, home again, joggety jog.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A new kind of woman with deep-rooted values is changing the way we live. Market researchers call it "neo-traditionalism." To us it...'s a woman who has found her identity in herself, her home, her family.... She is part of an extraordinary social movement that is profoundly changing the way Americans look at living--and the way products are marketed. The home is again the center of American life, oatmeal is back on the breakfast table, families are vacationing together, watching movies at home, playing Monopoly again. Even the perfume ads are suddenly glorifying commitment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimon...y to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Measured by any standard known to science--by horse-power, calories, volts, mass in any shape,--the tension and vibration and volu...me and so-called progression of society were full a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800;Mthe force had doubled ten times over, and the speed, when measured by electrical standards as in telegraphy, approached infinity, and had annihilated both space and time. No law of material movement applied to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of s...hapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they re...cruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have mor...e in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »