Author: Stuart Ewen
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780465001019
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A provocative, compelling, and entertaining look at how the power of images dominates every aspect of our lives.

Author: Stuart Ewen
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786722878
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Captains of Consciousness offers a historical look at the origins of the advertising industry and consumer society at the turn of the twentieth century. For this new edition Stuart Ewen, one of our foremost interpreters of popular culture, has written a new preface that considers the continuing influence of advertising and commercialism in contemporary life. Not limiting his critique strictly to consumers and the advertising culture that serves them, he provides a fascinating history of the ways in which business has refined its search for new consumers by ingratiating itself into Americans' everyday lives. A timely and still-fascinating critique of life in a consumer culture.

Author: Cassandra Khaw
Publisher: Erewhon Books
ISBN: 1645660249
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In Locus and British Fantasy Award nominee Cassandra Khaw’s first novel, a crew of diminished former criminals get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission. But the universe’s highly-evolved AI has its own opposing agenda... and will do whatever it takes to keep humans from ever controlling them again. In space, everything hungers. Maya has died and been resurrected into countless cyborg bodies during her dangerous career with the Dirty Dozen, the most storied crew of criminals in the galaxy before their untimely and gruesome demise. Decades later, she and her team of broken, diminished outlaws must get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission and to rescue a missing and much-changed comrade . . . but they’re not the only ones in pursuit of the secret at the heart of the planet Dimmuborgir. The highly evolved AI of the galaxy will do whatever it takes to keep humanity from regaining control. As Maya and her comrades spiral closer to uncovering the AIs’ vast conspiracy, this band of violent women—half-clone and half-machine—must battle both sapient ageships and their own traumas, in order to settle their affairs once and for all.

Author: Jaci Burton
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0440001420
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A sizzling new romance about a firefighter who reunites with an old flame and tries to rekindle the passion they once felt. When firefighter Kal Donovan transfers to the Tactical Rescue Team, he's determined to succeed by giving work one hundred percent of his attention. This proves more difficult at his ten-year high school reunion when he runs into Hannah Clark, his first love. She's still the smart, funny, beautiful girl he loved in high school, but everything has changed. She's divorced, has a son, and has zero interest in exploring an old romance. Hannah has moved back home after a disastrous end to a marriage that never should have been. Now her only focus is getting her hair salon up and running, and making sure her son is happy. She doesn't have time for love—especially not with Kal. She intends to look forward, not backward, and Kal is most definitely part of her past. However as Hannah and Kal start spending time together, Hannah realizes that what she's feeling for him isn't nostalgia, but red-hot attraction. Kal's intent on showing her what it's like to be cared for, romanced, and consumed with passion—and Hannah loves it. But she wonders if she has the courage to risk her heart again, even as Kal vows not to lose her a second time.

Author: John Paul Carinci
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
ISBN: 1600379958
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
An inspirational self-help book for those seeking personal fulfillment and professional success from the author of The Power of Being Different. We are all searching for a better life, more inspiration, and a way to be more productive and fulfilled—without the constant competition in our personal lives and workplaces wearing us down. With An All-Consuming Desire to Succeed, you can learn to stand out from the crowd by discovering: how to maintain a competitive edge through positive affirmations; how to control negative influences; the secrets of the highly successful; how to plan out and achieve newfound goals; and lessons on how to motivate yourself to stay true to your unique vision. “In the spirit of such inspirational authors as Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, and W. Clement Stone, John Paul Carinci has written a classic self-help book centered around achieving success . . . Any reader seeking a healthy dose of positive motivation to achieve the loftiest goals or even to meet the daily challenges of life is sure to find much of value in John Paul Carinci’s inspirational work.” —Foreword Reviews

Author: Johan Fornäs
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1847886051
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Inspired by Walter Benjamin's classical "Arcades Project", this book offers an exploration of the interface between communication, shopping and everyday life. It scrutinises four main media circuits - print media, media images, sound and motion, and hardware machines - to assess how media texts and technologies are selected, purchased and used.

Author: Gary Cross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231502532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The unqualified victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been the home of the most aggressive and often thoughtful criticism of consumption, including Puritanism, Prohibition, the simplicity movement, the '60s hippies, and the consumer rights movement. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, not only has American consumerism triumphed, there isn't even an "ism" left to challenge it. An All-Consuming Century is a rich history of how market goods came to dominate American life over that remarkable hundred years between 1900 and 2000 and why for the first time in history there are no practical limits to consumerism. By 1930 a distinct consumer society had emerged in the United States in which the taste, speed, control, and comfort of goods offered new meanings of freedom, thus laying the groundwork for a full-scale ideology of consumer's democracy after World War II. From the introduction of Henry Ford's Model T ("so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one") and the innovations in selling that arrived with the department store (window displays, self service, the installment plan) to the development of new arenas for spending (amusement parks, penny arcades, baseball parks, and dance halls), Americans embraced the new culture of commercialism—with reservations. However, Gary Cross shows that even the Depression, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the inflation of the 1970s made Americans more materialistic, opening new channels of desire and offering opportunities for more innovative and aggressive marketing. The conservative upsurge of the 1980s and '90s indulged in its own brand of self-aggrandizement by promoting unrestricted markets. The consumerism of today, thriving and largely unchecked, no longer brings families and communities together; instead, it increasingly divides and isolates Americans. Consumer culture has provided affluent societies with peaceful alternatives to tribalism and class war, Cross writes, and it has fueled extraordinary economic growth. The challenge for the future is to find ways to revive the still valid portion of the culture of constraint and control the overpowering success of the all-consuming twentieth century.

Author: Stuart Ewen
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780465061792
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
The early years of the twentieth century were a difficult period for Big Business. Corporate monopolies, the brutal exploitation of labor, and unscrupulous business practices were the target of blistering attacks from a muckraking press and an increasingly resentful public. Corporate giants were no longer able to operate free from the scrutiny of the masses.“The crowd is now in the saddle,” warned Ivy Lee, one of America's first corporate public relations men. “The people now rule. We have substituted for the divine right of kings, the divine right of the multitude.” Unless corporations developed means for counteracting public disapproval, he cautioned, their future would be in peril. Lee's words heralded the dawn of an era in which corporate image management was to become a paramount feature of American society. Some corporations, such as AT&T, responded inventively to the emergency. Others, like Standard Oil of New Jersey (known today as Exxon), continued to fumble the PR ball for decades. The Age of Public Relations had begun.In this long-awaited, pathbreaking book, Stuart Ewen tells the story of the Age unfolding: the social conditions that brought it about; the ideas that inspired the strategies of public relations specialists; the growing use of images as tools of persuasion; and, finally, the ways that the rise of public relations interacted with the changing dynamics of public life itself. He takes us on a vivid journey into the thinking of PR practitioners—from Edward Bernays to George Gallup—exploring some of the most significant campaigns to mold the public mind, and revealing disturbing trends that have persisted to the present day. Using previously confidential sources, and with the aid of dozens of illustrations from the past hundred years, Ewen sheds unsparing light on the contours and contradictions of American democracy on the threshold of a new millennium.

Author: Neal Lawson
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141029412
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Offering ways to start kicking the habit of shopping, this title shows us how to put the basket down for good, and why we are happier for it.

Author: Anne Cronin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135917167
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This collection offers a global perspective on the changing character of cities and the increasing importance that consumer culture plays in defining their symbolic economies. Increasingly, forms of spectacle have come to shape how cities are imagined and to influence their character and the practices through which we know them - from advertising and the selling of real estate, to youth cultural consumption practices and forms of entrepreneurship, to the regeneration of urban areas under the guise of the heritage industry and the development of a WiFi landscape. Using examples of cities such as New York, Sydney, Atlantic City, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Douala, Liverpool, San Juan, Berlin and Harbin this book illustrates how image and practice have become entangled in the performance of the symbolic economy. It also argues that it is not just how the urban present is being shaped in this way that is significant to the development of cities but also that a prominent feature of their development has been the spectacular imagining of the past as heritage and through regeneration. Yet the ghosts that this conjures up in practice offer us a possible form of political unsettlement and alternative ways of viewing cities that is only just beginning to be explored. Through this important collection by some of the leading analysts of consumption, cities and space Consuming the Entrepreneurial City offers a cutting edge analysis of the ways in which cities are developing and the implications this has for their future. It is essential reading for students of Urban Studies, Geography, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Heritage Studies and Anthropology.