Download or read book Packaged Pleasures written by Gary S. Cross and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the candy bar to the cigarette, records to roller coasters, a technological revolution during the last quarter of the nineteenth century precipitated a colossal shift in human consumption and sensual experience. Food, drink, and many other consumer goods came to be mass-produced, bottled, canned, condensed, and distilled, unleashing new and intensified surges of pleasure, delight, thrill—and addiction. In Packaged Pleasures, Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor delve into an uncharted chapter of American history, shedding new light on the origins of modern consumer culture and how technologies have transformed human sensory experience. In the space of only a few decades, junk foods, cigarettes, movies, recorded sound, and thrill rides brought about a revolution in what it means to taste, smell, see, hear, and touch. New techniques of boxing, labeling, and tubing gave consumers virtually unlimited access to pleasures they could simply unwrap and enjoy. Manufacturers generated a seemingly endless stream of sugar-filled, high-fat foods that were delicious but detrimental to health. Mechanically rolled cigarettes entered the market and quickly addicted millions. And many other packaged pleasures dulled or displaced natural and social delights. Yet many of these same new technologies also offered convenient and effective medicines, unprecedented opportunities to enjoy music and the visual arts, and more hygienic, varied, and nutritious food and drink. For better or for worse, sensation became mechanized, commercialized, and, to a large extent, democratized by being made cheap and accessible. Cross and Proctor have delivered an ingeniously constructed history of consumerism and consumer technology that will make us all rethink some of our favorite things.
Download or read book The Existential Pleasures of Engineering written by Samuel C. Florman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1994 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world where engineering plays an increasingly important role, one wonders about the exact nature of the engineering experience in our time. In this second edition of The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, Samuel Florman perceptively explores how engineers think and feel about their profession. Dispelling the myth that engineering is cold and passionless, Florman celebrates it as something vital and alive. He views engineering as a response to some of our deepest impulses, rich in spiritual and sensual rewards. Opposing the "antitechnology" stance, Florman brilliantly emerges with a practical, creative, and fun philosophy of engineering that boasts his pride in his craft.
Download or read book Counterpleasures written by Karmen MacKendrick and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1999-05-06 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counterpleasures takes up a series of literary and physical pleasures that do not appear to be pleasurable, ranging from saintly asceticism to Sadean narrative to leathersex. Each is placed in its cultural context to unfold a history of transgressive pleasure and to argue for the value and power of such pleasures as resistant to more totalizing forms of power.
Download or read book The Age of Addiction written by David T. Courtwright and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A fascinating history of corporate America’s efforts to shape our habits and desires.” —Sean Illing, Vox “[A] compulsively readable book about bad habits becoming big business...In crisp and playful prose and with plenty of needed humor, Courtwright has written a fascinating history of what we like and why we like it, from the first taste of beer in the ancient Middle East to opioids in West Virginia.” —American Conservative “A sweeping, ambitious account of the evolution of addiction...This bold, thought-provoking synthesis will appeal to fans of ‘big history’ in the tradition of Guns, Germs, and Steel.” —Publishers Weekly “A mind-blowing tour de force that unwraps the myriad objects of addiction that surround us daily...This intelligent, incisive, and sometimes grimly entertaining book will become the standard work on the subject.” —Rod Phillips, author of Alcohol: A History We live in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and shopping to binge eating and opioid abuse. Sugar can be as habit-forming as cocaine, researchers tell us, and social media apps are deliberately hooking our kids. But what can we do to resist temptations that insidiously rewire our brains? A renowned expert on addiction, David Courtwright reveals how global enterprises have both created and catered to our addictions. The Age of Addiction chronicles the triumph of what he calls “limbic capitalism,” the growing network of competitive businesses targeting the brain pathways responsible for feeling, motivation, and long-term memory.
Download or read book Guilty Pleasures written by Laurell K. Hamilton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-09-24 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, in the first novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling series that “blends the genres of romance, horror and adventure with stunning panache”(Diana Gabaldon). Laurell K. Hamilton’s bestselling series has captured readers’ wildest imaginations and addicted them to a seductive world where supernatural hungers collide with the desires of the human heart, starring a heroine like no other... Anita Blake is small, dark, and dangerous. Her turf is the city of St. Louis. Her job: re-animating the dead and killing the undead who take things too far. But when the city’s most powerful vampire asks her to solve a series of vicious slayings, Anita must confront her greatest fear—her undeniable attraction to master vampire Jean-Claude, one of the creatures she is sworn to destroy... “What The Da Vinci Code did for the religious thriller, the Anita Blake series has done for the vampire novel.”—USA Today
Download or read book Healthy Pleasures written by Robert E. Ornstein and published by Sterling Publishing Company. This book was released on 1990-01-22 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores ways to extend our lives as we enrich them, by understanding the role of pleasure in our health.
Download or read book The Tiny Book of Tiny Pleasures written by Irene Smit and published by Workman Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A perfect gift book filled with whimsical, colorful illustrations, short lists, cheerful prompts, recipes, and fun facts, The Tiny Book of Tiny Pleasures is the sweetest reminder imaginable that it’s the little things in life that make us happy. Little things like sharing tea with a friend. An ice cream cone with sprinkles. Finding a forgotten item of clothing in the closet. The smell in the air right after a summer rain. Created by the editors of Flow magazine, The Tiny Book of Tiny Pleasures is a celebration of slowing down and appreciating the simple moments of life—all you have to do is take notice.
Download or read book Empire of Pleasures written by Andrew Dalby and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An evocative survey of the sensory culture of the Roman Empire, showing how the Romans themselves depicted their food, wine and entertainments in literature and in art.
Download or read book Cigarettes and Soviets written by Tricia Starks and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enriched by color reproductions of tobacco advertisements, packs, and anti-smoking propaganda, Cigarettes and Soviets provides a comprehensive study of the Soviet tobacco habit. Tricia Starks examines how the Soviets maintained the first mass smoking society in the world while simultaneously fighting it. The book is at once a study of Soviet tobacco deeply enmeshed in its social, political, and cultural context and an exploration of the global experience of the tobacco epidemic. Starks examines the Soviet antipathy to tobacco yet capitulation to market; the development of innovative cessation techniques and clinics and the late entry into global anti-tobacco work; the seeming lack of cultural stimuli alongside massive use; and the expansion of smoking without the conventional prompts of capitalist markets. She tells the story of Philip Morris's "Mission to Moscow" campaign for the Soviet market, the triumph of the quintessential capitalist product—the cigarette—in a communist system, and the successes and failures of the world's first national antismoking campaign. The interplay of male habits and health against largely female tobacco producers and medical professionals adds a gendered dimension. Smoking developed, continued, and grew in the Soviet Union without mass production, intensive advertising, seductive industrial design, or product ubiquity. The Soviets were early to condemn tobacco, and yet, by the end of the twentieth century Russians smoked more heavily than most most other nations in the world. Cigarettes and Soviets challenges interpretations of how tobacco use rose in the past and what leads to mass use today.
Download or read book Metaphysical Answers to Metaphysical Questions Book 3 written by Mustafa Karnas and published by Noetika Medya Yayıncılık Danışmanlık Bilişim.tur.san.ve Tic.a.ş. . This book was released on 2021-02-13 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CONTENTS THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (1): What causes the system to start to reverse - that is to say, to self-destruct when an information that is in a systematic and enables the fiction of the system to continue? . THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (2): If an observer is regarded as nonexistent by a field he observes, and if the observed field distances the observer from being an observer by pushing them out of the system. In this case, what error would the observer make towards the field he observed? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (3): What kind of force is the resulting force when a field of information framed by the perception of impossibility is turned into work? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (4): When the projection of a system's image in us does not coincide with the image information we have about that system, how is this image perceived in our perception? . THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (5): Why are soap bubbles round? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (6): According to the law of creation, if the reason for the existence of a thing is to complete another thing while being defined from another , In this case, when we accept love as the spatial state of energy, what energy does love dwell on? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (7): What is the road, what is the passenger, what is the passenger road? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (8): What are the possibilities of something, as well? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (9): What is the energy that occurs when the mind is at rest? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (10): What is the new space of the mind after bodily death? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (11): What is the new space of the mind after bodily death? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (12): What energy does innocence dwell on? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (13): If thinking is a state of energy; thinking in this case also has a space energy. What is the difference between dreaming and thinking in line with this information? . THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (14): Through this system, it symbolizes the divine law in itself and shows the manifested effect of God , The concept mentioned above , What is it? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (15): What location is a building in , 2 + 2: 4 , doesn't it? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (16): The concept called luck is a habi-taste, a field of knowledge, energy and matrix in itself. It shapes itself on a complete metaphysical system , Acting on this knowledge. If the system called chance is a space. What is the basic paradigm that feeds this field? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (17): Fenafillah, in his case, the saint, died before he died, got rid of himself. If we think on this matter. Getting rid of one's self means getting rid of what's oneself. THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (18): In order to transform one matrix into another, what does the matrix have to be changed? . THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (19): How can you make something worthless? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (20): What inevitably leads to the total energy element in the common field, which occurs when the energy fields enter into interaction, communication, admixture and observational relationship? . THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION: (21): It cannot reach the energy of realization that is not designed. What is the source energy of starting something to be designed in the mind. That is, why does the mind design a certain thing, but not something else , What is the source that designs that particular thing to the mind, that is, selectivity in perception? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (22): What is the reason why the field does not open itself to the observer, although he wants to observe a field. That is, what should the observer present to the field he wants to observe? … THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (23): What is the difference between dreaming and thinking? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (24): What is the place of "I"? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (25): To bring a business into a state of prudence and abundance - that is, business or. Need to align (encode) the relationship , with what? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (26): What do you turn into when you frame a matrix field, limit it and put it in the frame of perception. . formun üstü THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (27): A system that mentally enslaves a man (mind) , and enslaves its own paradigms, makes the target people think how to achieve this (slave minds do not think with reason). THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (28): If it were a quantum computer. What would you ask the computer first? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (29): In order to transform one matrix into another, what does the matrix have to be changed? . THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (30): Where is the place of knowledge? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (31): Why are soap bubbles round? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (32): In what state should the information be during the following process? . THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (33): What power do you activate when you give up something? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (34): Where is heaven? THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (35): Where is the beginning of the event horizon of abstract mechanisms such as thought and imagination? . THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION (36): What needs to be done in order to open up a new matrix field by allowing the paradoxical dilemma to re-interact with other possibilities?
Download or read book Twentieth Century Pleasures written by Robert Hass and published by New York : Ecco Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of essays written during the last five years on the importance and vitality of poetry.
Download or read book Consuming Pleasures written by Daniel Horowitz and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the essence of a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking. Consuming Pleasures reveals how a group of writers shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate. Historian Daniel Horowitz traces the emergence of these new perspectives through a series of intellectual biographies. With writers and readers from the United States at the center, the story begins in Western Europe in the early 1950s and ends in the early 1970s, when American intellectuals increasingly appreciated the rich inventiveness of popular culture. Drawing on sources both familiar and newly discovered, this transnational intellectual history plays familiar works off each other in fresh ways. Among those whose work is featured are Jürgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, C. L. R. James, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hoggart, members of London's Independent Group, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Susan Sontag, Reyner Banham, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Consumption written by Dr. Frederick F. Wherry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Consumption consolidates the most innovative recent work conducted by social scientists in the field of consumption studies and identifies some of the most fruitful lines of inquiry for future research. It begins by embedding marketing in its global history, enmeshed in various political, economic, and social sites. From this embedded perspective, the book branches out to examine the rise of consumer culture theory among consumer researchers and parallel innovative developments in sociology and anthropology, with scholarship analyzing the roles that identity, social networks, organizational dynamics, institutions, market devices, materiality, and cultural meanings play across a wide variety of applications, including, but not limited to, brands and branding, the sharing economy, tastes and preferences, credit and credit scoring, consumer surveillance, race and ethnicity, status, family life, well-being, environmental sustainability, social movements, and social inequality. The volume is unique in the attention it gives to consumer research on inequality and the focus it has on consumer credit scores and consumer behaviors that shape life chances. The volume includes essays by many of the key researchers in the field, some of whom have only recently, if at all, crossed the disciplinary lines that this volume has enabled. The contributors have tried to address several key questions: What motivates consumption and what does it mean to be a consumer? What social, technical, and cultural systems integrate and give character to contemporary consumption? What actors, institutions, and understandings organize and govern consumption? And what are the social uses and effects of consumption?
Download or read book Risk on the Table written by Angela N. H. Creager and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the world’s population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supply’s productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. From the proliferation of synthetic additives to the threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the chapters in Risk on the Table zero in on key historical cases in North America and Europe that illuminate the history of food safety, highlighting the powerful tensions that exists among scientific understandings of risk, policymakers’ decisions, and cultural notions of “pure” food.
Download or read book New Ritual Society written by Gianpiero Vincenzo and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consumerism has established itself as a dominant lifestyle, but the reasons behind this are often unclear. This study revisits a large amount of diverse research, and argues that consumerism is a powerful ritual “machine” that can make up for the modern lack of values with new symbols and rituals. Consumerism made its claim between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, when the traditional symbolic world had ended and a new one had not yet emerged. Slowly but progressively, consumerism begun to develop new symbolic forms and new social rituals, becoming the basis for new mimetic behaviours. As nationalism has progressively declined, consumerism has permeated the entire social fabric. Supermarkets and shopping malls must be interpreted in the light of their ritual significance, as temples and holy cities of a new symbolic order. In the consumeristic era, many people are led to think and imagine in consumer terms, to identify themselves through consumption rituals. The impact of consumerism on culture, from literature to art, should not be underestimated. Many artists have tried to develop their aesthetics by triggering a dialectical, or openly critical, confrontation with consumerism. This book also takes into account the development of violence and the effects of consumerism on childhood and new generations. The book contains a preface by the German anthropologist Christoph Wulf, and the images illustrating the text are by Belgian artist Michel Couturier.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture written by Emily West and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture provides an essential guide to the key issues, methodologies, concepts, debates, and policies that shape our everyday relationship with advertising. The book contains eight sections: Historical Perspectives considers the historical roots and their relationship to recent changes of contemporary advertising and promotional practice. Political Economy examines how market forces, corporate ownership, and government policies shape the advertising and media promotion environment. Globalization presents work on advertising and marketing as a global, intercultural, and transnational practice. Audiences as Labor, Consumers, Interpreters, Fans introduces how people construct promotional meaning and are constructed as consumers, markets, and labor by advertising forces. Identities analyzes the ways that advertising constructs images and definitions of groups -- such as gender, race and the child -- through industry labor practices, marketing, as well as through representation in advertising texts. Social Institutions looks at the pervasiveness of advertising strategies in different social domains, including politics, music, housing, and education. Everyday Life highlights how a promotional ethos and advertising initiatives pervade self image, values, and relationships. The Environment interrogates advertising’s relationship to environmental issues, the promotional efforts of corporations to construct green images, and mass consumption’s relationship to material waste. With chapters written by leading international scholars working at the intersections of media studies and advertising studies, this book is a go-to source for those looking to understand the ways advertising has shaped consumer culture, in the past and present.
Download or read book Stories of the Self written by Anna Poletti and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politics In an age where our experiences are processed and filtered through a wide variety of mediums, both digital and physical, how do we tell our own story? How do we “get a life,” make sense of who we are and the way we live, and communicate that to others? Stories of the Self takes the literary study of autobiography and opens it up to a broad and fascinating range of material practices beyond the book, investigating the manifold ways people are documenting themselves in contemporary culture. Anna Poletti explores Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, a collection of six hundred cardboard boxes filled with text objects from the artist’s everyday life; the mid-aughts crowdsourced digital archive PostSecret; queer zine culture and its practices of remixing and collaging; and the bureaucratic processes surrounding surveillance dossiers. Stories of the Self argues that while there is a strong emphasis on the importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politics, mediation is just as important in establishing the credibility and legibility of life writing. Poletti argues that the very media used for writing our lives intrinsically shapes how we are seen to matter.
