COMM 807 - The Consuming Self:From Flappers to Facebook

Institution:

University of Pennsylvania

Subject:

Description:

This course will explore a set of overlapping claims that a distinctive model selfhood emerged in early twentieth-century American consumer culture. We will sort through a rich literature, mostly outside communication studies, that locates a "performing" self in the midst of all the billboards and department stores. Taken as a whole, the literature points to a new modal self concerned with the conscious staging of an attractive personality, bound up in the rise of advertising and the consumer economy. The authors under discussion--including Thorstein Veblen, Philip Rieff, Warren Susman, David Riesman, Erving Goffman, Daniel Bell, Raymond Williams, Jackson Lears, Roland Marchand and Axel Honneth--differ in crucial respects on the nature of this new self, its sources and its consequences. Our task will be to make sense of the competing claims, but also to identify points of overlap. A major theme early in the semester will be the experience of dislocation, anonymity and sped-up living that accompanied major social change in the decades around the turn of the century. We will focus on the personal and social adaptations to this experience, reflected in but also driven by advertising-driven consumption. A major question the course will pose in its concluding weeks: Do popular uses of new social media like Facebook and Twitter Our task will be to make sense of the the competing claims, but also to identify points of overlap. A major theme early in the semester will be the experience of dislocation, anonymity and sped-up living that accompanied major social change in the decades around the turn of the century. We will focus on the personal and social adaptations to this experience, reflected in but also driven by advertising-driven consumption. A major question the course will pose in its concluding weeks: Do popular uses of new social media like Facebook and Twitter --including status updates and other kinds of managed self-disclosure--represent an intensification of the performing self

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.upenn.edu

Phone Number:

(215) 898-5000

Regional Accreditation:

Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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