Rena King:
“Don’t you feel such shows [of soft-core pornography and hardcore violence] contribute to a social climate of violence and sexual malaise, and do you care?”
Max Renn:
“Certainly I care. I care enough to give my viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and their frustrations…”
Category Archives: Computers & Technology
iMac – the making of an iCon
The PC was first upgraded from its status as an advanced professional tool to an intentionally popular, available lifestyle-companion upon the introduction of the Apple Computer’s 1998 PC, the “iMac‿. This machine’s clean, sleek aesthetic presence, paired with its functionality, lead to its overwhelming success and eventual place (alongside the microwave, the telephone, and the corset) in cultural memory. Furthermore, I believe the PC’s success is symptomatic of a larger theme among all objects of popular culture: an inherent symbiosis between design and technology, form and function, medium and message, art and science. Objects of popular culture, it would seem, can only become so upon an appreciation of both function (science and technology) and form (aesthetics).
“Joyriding” in Kunstler’s and Spiegel’s Suburbia
The 1950s can be seen as a time of unprecedented family values, in which young, white, middle-income nuclear families arrived en masse in the pre-planned community living areas of suburbia. In the article “Joyride”, Kunstler identifies the reasons for, and attraction of, a grand public relocation to previously uninhabited areas outside main city centres. Kunstler argues that it was, in part, the replacement of the streetcar (or trolley), and later the automobile, from the horse-powered transit of earlier 20th century life, that ignited weekend traffic to expand outside urban centres.