Part One. Study Questions
One. What “human dramas” are being enacted on Main Street?
See 268.
For one, people are returning to
their perception of the past, possibly driven by nostalgia and a yearning for
lost innocence.
Secondly, people are enacting the
drama of a cohesive community in which the citizens share values, cultural
ideals, aesthetics. Everyone is a reflection of each other. Diversity is not
valued. This is the drama, not of diversity, but of the monolith in the name of
community.
Third, this drama sugar-coats
life’s dark elements—death, drinking, human pathology of all kinds is swept
under the rug, as it were, and replaced with a sterilized, antiseptic,
cartoonish view of reality. This
reality is so sheltering that it is described as being “pre-adolescent” in its
sensibility.
Fourth, people long for a time of
gentility, the era when manners and politeness were an essential value to
community standards. No one spits on the sidewalk, swears openly, wears crude
clothing, etc. Because people assume they all share the same values, they are
inclined to be friendly with one another.
Two. What price do Main
Street’s citizens pay for living in their idealized town?
They give up freedom, they must
conform to the town’s ideal, they must live in totalitarian social engineering.
See 271 top.
Three. What is the “Malling of
America”? 271
One. Social engineering makes
malls places that maximize human traffic and human shopping in a sort of
brainless way so that people are shopping zombies.
Two. A uniformity of facades
create the illusion of a cohesive shopping environment with similar if not
identical store hours must be maintained.
Three. Use social engineering to
create the desire for “sociorecreational shopping” in which visiting the mall
becomes more than shopping; it becomes a place for human interaction,
socializing and “imbibing in the mall ambience.”
Four. What are the
psychological dangers of growing up in the suburbs?
One. The growth of the suburbs
often outpaces planning for infrastructure leaving its citizens lost in a
barren wasteland. See 275
Two. The houses tend to be
identical and have a generic, soulless and depressing effect on its citizens
who feel like caged chickens. 275
Three. Often the men drive to
work, which is far from the suburbs. So the suburbs are mostly full of women
and children and lacking masculinity they are over-feminized. We can infer the
writer is arguing for a stronger male presence. 275
Four. Lacking other measures for
social worth, people identify themselves by competing to have the most material
possessions, called the “libido ostentandi.” Social status can only be measured
by shopping. 275 and 276 top.
Five. Shopping fills a gnawing
void, an emptiness that cannot be filled any other way. 277
Writing Assignment for Essay #3:
Based on #5 on page 328: Using
selections from Chapter 7, analyze the motivations people have to go to
shopping centers that are beyond “commercial purposes.”
The seductive layout of the mall (blinds and shudders create a mystery); the longing for shared experience, idealized, upscale community better than where they might even live, loneliness, assumed meeting place, the fantasy of self-renewal
Also to repeat the previous lecture:
Symbolic Shopping: We shop because the products represent
or symbolize powerful emotional needs: belonging, identity, status,
reproductive success, creativity, and rebirth. If you are a marketer and you
can’t link your product to one of these emotional longings, then you are
finished. These are the same
symbols and emotional needs addressed by religion, so we can conclude that
shopping has a pseudo-religious component to it.
Another Option: Does Internet shopping signal the demise of the shopping mall? Why or why not?
Research Links:
Shopping Malls as Secular Cathedrals
The Mall Had Its Day; Now It's the Web's Turn
Alternative Writing Option: Analyze the role of the shopping mall in the short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" In this story a teenage girl meets the Devil disguised as Arnold Friend.
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