Mass media and culture

Culture Jammers, an activist guerilla-like movement, entered the global scene in the 1990s and, through public performances, attempt to draw attention to their claim that the US economic structure is facing a fundamental need to shift away from a consumer-oriented capitalist economy. As an alternative, the activists propose--True Cost economics, a model that would include the costs of negative production and consumption externalities in the pricing of commodities. In this paper, I focus on culture jammers' critique of neoclassical economics, more specifically, the clash of the--new paradigm (True Cost economics) and the old paradigm (neoclassical economics). In evaluating whether True Cost economics is a feasible alternative, I graphically examine how the True Cost solution and the neoclassical market model correct for negative externalities to reveal similarities in the two models.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, most often noted for its critique on consumerism in post-war America and the conflict between Old World European values with New World American ones, contains an equally strong critique on consumerism of media. Lolita's narrative style, the memoir of a pedophile and murderer simultaneously seeking absolution and applause, investigates the relationship between a seductive mass media and its prurient and Puritanical audience. Implicit in the narrative technique is the audience's own participation in the mediation of reality.