I. - If you haven't already, go to "AP.DebateGroups.2014" and follow the directions there.
II. We are beginning our second discussion. This one concerns Consumerism, and the first reading is the 55-minute Frontline episode entitled "The Merchants of Cool" that we started watching today in class. (If you have trouble watching this, you might be able to find it in parts on YouTube.) After watching, the rest of your homework is to respond in a comment to this post. You can do this in one of a few ways:
a) do something similar to what you did with the Frankfurt interview -- give a short specific response to one of Rushkoff's assertions in a They Say / I Say format (or something similar; the ideas are more important than the exact phrasing):
"At 2:38 in chapter 2 of the episode, R states that __________ . That seems (choose your adjective)
to me. For example, in the recent presidential election, Mitt Romney said ________ , which was a
subtle attempt to ____________ ."
b) find at least one comment in this section with which to take issue. (If you are one of the first few here, you might not have this one available to you. If what you really want to say has either been said or is diametrically opposed to something someone else has said, you might want to choose this options.) Identify to whom you are responding, and be clear about with what you are disagreeing and why.
c) remembering that this was produced in 2001, think about what has changed. Do you think these ideas expressed in the video are obsolete? Are there more contemporary examples of these ideas? Has the world changed that much in the last 13 years? It won't be terribly useful to you or your classmates if you write something like "well, um, there's the Internet now, right?" It would be very helpful, though, if you were able to identify some elements of what is in the video that exist now but in a different form or what you think is fundamentally different.
Optional - In addition, there was some talk today in both classes about brand loyalty. I'm not disagreeing with anyone who says that brand loyalty is high, but you all might think about this piece:
The Financial Page
"TWILIGHT OF THE BRANDS"
by James Surowiecki