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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 808.0427
EAN num: 9780312431334
ISBN number: 0312431333
Label: Bedford/St. Martin's
Manufacturer: Bedford/St. Martin's
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 808
Printing Date: January 01, 2006
Publishing house: Bedford/St. Martin's
Sale Popularity Level: 17712
Studio: Bedford/St. Martin's
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Unlike other popular culture readers, Signs of Life presumes that this topic merits rigorous analysis and so provides a conceptual framework for understanding it: semiotics, a field of critical theory developed specifically for the interpretation of culture and its signs. The selections in Signs of Life are arranged in provocative chapters (on such themes as gender codes, television and music, film, and advertising) that tap into students’ own experiences with and interest in popular culture.
The uniquely qualified editorial team of a prominent semiotician and an experienced writing instructor have prepared extensive apparatus to prompt the rigorous analysis that helps students become better thinkers and writers. In this exciting edition, Signs of Life examines fresh topics with an emphasis on the emerging phenomenon of Web 2.0. Maasik and Solomon continue to stay on the leading edge of popular culture, examining the hottest trends that capture students’ attention.
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Rated by buyers 
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The marketing blurbs, along with the self-proclaimed 'intelligentsia', will tell you that this book offers direct, even poignant, analysis of a depth of our culture that is seldom explored. This rather impressively-sized tome offers to show the reader just how to semiotically analyze the cacophonous bombardment of news, music, films, books, and editorial.
It fails to do so. Using the semiotics so highly extolled in the very first chapter of the book to analyze the book itself, you find that the premise is faulty, the writers over-inflate the importance of their own efforts, and the material has a shallowness that is breathtaking in its lack of shame.
Right from the beginning, the book claims that high culture and low culture are essentially the same -- they even go so far as to endeavor to justify this by referring to how deeply Americans were affected by the events of 9/11. The boiled-down argument goes like this: "After 9/11, both opera singers and rap singers gave benefit appearances. Therefore, there is no difference in their roles in our culture." Pure pap.
This book presupposes that the topic is worthy of in-depth analysis, and strives to demonstrate to the reader or student the hitherto-unknown gravity of the foibles of a bored populace. Instead, it demonstrates the shallowness of a number of the members of academe who endeavor to ascribe depth and meaning to a nation's ever-more-frightening Colosseum mentality.
As 'Signs of Life in the USA' is in the form of a textbook, and makes references inside to the 'course' that the student reader is taking, I can only conclude that a few rather non-stellar faculty members created and padded this book solely so that they could make it required for the 'course', and then use the course and book to justify their own fascination with the puerile. The only reason there have been four editions of this book is simply to enable these faculty members to keep selling even more new copies of a book that should have been strangled at birth.
The book is poorly written. Its prose is difficult to follow, has no natural rhythm, and gives solid proof to the concept that an 'experienced writing instructor' does not necessarily connote anyone who knows how to write. It is singularly unprovocative, and intellectually pedestrian. If you are a student who has been assigned to this class, you should immediately put this book down before buying, return to the registrar and demand a refund for this utter lack of educational merit, and very first take a class on critical thinking to protect yourself. Those who find virtue in this type of thinking will be easy prey for other con men, and will happily buy a jackalope ranch.
I would tell the authors this: Acting up to show devotion to a pop star is not 'culturally significant', it's just childish. This book presents a world-view that is the literary equivalent of showing admiration for sheople who throw underpants at Tom Jones.
Rated by buyers 
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Signs of Life focuses on the way we are shaped by the media and advertising with nine chapters that cover "Consuming Passions," "The Signs of Advertising," "Video Dreams," "The Culture of American Film," "Culture and Contradiction in the U.S.A.," "Gender Codes," "Constructing Race," "Popular Spaces," and "American Icons." Many of the essayists, like David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Thomas Frank, Eric Schlosser, Franine Prose, Gregg Easterbrook, Malcolm Gladwell, and Michael Eric Dyson are best-selling authors whose essays or book excerpts are published in popular magazines. Signs of Life is well served by these writers who, unlike some of the lesser known writers, don't indulge in heavy didactic, academic prose. Some might not like the book for giving too much space to overly didactic writers. For example, there is Fred Davis' essay about the cultural signs and contradictions of blue jeans, which is so steeped in academic speak and is so absorbed by its tiny topic that it seems a pardoy of scholarly writing. Read for example: "Paralleling the de-democratization of the jean, by the 1970s strong currents toward is eroticization were also evident." Or "Of all of the modifications wrought upon it, the phenomenon of designer jeans speaks most directly to the garment's encoding of status ambivalences. The very act of affixing a well-known designer's label . . . to the back side of a pair of jeans has to be interpreted . . . along Veblenian lines, as an instance of conspicuous consumption; in effect, a muting of the underlying rough-hewn proletarian connotation of the garment throug the introduction of a prominent status marker." This is tough going, especially freshmen college students who are not familiar with this type of heavy-handed writing. This essay selection should be further criticized because I don't think students should be encouraged to believe that Fred Davis' heavy-handed writing style represents a worthy model.
In spite of some of the book's excesses, teachers and students alike should appreciate Signs of Life for three reasons: 1) Integrating the aforementioned popular authors into the chapters about popular culture, 2) Providing excellent essay assignments at the end of each essay under the heading "Reading the Signs." With a half dozen strong essay options per essay, the students have over 50 assignment options for chapter. 3) The introduction has three excellent model essays that show the students how to write A-level expositions. The models are based on "The Personal Experience Essay," "Critical Reading of a Film," and "The Open-Ended Analytic Assignment." Each model shows how to integrate outside quotes, paraphrases, and summary into the writer's own voice and how to document outside sources in the text and at the end of the manuscript with an MLA style "Works Cited" page.
It appears that Signs of Life Fifth Edition is moving away from the academic lucubrations of scholarly authors and embracing more accessible writers, like those previously mentioned. This is a positive evolution for the fifth edition and hopefully points to less overly-done academic writing in future editions.
Rated by buyers 
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There is a statement that is familiar amongst our society, especially those of us that are more liberal, and that is "to not always trust what the media offers as valid or true." This textbook is an endeavor to characterize the ways that media manipulate or tangle the truth, and even goes as far as offering an explanation as to why they do it. Now this is where objectivity within a learning text can be lost because to offer opinion about why the media does such things is treacherously difficult to do without biasing a left or right view. Yet the book does offer many illuminating details about the workings of this incredibly powerful economic and political tool, and more importantly, it offers the reader tools for combating or deciphering the clouded messages it gives.
I believe that this is a book that must be read by every human being (not to mention our pets who more and more become economic targets) so as to arm himself or herself against the incessant onslaught of "buy me! Buy me!" and "I can make you better because God knows you weren't made right!" However, the book loses power in being a textbook because some fluidity is lost, and it can be at times rather bland.
Nonetheless, it is a great tool to have and a tool that has now more recently become important to the human in his newest, superficial society.
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