De Anza College Positive and Negative Impacts of Facebook on Society Essay all the instructions are attached!Write an essay of at least 3 1/2 pages analyzi

De Anza College Positive and Negative Impacts of Facebook on Society Essay all the instructions are attached!Write an essay of at least 3 1/2 pages analyzing the current success (or not) of a social media site or other form of online social interaction and how it may reflect today’s culture. Explore background or history, social influences, gender or race stereotypes, status, labeling or profiling, music (if it applies), and what these and more reveal about our society today. You may incorporate concrete, specific, detailed personal experience/observation examples. Thesis support needs to include any two essays from the chapters 5 and/ or 6 in your SL book plus three other sources; as a result, there will be a minimum six listings on your Works Cited page if you include the SL book as a separate reference. Follow the 2016 MLA format: see SL book “Conducting Research and Citing Sources” and/or Purdue OWL. Remember, each Work Cited entry must be mentioned in the content of your essay. Also, you will receive +2 bonus points for each additional Work Cited entry done correctly (six points max). Always tie back to your thesis statement and respond to every quote. Name
EWRT 2
Out-of-Class Essay #3
June 11, 2020
Title
Write an essay of at least 3 1/2 pages analyzing the current success (or
not) of a social media site or other form of online social interaction and how it
may reflect today’s culture. Explore background or history, social influences,
gender or race stereotypes, status, labeling or profiling, music (if it applies), and
what these and more reveal about our society today. You may incorporate
concrete, specific, detailed personal experience/observation examples.
Thesis support needs to include any two essays from the chapters 5 and/
or 6 in your SL book plus three other sources; as a result, there will be a
minimum six listings on your Works Cited page if you include the SL book as a
separate reference. Follow the 2016 MLA format: see SL book “Conducting
Research and Citing Sources” and/or Purdue OWL. Remember, each Work Cited
entry must be mentioned in the content of your essay. Also, you will receive +2
bonus points for each additional Work Cited entry done correctly (six points max).
Always tie back to your thesis statement and respond to every quote.
A completed typed essay with Works Cited page is due via email no later
than 9am on Thursday, June 11th (+150 points). However, if you have completed
your essay earlier, have proofread it carefully, you may submit your completed
essay before 9am on Tuesday, June 9th, for +5 Bonus points. Be sure to follow
the guidelines demonstrated in this handout (top left heading/all type double
spaced) or five points will be deducted.
*Tutoring is provided by the Writing and Reading Center (WRC) using Zoom;
plus, Smarthinking via My Portal is available. Also, check out “Grammarly,” a free
app that proofreads for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. Proofreading
is a vital part of writing! Share with friends/family if possible.
Works Cited
Keenan, Trish. “Halloween Costume Winners.” Facebook, 3 May 2020, 11:23am,
www.facebook.com/trishKeenan.
@runningfast. “How to increase speed.” Twitter, 27 May 2020, 1:38pm, https.//
twitter.com/runningfast/status/243895641351132484.
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Ninth Edition
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Signs of Life in the U.S.A.
Readings on Popular Culture for Writers
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Ninth Edition
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Signs of Life in the U.S.A.
Readings on Popular Culture for Writers
Sonia Maasik
University of California, Los Angeles
Jack Solomon
California State University, Northridge
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For Bedford/St. Martin’s
Vice President, Editorial, Macmillan Learning Humanities: Edwin Hill
Senior Program Director for English: Leasa Burton
Program Manager, Readers and Literature: John E. Sullivan III
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Developmental Editor: Sherry Mooney
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Production Supervisor: Robert Cherry
Media Project Manager: D. Rand Thomas
Editorial Services: Lumina Datamatics, Inc.
Composition: Lumina Datamatics, Inc.
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Photo Researcher: Terri Wright
Permissions Editor: Angela Boehler
Senior Art Director: Anna Palchik
Cover Design: William Boardman
Cover Art/Cover Photo: Replica Statue of Liberty and roller coaster on exterior of New YorkNew York Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA / David Wall / Alamy Stock Photo;
Muncie – Circa August 2016: Legacy McDonald’s Hamburger Sign with Speedee / Jonathan
Weiss / Alamy Stock Photo; Geological rock ridge in a California state park marks the San
Andreas Fault Line / kenkisler / Shutterstock; Abraham Lincoln Memorial Sitting Chair
famous Landmark Closeup Phrase Washington DC Monument / Hunter Bliss / Shutterstock;
Route 66. Road sign of the more famous American road / Marco Mariani / Shutterstock.
Copyright © 2018, 2015, 2012, 2009 by Bedford/St. Martin’s.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in
writing by the Publisher.
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For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116
ISBN: 978-1-319-13186-9 (EPUB)
Acknowledgments
Text acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on pages 569–73, which
constitute an extension of the copyright page. Art acknowledgments and copyrights appear on
the same page as the art selections they cover.
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Preface for Instructors
A funny thing happened on the way to the ninth edition of Signs of Life in the
U.S.A.: Donald Trump — contrary to all of the projections that the latest in
predictions markets technology could muster — was elected president of the
United States. This gave us pause: not because we had any intention of turning
our book into some sort of “Trump Reader,” but because the election at once both
verifies the fundamental premises of earlier editions of Signs of Life and promises
to affect American culture in ways that it behooves the current edition to
anticipate and address. And that is what we have strived to do, in as nonpartisan a
manner as we can.
There are two basic ways in which the presidential election of Donald Trump
bears out the guiding principles of this book. First, it exemplifies, in a particularly
striking manner, the preeminent place of popular culture in contemporary
American life. For Trump’s road to the White House was paved in large part both
by his success as a reality TV star and by his no-holds-barred employment of
Twitter as a means to communicate with his followers. Not even the election of
Ronald Reagan (himself a former entertainment figure) can really compare in this
regard, because Reagan had spent years in the political arena — most notably as
governor of California — before he went to Pennsylvania Avenue, and candidate
Reagan had no social media available to maintain a 24/7 connection with voters.
So 2016 really was different, reflecting the full coming of age of the power of pop
culture.
But there is a second way in which the Trump presidency reflects what earlier
editions of Signs of Life presumed and explored: the ever-growing ideological
divide between two Americas — often called red state and blue state — is a
theme that this book formally addressed in chapters devoted to the fundamental
contradictions that have riven this nation from its inception. And if anyone has
doubted the existence of this division, or felt that it was only a sideshow to a
basically unified country, the Trump election, and more importantly its aftermath,
loudly says otherwise. Americans have really seen nothing quite like this since the
Civil War.
So, putting aside our own opinions about what could be called the “Election
Heard Round the World,” we have created this new edition of our book with our
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foundational assumptions not only strengthened but intensified: that American
popular culture, no longer a mere cultural embellishment or ornament, now
permeates almost everything we do, even as it reflects back to us what we are
becoming as a society and who we are. Thus, if we wish to understand America
today, we must learn to think critically about the vast panoply of entertainments
and commodities that were once condescendingly dismissed as elements of “mass
culture.” And that is what Signs of Life in the U.S.A. has always been designed to
teach your students to do.
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Then and Now
The importance of thinking critically about popular culture has not always been
apparent in the academic world. When the first edition of Signs of Life appeared,
the study of popular culture was still embroiled in the “culture wars” of the late
1980s and early 1990s, a struggle for academic legitimacy in which the adherents
of popular cultural studies prevailed so thoroughly that it now seems surprising
that anyone ever objected to it at all. For today, the importance of understanding
what Michel de Certeau has called “the practice of everyday life,” and the value
of using popular culture as a thematic ground for educating students in critical
thinking and writing, is now taken for granted, as what was once excluded from
academic study on the basis of a naturalized distinction between “high” and “low”
culture is now an accepted part of the curriculum, widely studied in freshman
composition classrooms as well as in upper-division undergraduate courses and
graduate seminars.
But recognition of the importance that popular culture has assumed in our
society has not been restricted to the academy. Increasingly, Americans are
realizing that American culture and popular culture are virtually one and the
same, and that whether we are looking at our political system, our economy, or
simply our national consciousness, the power of popular culture to shape our lives
is strikingly apparent. That’s why, unlike most other popular culture texts, Signs
of Life adopts an interpretive approach — semiotics — explicitly designed to
analyze that intersection of ideology and entertainment that we call popular
culture. We continue to make semiotics the guiding methodology behind Signs of
Life because semiotics helps us, and our students, avoid the common pitfalls of an
uncritical celebration of popular culture, or simple trivia swapping.
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The Critical Method: Semiotics
The reception of the first eight editions of this text has demonstrated that the
semiotic approach to popular culture has indeed found a place in America’s
composition classrooms. Instructors have seen that students feel a certain sense of
ownership toward the products of popular culture and that using popular culture
as a focus can help students overcome the sometimes alienating effects of
traditional academic subject matter. More profoundly, the use of pop culture
content in a composition class is a way of abiding by the fundamental principle
that learning is a movement from the familiar to the unfamiliar, an assimilation of
the unknown by way of the already known. Coming to your class with an
established expertise in popular culture, your students will be all the more
prepared to learn the university-level critical thinking and writing skills that their
composition classes are designed to impart.
Reflecting the broad academic interest in cultural studies, we’ve assumed an
inclusive definition of popular culture in this book. The seven chapters in Signs of
Life in the U.S.A. embrace everything from the marketing and consumption of the
products of mass production to the television programs and movies that entertain
us. We came to choose semiotics as our approach to such subjects because it has
struck us that, while students enjoy assignments that ask them to look at popular
cultural phenomena, they often have trouble distinguishing between an argued
interpretive analysis and the simple expression of an opinion. Some textbooks, for
example, suggest assignments that involve analyzing a TV show or film, but they
don’t always tell a student how to do that. The semiotic method provides that
guidance.
As a conceptual framework, semiotics teaches students to formulate cogent,
well-supported interpretations. It emphasizes the examination of assumptions and
of the way that linguistic and cultural codes shape our apprehension of the world.
And, because semiotics focuses on how beliefs are formulated within a social and
political context (rather than just judging or evaluating those beliefs), it’s ideal for
discussing sensitive or politically charged issues (like the 2016 presidential
election). As an approach used in literature, linguistics, media and
communications studies, anthropology, art and design coursework, sociology,
law, and market research (to name only some of its more prominent field
applications), semiotics has a cross-disciplinary appeal that makes it ideal for
teaching a writing class to students from a variety of majors and disciplines. We
recognize that semiotics has a reputation for being highly technical or theoretical;
rest assured that Signs of Life in the U.S.A. does not require students or instructors
to have a technical knowledge of semiotics. We’ve provided clear and accessible
introductions that explain what students need to know.
We also recognize that adopting a theoretical approach may be new to some
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instructors, so we’ve designed the book to allow instructors to use semiotics with
their students as much or as little as they wish. The book does not obligate
instructors or students to spend a lot of time with semiotics — although we do
hope you’ll find the approach intriguing and provocative.
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The Editorial Apparatus
With its emphasis on popular culture, Signs of Life in the U.S.A. should generate
lively class discussion and inspire many kinds of writing and thinking activities.
The General Introduction provides an overall framework for the book,
acquainting students with the semiotic method they can use to interpret the topics
raised in each chapter, while the section on “Writing about Popular Culture”
provides a succinct guide to students for writing their papers, along with three
sample student essays that demonstrate different approaches to writing critical
essays on popular culture. The book’s section on “Conducting Research and
Citing Sources” offers an updated guide to the latest MLA-style conventions to
help your students properly document the research they’ve done for their writing
assignments, and three articles that guide students in the appropriate use of the
Internet as a research tool.
Each chapter starts with a frontispiece — a provocative visual image related to
the chapter’s topic — and an Introduction that suggests ways to “read” the topic,
provides model interpretations, and links the issues raised by the reading
selections. Every Chapter Introduction also contains three types of boxed
questions designed to stimulate student thinking on the topic. The Exploring the
Signs questions invite students to reflect on an issue in a journal entry or other
prewriting activity, while the Discussing the Signs questions trigger class
activities such as debates, discussions, or small-group work. The Reading Online
questions invite students to explore the chapter’s topic on the Internet, both for
research purposes and for texts to analyze.
Two sorts of assignments accompany each reading. The Reading the Text
questions help students comprehend the selections, asking them to identify
important concepts and arguments, explain key terms, and relate main ideas to
one another and to the evidence presented. The Reading the Signs questions are
writing and activity prompts designed to produce clear analytic thinking and
strong persuasive writing; they often make connections among reading selections
from different chapters. Most assignments call for analytic essays, while some
invite journal responses, in-class debates, group work, or other creative activities.
Complementing the readings in each chapter are images that serve as visual texts
to be discussed. We also include a glossary of semiotic terms, which can serve as
a ready reference to key words and concepts used in the Chapter Introductions.
Finally, the Instructor’s Manual (Editors’ Notes for Signs of Life in the U.S.A.)
provides suggestions for organizing your syllabus, encouraging student responses
to the readings, and using popular culture and semiotics to teach your writing
class.
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What’s New in the Ninth Edition
Popular culture evolves at a rapid pace, and the substantial revision required for
the ninth edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. reflects this essential mutability.
First, we have updated our readings, including more than thirty new selections
focusing on issues and trends that have emerged since the last edition of this
book. We have also updated the exemplary topics in our Chapter Introductions,
which are used to model the critical assignments that follow, and have adjusted
the focus of some chapters to reflect the changing conditions of students’ lives
and the ways they consume popular culture. And, in light of the Trump election,
we have restored to this edition our chapter on American contradictions:
“American Paradox: Culture, Conflict, and Contradiction in the U.S.A.” The way
that students consume media has been revolutionized by digital and mobile
technologies, and Signs of Life in the U.S.A. reflects this new reality, offering both
an e-book version of the main text and a collection of reading comprehension
quizzes for every reading in the book. These are available in LaunchPad Solo for
Readers and Writers, a robust adaptable learning solution that can be packaged
with Signs of Life in the U.S.A. for little to no cost.
Even as we revise this text to reflect current trends, popular culture continues
to evolve. The inevitable gap between the pace of editing and publishing, on the
one hand, and the flow of popular culture, on the other, need not affect the use of
popular culture in the classroom, however. The readings in the text, and the
semiotic method we propose, are designed to show students how to analyze and
write critical essays about any topic they choose. That topic may have appeared
before they were born, or it may be the latest box-office or prime-time hit to
appear after the publication of this edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. Currently
popular social media sites may well have been replaced by more recently arriving
digital hangouts within the life span of this edition (indeed, Facebook obliterated
MySpace shortly after the publication of the sixth edition of this book), but such
changes are opportunities for further analysis, not obstacles. To put it another
way, the practice of everyday life may itself be filled with evanescent fads and
trends, but daily life is not itself a fad. As the vital texture of our lived experience,
popular culture provides a stable background against which students of every
generation can test their critical skills.
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Acknowledgments
The vastness of the terrain of popular culture has enabled many users of the eighth
edition of this text to make valuable suggestions for the ninth edition. We have
incorporated many such suggestions and thank all for their comments on our text.
We are also grateful to those reviewers who examined the book in depth: Robin
Avner, Palomar College; Craig Bartholomaus, Metropolitan Community College Penn Valley; Sharon Becker, Towson University; Maria Cahill, Husson
University; Tammy Cherry, Florida State College Jacksonville; Wallace Cleaves,
University of California at Riverside; Sharon Estes, Bucks County Community
College; James Geasor, Queensborough Community College; Matthew Hidinger,
Allan Hancock College; Marcia Holland, Indiana University South Bend; Elana
Kent-Stacy, College of the Canyons; Dan Portillo, College of the Canyons; Rocco
Versaci, Palomar College.
Finally, we’d like to give a special shout out to Eric Dinsmore of California
State University, Northridge, whose suggestion that we have a look at the 2014
cinematic installment in the never-ending Godzilla franchise (along with
providing us with the DVD) ended up making a direct contribution to our book.
If we have not included something you’d like to work on, you may still direct
your students to it, using this text as a guide, not as a set of absolute prescriptions.
The practice of everyday life includes the conduct of a classroom, and we want all
users of the ninth edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. to feel free to pursue that
practice in whatever way best suits their interests and aims.
Once again, we wish to thank heartily the people at Bedford/St. Martin’s who
have enabled us to make this new edition a reality. We especially want to thank
our new editor, Sherry Mooney, whose always cheerful, diplomatic, and efficient
assistance has kept this edition on course from start to finish. …
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