Sign Wars

Reviews / Votes

Sign Wars is a path-breaking analysis of contemporary advertising, a work of sustained brilliance, rich in insight and imagination, that will reward repeated readings. --John Wilson, Ph.D., Duke University, Dept of Sociology

Goldman and Papson have performed a real service for scholars and consumers alike. Their book tells us that images, like words, can be read, understood, and judged true or false. In a world where MTV competes with CNN and New York Times headlines with Nike slogans, no lesson is more appropriate or important. Sign Wars is a great leap forward in making America media literate. --Randall Rothenberg, senior writer, Esquire, and author, Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story

The aptly titled Sign Wars offers an insightful and engaging examination of some of our most familiar and pervasive images, sounds, and messages. Goldman and Papson take readers inside the logic and structure of contemporary commodity culture to show how the economic interests of transnational corporations, the culture of ad makers, and the strategies of ads themselves all work to increase the intensity and velocity of corporate struggles for our attention, identification, and loyalty to their logos and products. Most importantly, Sign Wars convincingly uses ads and ad culture to ponder the collective crisis of meaning in late capitalism (over issues like gender, race, community, morality, the environment, and citizenship), a crisis which they argue is increasingly expressed in terms of a commodity culture where identification with and fluency in advertising images are the markers of citizenship and participation in society. To their credit, Goldman and Papson place advertising front and center in contemporary debates about politics and culture. --Herman Gray, Ph.D., Associate Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Watching Race: Television and the Sign of Blackness
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