For immediate release:September 18, 2000
Contact: Teresa S. Thomas, Carnegie Mellon (412) 268-3580
"100 Years of Mass Culture" Conference At Carnegie Mellon Explores the Good, Evil and "Beyond" of Entertainment Media
PITTSBURGH-Carnegie Mellon University will host a conference from Sept. 29-Oct. 1 that explores the last "100 Years of Mass Culture: Beyond Good and Evil."
Drawing from scholarship that looks at the impact of a century of entertainment media, conference organizers say the event will address the full range of mass cultural media, including movies, network and cable television, radio, newspapers, sound recordings, the World Wide Web, magazines, formula fiction and advertising of professional and college sports.
Featured speakers include Richard Ohmann, an English professor at Wesleyan University, who will discuss research based on his book, "Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets and Class at the Turn of the Century;" and Lynn Spigel, a professor in the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California, who will discuss "Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America."
"Our discussion will move beyond the paradigm of whether mass culture is good or evil and toward a discussion of how mass culture actually works politically, socially and economically," says David Shumway, an associate professor of English who is one of the conference organizers.
Shumway and Kathy Newman, an assistant professor English who also was a conference organizer, say that among many topics, "100 Years of Mass Culture" will also address issues such as cultural imperialism and globalization, corporations, mass culture and violence, the "whiteness" of the media, the political impact of television, the "decline" of the print media and the impact of mass culture on democratic values and practices.
The event is sponsored by Carnegie Mellon's English Department. Most sessions for the conference take place at the University Center on Carnegie Mellon's campus.
Further information is available at: http://hss.cmu.edu/massculture
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