To begin my discussion of the issue of commodification and advertising, I

would like to look at TV. We live in a television culture. This

television culture is produced primarily by what we know as TV networks

(which is, as I think about it now, a rather strange metaphoric use of the

word "network") who receive money from corporations (with advertising

agencies serving as the go-betweens). Cable TV has the potential to

provide input from local communities, and government sponsored "public" TV

does exist, but these forms of TV can be compared to regional dialects

existing at the margins: it is commercial TV which sets the standards for

the medium. Here I do not want to go into detail about how networks

themselves are corporations (although for the reader interested in this

kind of thing I would recommend _Networks of Power: Corporate TV's Threat

to Democracy_, Dennis W. Mazzocco, South End Press, 1994) since I merely

want to outline the nature of the product (or culture) they produce. Let

it suffice to say that TV networks have not been immune from the trends of

late capitalism towards corporate merging and restructuring (downsizing,

as s/he is. Thus the imperfect self-delusion of J. George Frederick and

within our economic/cultural life. In early capitalist society,

this is that although we often equate advertising with freedom and

Some topics in this essay:
Fourth TV, John McCreery, Miller's TV, Fables Abundance, Alan Trachtenberg, Late Capitalism_, Finally TV, Basic Books, George Frederick's, Marxist TV, tv culture, film literature, culture tv, television culture, print culture, fourth tv culture, environment dissent, modernist capitalism, dissent impossible, advertising agencies, ad people, environment dissent impossible, monopoly stage capitalism,