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Speed Culture: Fast Strategies in Televised Commercial Ads

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Abstract

While various theorists explain the postmodern moment or culture by pointing at an acceleration of transformations in macro-social institutions, such explanations remain often abstract and removed from everyday experience. Seeking to concretize how speed is articulated in popular texts, I analyze here the various strategies TV commercial ads deploy to inscribe speed as a normal and desirable quality of everyday life, objects, and self. Focusing on both pictorial and textual dimensions, I call the reader's attention to these strategies, and discuss the possible social and psychological consequences of the ideological orientations they articulate.

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Gottschalk, S. Speed Culture: Fast Strategies in Televised Commercial Ads. Qualitative Sociology 22, 311–329 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022007721264

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022007721264

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