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Title: The overspent American Reference: Abstract: Library of Congress subjects: Reviews and Numerical Ratings
(3) Good introduction to the topic of consumer culture, with a focus on the reasons why people have been facing more debt in the past twenty years. Not particularly challenging, and doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know, but looks at the issue from enough angles to present a number of possibilities for discussion. High-quality production, lots of charts, graphs and other statistics, good visual presentation. Contextualizes individual motivations, behaviour and identity within large-scale social and economic processes. Steve LeDrew (3) A well-organized, detailed analysis by Harvard economist Juliet Schor that links labour and media issues, using familiar images in convincing ways. It’s refreshing to see a video present a social phenomenon, rather than an individual’s story, as the central figure. Kathy Bischoping (1) This film moves very slowly. Moreover, its assumptions about human agency and the power of individual actors are almost enraging. The film not only presents the notion that individual choice, rather than the logic of capitalism, is responsible for consumer society in North America, but women are pinpointed as primary consumers and subsequently primarily responsible. This film relies on a one-woman analysis and focuses excessively on the individual, which provides a very narrow understanding of how consumer society developed and how it can be transformed. I would not suggest this movie be shown in any classroom, as it might prove very difficult to untangle the issues from the web of consumer politics. Sarah Newman
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