Preface and acknowledgments | p. vii |
Media culture and the triumph of the spectacle | p. 1 |
Guy Deboard and the society of the spectacle | p. 2 |
The infotainment society and technocapitalism | p. 11 |
From media culture to media spectacle | p. 15 |
Signs of the times | p. 17 |
Cultural studies as diagnostic critique | p. 27 |
Commodity spectacle: McDonald's as global culture | p. 34 |
McDonald's and McDonaldization | p. 34 |
Theorizing McDonald's: a multiperspectivist approach | p. 38 |
McDonald's between the global and the local | p. 39 |
McDonald's between the modern and the postmodern | p. 42 |
Criticizing/resisting the McDonald's spectacle | p. 45 |
The case against McDonald's | p. 47 |
Evaluating McDonaldization | p. 55 |
The personal and the political | p. 57 |
The sports spectacle, Michael Jordan, and Nike | p. 63 |
The sports spectacle | p. 65 |
The spectacle of Michael Jordan | p. 70 |
Michael Jordan and the sports/race spectacle | p. 73 |
Michael Jordan, Nike, and the commodity spectacle | p. 78 |
Third coming, sex scandals, and the contradictions of the spectacle | p. 83 |
Contradictions of Michael Jordan | p. 86 |
Reading Jordan critically | p. 87 |
Megaspectacle: the O. J. Simpson murder trial | p. 93 |
Murder and media spectacle in Brentwood | p. 94 |
Spectacle culture and the social construction of reality | p. 102 |
The verdict and the aftermath | p. 104 |
The Simpson spectacle, identity politics, and postmodernization | p. 108 |
Identity and identity politics | p. 110 |
The Simpson effect: contradictions of a megaspectacle | p. 116 |
TV spectacle: aliens, conspiracies, and biotechnology in The X-Files | p. 126 |
Conspiracy, paranoia, and postmodern aesthetics in The X-Files | p. 128 |
Series television as social critique: "Trust no one" | p. 136 |
The postmodern sublime, or "Is the truth out there"? | p. 140 |
Postmodern deconstruction: "I want to believe" but ... | p. 145 |
Nothing important happened today ... except that everything changed | p. 150 |
Representing the unrepresentable | p. 156 |
Presidential Politics, the Movie | p. 160 |
JFK, the Movie | p. 161 |
LBJ and Nixon: bad movies | p. 162 |
Ford and Carter: indifferent presidencies and poor spectacle | p. 164 |
Ronald Reagan, the acting president | p. 166 |
Bush I, mixed spectacle, failed presidency | p. 168 |
The Clinton spectacle | p. 170 |
Bush II, Grand Theft 2000, and Terror War | p. 173 |
Conclusion: democratic politics and spectacle culture in the new millennium | p. 176 |
References | p. 179 |
Index | p. 186 |
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