Books about Elitist from Amazon.com

Americans have come to tolerate, embrace and even champion many things that would have horrified their parents' generation—from easy divorce and unrestricted abortion-on-demand to extreme body piercing and teaching homosexuality to grade-schoolers. Does that mean today's Americans are inherently more morally confused and depraved than previous generations? Of course not, says veteran journalist David Kupelian. But they have fallen victim to some of the most stunningly brilliant and compelling marketing campaigns in modern history.
The Marketing of Evil reveals how much of what Americans once almost universally abhorred has been packaged, perfumed, gift-wrapped and sold to them as though it had great value. Highly skilled marketers, playing on our deeply felt national values of fairness, generosity and tolerance, have persuaded us to embrace as enlightened and noble that which all previous generations since America's founding regarded as grossly self-destructive—in a word, evil.
In this groundbreaking and meticulously researched book, Kupelian peels back the veil of marketing-induced deception to reveal exactly when, where, how, and especially why Americans bought into the lies that now threaten the future of the country.
For example, few of us realize that the widely revered father of the "sexual revolution" has been irrefutably exposed as a full-fledged sexual psychopath who encouraged pedophilia. Or that giant corporations voraciously competing for America's $150 billion teen market routinely infiltrate young people's social groups to find out how better to lead children into ever more debauched forms of "authentic self-expression."
Likewise, most of us mistakenly believe the "abortion rights" and "gay rights" movements were spontaneous, grassroots uprisings of neglected or persecuted minorities wanting to breathe free. Few people realize America was actually "sold" on abortion thanks to an audacious public relations campaign that relied on fantastic lies and fabrications. Or that the "gay rights" movement—which transformed America's former view of homosexuals as self-destructive human beings into their current status as victims and cultural heroes—faithfully followed an in-depth, phased plan laid out by professional Harvard-trained marketers.
No quarter is given in this riveting, insightful exploration of how lies, both subtle and outrageous, are packaged as truth. From the federal government to the public school system to the news media to the hidden creators of "youth culture," nothing is exempt from the thousand-watt spotlight of Kupelian's journalistic inquiry.
In the end, The Marketing of Evil is an up-close, modern-day look at what is traditionally known as "tempation"—the art and science of making evil look good..
Price: $15.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is running the show

In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement.

Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. Worse, Keen claims, our “cut-and-paste” online culture—in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated—threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors.

In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented.

The very anonymity that the Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. While no Luddite—Keen pioneered several Internet startups himself—he urges us to consider the consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions.

Offering concrete solutions on how we can rein in the free-wheeling, narcissistic atmosphere that pervades the Web, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR is a wake-up call to each and every one of us..
Price: $10.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

God is unemployed and begging for work. It's a novel (anti-novel), it's surrealistic, and it is really weird. No book summary can do it justice .
Price: $14.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"We sell lies," write Tor Hyams and David Scharff "Fierce.com is our excuse for spilling misinformation on the public's lap each week." Well, sort of. Actually, it's a Web site where they post weekly reviews of other people's Web sites, and Fierce.com: The Exclusive Book for Web Elitists contains a couple hundred of them culled from the first few years of the site's existence.

Be advised, however: this is just a collection of Web site reviews approximately the same way The Divine Comedy is just a bunch of notes from Dante's dream journal. Highly opinionated (verging on warped), these speed-typed, barely edited write-ups only occasionally provide a straight-line glimpse of the sites they purport to critique. More often the review is a pretext for a deranged rant about evil alien show dogs, an erotic reverie on getting turned on by Archie comics as a child, or some other peek into the oddly charming inner lives of cousins Scharff and Hyams.

Lamentably, the sheer quantity of reviews gathered here, combined with the authors' off-the-cuff, Web-native style, means the reviewers' efforts themselves often deserve their own most lukewarm rating: Not Quite. But Hyams' brother Matt's humorous interludes (trippy riffs on, say, obscure mail-order products or U.S. diplomatic efforts to get a look at Saddam Hussein's nether regions) are never less than laugh-out-loud hilarious. And overall, the reviewers hit their marks too, providing a sharply personal snapshot of the Web that earns them their own highest praise: this book is Fierce. --Julian Dibbell.
Price: $1.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This digital document is a journal article from Poetics, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Research on cultural omnivorousness is expanded by examination of cultural participation and by anchoring omnivorousness alongside other patterns of cultural consumption in a comparative context over time in the USA. Between 1982 and 2002, at the aggregate level little change was found in cultural consumption of live performing arts, but patterns of attendance did change, with an increase in cultural differentiation. It was expressed in quasi-omnivorous and entertainment patterns that drew consumers away from more traditional highbrow consumption patterns. Increase in cultural differentiation was associated with rise in educational levels; this may reflect a link between the breadth of consumption patterns of the elite and their need for scale and synthesis in cultural knowledge. .
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]