Barthes’s basic idea (although with Barthes it’s always dangerous to reduce things to a basic idea) was that the operation of mass culture is analogous to mythology. He argued that the cultural work previously done by gods and epic sagas — teaching citizens the values of their society, providing a common language — was now being done by film stars and laundry-detergent commercials. In “Mythologies,” his project was to demystify these myths. He wrote essays about professional wrestling, celebrity weddings, soap advertisements, actors’ publicity photos, trends in children’s toys and an initiative by the president of France to get citizens to drink more milk.
.. “Mythologies” is often an angry book, and what angered Barthes more than anything was “common sense,” which he identified as the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, a mode of thought that systematically pretends that complex things are simple, that puzzling things are obvious, that local things are universal — in short, that cultural fantasies shaped by all the dirty contingencies of power and money and history are in fact just the natural order of the universe. The critic’s job, in Barthes’s view, was not to revel in these common-sensical myths but to expose them as fraudulent. The critic had to side with history, not with culture. And history, Barthes insisted, “is not a good bourgeois.”
.. Does writing for a magazine or a Web site dominated by ads make the critic an extension of those ads — in essence, an advertisement for the ads?
Meta-filter on Ted Nelson
Dear old Ted. Rather like Richard Stallman, he is bitter that his ideas and work haven’t earned him the fame he feels is his due. In both cases I suspect lack of people skills have a lot to do with it.
Steve Jobs Insult Response
Steve Jobs at the 1997 WWDC. This is the question that contains an insult based on a question asked by someone else about 45 minutes earlier.