New Publication: Anat Rosenberg, The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment, and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022) @anat_rosenberg @OUPAcademic @ReichmanUni

Anat Rosenberg, Reichman University, is publishing The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment, and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022). Here is a description of the book's contents. 

The Rise of Mass Advertising is a first cultural legal history of advertising in Britain, tracing the rise of mass advertising c.1840-1914 and its legal shaping. The emergence of this new system disrupted the perceived foundations of modernity. The idea that culture was organized by identifiable fields of knowledge, experience, and authority came under strain as advertisers claimed to share values with the era's most prominent fields, including news, art, science, and religiously inflected morality. While cultural boundaries grew blurry, the assumption that the world was becoming progressively disenchanted was undermined, as enchanted experiences multiplied with the transformation of everyday environments by advertising. Magical thinking, a dwelling in mysteries, searches for transfiguration, affective connection between humans and things, and powerful fantasy disrupted assumptions that the capitalist economy was a victory of reason. The Rise of Mass Advertising examines how contemporaries came to terms with the disruptive impact by mobilizing legal processes, powers, and concepts. Law was implicated in performing boundary work that preserved the modern sense of field distinctions. Advertising's cultural meanings and its organization were shaped dialectically vis-à-vis other fields in a process that mainstreamed and legitimized it with legal means, but also construed it as an inferior simulation of the values of a progressive modernity, exhibiting epistemological shortfalls and aesthetic compromises that marked it apart from adjacent fields. The dual treatment meanwhile disavowed the central role of enchantment, in what amounted to a normative enterprise of disenchantment. One of the ironies of this enterprise was that it ultimately drove professional advertisers to embrace enchantment as their peculiar expertise. The analysis draws on an extensive archive that bridges disciplinary divides. It offers a novel methodological approach to the study of advertising, which brings together the history of capitalism, the history of knowledge, and the history of modern disenchantment, and yields a new account of advertising's significance for modernity.

Link to the book on the publisher's website. 

Calling Alexander Graham Bell

Ayun Halliday investigates the uses of inventor Alexander Graham Bell as representative of all kinds of TV spokesperson, from the obvious (electronic equipment) to the somewhat less so (chewing gum--well, maybe it's linked to speech, which goes into the phone?) to the obscure (Legos--Bell as a child making a phone out of the product--I'm really in the weeds now). Along the way, she points out that intellectual property law can be a concern if one uses images of dead figures in one's advertising. Public figures may also have post-mortem rights of publicity, depending on the jurisdiction.

For Open Culture. 

Law, Advertising, Deception, and Free Speech

How much deception do we, should we, tolerate in a free society? From our media? From our lawyers? From ourselves? The latest post from John Denvir's blog Guile is Good: Guile Is Us.