Dear Readers...
Welcome to the second edition of Culture Shock!, a magazine of student writing on popular culture subjects. This volume was designed, produced, written, and edited by students enrolled in a section of 21W.731, Writing and Experience, at MIT in the fall of 2002. It includes also the writing of several tenth-grade students at the Odyssey School in South Boston, a group of whom corresponded by e-mail with the MIT students in the course and who were invited to submit work for the magazine. It was my pleasure and privilege to serve as the instructor of the course.
This second volume follows the first, produced in the fall of 2000 by students in the course the first time I taught it. (You can access that first volume via the Archives link on our home page.) In this volume of the magazine, you can read about role models, internet pirating, the recent popularity of investing in the stock market, the loss of privacy in the electronic age, rave culture, and other compelling subjects in essays that take as their task the critical scrutiny of facets of the world we live in. To become more aware of the ways media, marketing, popular films and music, style and fashion, and pervasive advertising construct our sense of ourselves and of what is real, what counts, was a goal of the course. It is our pleasure now to invite you to read the writing that is the fruit of our semiotic analyses of American popular culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We hope you enjoy our magazine. If you do—or even if you don’t—we hope you will write to tell us. Now read on….
Rebecca Blevins Faery, Ph.D.