Journal Article Analysis

I believe the intended audience for this article is someone who would be interested in the earlier days of mass production of popular culture products. This could be someone who is conducting research on this topic to someone who is just interested about where nylon came from and what made is so popular. The article keeps referencing back to the late 1920’s and how this new technology or product came popular.
This article begins off as a study of ideologies that have contributed to the significance of mass culture. The article then uses an example of this from the mass production of nylon. Susan Smulyan , the author of this article “makes visible the ways in which race, class, gender, nationhood, and consumption both emerge in and are developed through popular culture”. (2007) She then goes into detail about the technology behind nylon and what made it so popular. Nylon was primarily used for stockings that were worn on women’s legs. She then explains that how not only the scientific creation of nylon was important but, also how the advertisement and consumers were just as important. As the marketability of this product grew, the product would be researched even more to see what they could get out of it. The research that was conducted found that nylon was the consumer’s replacement for silk. The article then goes in and describes how the DuPont cooperation keeps advertising nylon to the consumers and keeps gaining more and more power. Smulyan’s study showed how cooperation’s like DuPont gained more power over consumers. “This case study aptly demonstrates Smulyan’s overall argument that mid century conflicts between producers and consumers of popular products show the increasing power of producers in controlling the language about, and the multiple meanings of goods (Smulyan, 2008). The style of this article was not logically organized. It would be discussing one topic and then jump right into another one. Besides the back and fourth of topics, the test was fairly easy to ready. I found that I would have to reread every couple sentences to get a grasp on what was being written. An example of this is how Smulyan would be discussing her research in one sentence and in the very next sentence she would be discussing the research of the DuPont cooperation.
The key idea I took away from this article is no matter how much or how hard the consumer argues or disagrees with a producer, the producer will most likely wind up on top because they have all of the power.



Reference
Smulyan, S. (2007). Popular ideologies: Mass culture of mid-century. Technology and Culture,
49(4), 1077-1079. Retrieved from OhioLINK electronic journal finder.