I have thoroughly enjoyed the process of gathering research and compiling the annotated bibliography. It is unbelievable the intellectual skills required of one when setting up an annotated bibliography. Because the purpose of this document is critical and descriptive it requires research, synoptical and analytical skills that are used to describe the scope of the material and the authority of the author, but equally important is tying the credentials together by way of support or argument as well as tying the works cited into your own topic.

I found a very broad range of resources that I believe will serve the essay and provide critical information with objective reasoning.

One of the resources I found that I am most excited about is a book by Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool. The author, American political analyst, historian of culture and ideas and journalist, explores American countercultures dating back to the 1950s on through the new millennium, and their influence on the development of the values in America, and consumerism as seen in a corporate context. The study researches the counterculture explicitly in terms of the consumer culture, the repetitiveness of historical symbolism reestablishing its relevancy within the advertising industry and the contrasting calamity in corporate thought. This study also explores the questions surrounding the countercultures and popular cultures reluctance to apply how these anti-commercial youth countercultures have become the symbol for heightened capitalism historically.

In contrast, a cross national analysis undertaken by James L. Spates, author and Professor of Sociology where the content of popular culture magazines and the underground press were contrasted and analyzed in parallel with the growing counterculture population to gauge the effects that this ideology may or may not have had on these publications. The content, political, expressive and instrumental, was analyzed in juxtaposition with the value system of the hippie counterculture. Examining the data over a 6 year time period, it indicated that the values of pop culture magazines did not change significantly during this period and those of the underground press did in conjunction with the changing ideology of the counterculture. The depths of this study will be a great benefit to the research and introduces a sound argument to the observations of Frank’s works cited above.

References:

Frank, T. (1997) The Conquest of Cool. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Spates, J. (1976) Counterculture and Dominant Culture Values: A Cross-National Analysis of the Underground Press and Dominant Culture Magazines. In American Sociological Association. (1976) American Sociological Review. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/journal/amersocirevi [accessed 11-29-2016] Jstor. pp.868-883