This article examines how the critically acclaimed television show Mad Men (2007-2015) sells romanticized working-class representations to middle-class audiences, including contemporary cable subscribers. The television drama’s lead protagonist, Don Draper, exhibits class performatively in his assumed identity as a Madison Avenue ad executive, which is in constant conflict with his hobo-driven born identity of Dick Whitman. To fully examine Draper/Whitman’s cross-class tensions, I draw on the American literary form of the hobo narrative, which issues agency to the hobo figure but overlooks the material conditions of homelessness. I argue that the hobo narrative becomes a predominant but overlooked aspect of Mad Men’s period presentation, specifically one that is used as a technique for self-making and self-marketing white masculinity in twenty-first century U.S. cultural productions.
non verbal cues such as the tone of voice, facial gestures, or body language present in face-to-face interactions. In the absence of these cues, online players often create negative situations with other players. Tresca uses those who intentionally log on to kill players and to dominate the game as being the top achiever as evidence. Just like Plato's Ring of Gyges, the internet creates the sense of invisibility and anonymity. As Plato philosophized, this anonymity would result in the worst in human nature. On the other hand, Tresca notes that because we cannot see the other factors that limit participation such as gender, race, disability, and so forth, the potential for negative environments are reduced. In this way the redeeming qualities of online interactions are their ability to create a more egalitarian universe by allowing equal participation, and by removing barriers to communication creating more closely knit groups than is possible offline.Ultimately Tresca's book is a strong supplementary text for exploring role-playing games and online interactions. It provides a concise balanced summary of the history of role-playing games, while also spending time analyzing the shift to online role-playing games. Despite the lack of a strong analytical edge, Tresca manages to provide some interesting insights for how online games work. His emphasis on the role of anonymity and limited availability for using non verbal cues provides keen insight into online role-playing games if not all online interactions.
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