Thesis advisor: Suzanne Conway / This paper looks at the ways in which pornography influences American society. It explores the rise of porn culture with an emphasis on Internet porn and the impact it has had on the distribution and availability of pornography. As a result, advertising companies and other producers of mainstream media have looked to the porn industry for ways to increase their profit margins. As sexual imagery has become a standard aspect of everyday life, it has impacted younger generations in terms of clothing and how they develop relationships. The popularity of social media applications has also helped to perpetuate the pornification of mainstream culture by focusing on physical appearance. The college hookup culture illustrates the lack of satisfaction that can result from the strictly sexual relationships highlighted in pornography. Acknowledging the effects of pornography can help to reduce the many problems that result from a hyper-sexualized society. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

This thesis considers the cultural significance of Web-based exchange practices among the participants in contemporary western mainstream culture. The thesis argues that analysis of these practices shows how this culture is consumption oriented, event-driven and media obsessed. Initially, this argument is developed from a critical, hermeneutic, relativist and interpretive assessment that draws upon the works of authors such as Baudrillard and De Bord and other critiques of contemporary 'digital culture'. The empirical part of the thesis then examines the array of popular search terms used on the World Wide Web over a period of 16 months from September 2001 to February 2003. Taxanomic classification of these search terms reveals the limited range of virtual and physical artefacts that are sought by the users of Web search engines. While nineteen hundred individual artefacts occur in the array of search terms, these can classified into a relatively small group of higher order categories. Critical analysis of these higher order categories reveals six cultural traits that predominant in the apparently wide array of search terms; freeness, participation, do-it-yourself/customisation, anonymity/privacy, perversion and information richness. The these argues that these traits are part of a cultural complex that directly reflects the underlying motivations of contemporary western mainstream culture. The daily practices of Web-based search and exchange thus reproduce and reinforce this cultural complex. The empirical work of the thesis validates the critical assessment of western mainstream culture developed in the initial chapters of the thesis.

<p>Rad istražuje alternativne kulturne prakse arhitekture i<br />urbanizma u Jugoslaviji, nastale u periodu 1945. i 1980.<br />Teorijske, edukativne, kustoske, umjetničke i profesionalne<br />arhitektonske prakse su sagledane u kontekstu socijalističke<br />svakodnevice i modernizma. Obja&scaron;njene su osnovne<br />karakteristike fenomena alternativnih kulturnih praksi,<br />prostora i autora, njihova reprezentativna moć kao sastavni<br />dio reprezentacije moći države, njihova posebnost kao<br />prostorno-kulturnog fenomena i trajne posljedice nezavisno<br />od izmjenjenih uslova i okolnosti u kojima danas postoje.</p> / <p>The paper explores alternative cultural practices of architecture<br />and urban planning in Yugoslavia, from the period 1945 and<br />1980. Theoretical, educational, curatorial, artistic and<br />professional architectural practices have been viewed in the<br />context of everyday life and socialist modernism. Explains the<br />basic characteristics of the phenomenon of alternative cultural<br />practices, space and authors, their representative power as an<br />integral part of the team and not the state, their uniqueness as<br />spatially-cultural phenomenon and lasting effects<br />independently of the changed conditions and circumstances<br />exist today.</p>