Blog Posting # 5 (Due Sunday 27 February 11:59 PM) So are you feeling better now? Drug Life (forms)

Every time I read a list of symptoms in the Merck Manual or take one of those online tests ('Do you suffer from Generalized Anxiety Disorder?') I instantly have the disease—at least for a little while.  Elliot called this 'semantic contagion.'  We've talked in detail about how much minds (by writing words) can alter bodies, and how bodies-out-of-balance (hungover, dehydrated, hungry, 'sugar high,' sleep-deprived, cortisol-hyped, or 'on Prozac,' and so on) can profoundly influence minds. For M. Latour, minds are bodies and vice versa.

So at best, 'conditions' belong to historical 'eras' whose ways of seeing the world (partly) determine how we 'read' ourselves--and know what we're supposed to be.

Can we find a better picture of 'The Feminine  Mystique' than this 1967 ad from JAMA? Andrea Tone claims that drugs like this benzodiazepine were used to make women accept 'settings in which they should be uncomfortable,... (and) encourage them to focus on tasks that did not matter.' (106).

Here we get to be critical historians, critical science-studies guys, and text analysts.  Go to the totally wonderful Bonkers Institute website (not sure how respectful that name is, but whatever....) and mouse around over the many collections of advertising in the archive.  It's not boring.  It's framed on our Moodle, week 7, but directly linked HERE.

Ads mean (they show us our histories).  Ads matter (they shape our lives and bodies).

Find a good one, and read it in terms of our work.  Write your post with some of the same 'public commitment' you used in your 'letter to the editor'; in other words, find an issue of political / ethical / social importance, imagine a real audience who actually cares, make it clear why it's urgent, and show how seeing what's going on in this text can bring us to understand how our lives have been shaped by technoscience—maybe for better, maybe not.