false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175700400m/546831.jpg 546831 1 Now that Americans are dividing up into militias and staking out a few acres of inviolable homeland, perhaps it's time to ask how the country came to be so deeply fragmented. Joseph Turow points to the ways that the techniques of "target marketing" by advertising agencies exploited and exacerbated existing fissures in U.S. society. Turow is too subtle a thinker to believe that advertising is responsible for the differences between people, but he makes a strong case that the way those differences have been used to distinguish different markets for different products has, simply by defining and presenting various subcultures, furthered those differences. This vicious cycle of targeting and producing target markets is analyzed both historically and politically to show the difficult effects of assuming that Americans are not united, except against each other. 534097 1998 Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World total:5|3:5| 5 15 6 0 0 0 false false Thu Oct 29 14:59:23 -0700 2009 Thu Oct 29 14:59:25 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Tue Jun 24 21:38:08 -0700 2008 Wed May 21 21:42:52 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 24 21:38:08 -0700 2008 3 0 false false Sat Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Fri Apr 11 10:35:40 -0700 2008 Tue May 27 14:09:53 -0700 2008 3 0 false false Mon Feb 04 16:22:34 -0800 2008 Mon Feb 04 16:22:34 -0800 2008 3 0 false false Wed Sep 19 13:22:58 -0700 2007 Wed Sep 19 13:22:58 -0700 2007 3 0 false false Thu Jun 28 17:15:00 -0700 2007 Thu Jun 28 17:15:00 -0700 2007 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=546831