You must really not have liked Watchmen to be welcoming back the theorists. I’ll take the comic book any day compared to this stuff. With regards to the ‘base’ discussion, I would relate to how people saying breakfast is the most important meal of the day. If you don’t start off right, then the rest of the day is going to suck. What I think Althusser is going for here is that the while the base is important to the edifice, it is not the only part, “there is a ‘relative autonomy’ of the superstructure with respect to the base”

I agree with you I don’t think these men enjoyed movies very much, or any form of media for that matter. Unfortunately, I find myself also agreeing with SOME of the things they say. As for the loss of self or identity when working for a company, what I think they are saying is that because our society forces us to work in order to survive everyone becomes an employee. Thus, everyone faces of a loss of who they really are and need to conform to the role of an employee and work their way up to look good in society. So going back to the quote, this makes people working for a company just another person “an illusion” as they would say, basically making the job an act of just going through the motions and being what a company needs and wants one to be. Money is everything to people now a days so maybe what their trying to say is that working to move up in society is what becomes most important and what causes people to lose who they really are and gain this new persona?? Just a thought!

The definition you provided kind of cleared things up for me a bit. I could be wrong (most likely) but I’m going to try and bounce an idea off of what you said. Michael Jordan- greatest basketball player in the world, most respected, accepted by all races, why? White people get the impression that they are actually intermingling with black people. They perceive a comfortableness that doesn’t actually exist because they get it from watching TV. The hyper reality in this case would be a homogeneous culture of the white and black populations. The value received is that ‘lack’ of racism. It is an intrinsic value- a felling that one is doing their part to create a utopian society by interacting with other racial persona(s) through the media. This comment is more than open to criticism.

At the top of your screen click Dashboard. When the menu pops up, click on Options. On the general page that automatically comes up, scroll down to the “Time and Date” section. If you type -5 in the first box, as in five hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, and hit save you should be all set.