Understanding American Icons

Arthur Asa Berger is professor emeritus of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts at San Francisco State University, where he taught between 1965 and 2003. He graduated in 1954 from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts; he majored in Literature and minored in Philosophy and Art. He received a Master’s Degree in Journalism (but also studied at the Writers Workshop) from the University of Iowa in 1956 and was elected to the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s “Hall of Fame” in 2009. He received a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1965. He wrote his dissertation on the comic strip Li’l Abner.In 1963 he had a Fulbright scholarship to Italy, and in 1983–84 was visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He has also taught at Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf, Germany, at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Hong Kong, and in China at Jinan University in Guangzhou and Tsinghua University in Beijing. Over the years he has lectured in more than a dozen countries such as England, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Russia and Ukraine.He has published more than one hundred articles in publications such as The Journal of Communication, Society, Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, and more than sixty books on media, popular culture, humor, and tourism. Among his books are: Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics; Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to Visual Communication; What Objects Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture; Media and Society; Media and Communication Research Methods; Making Sense of Media; Bloom’s Morning; Ads, Fads and Consumer Culture; and Shop ‘Til You Drop. His work has focused on the impact of media and popular culture on individuals and on American co