Makeup lab — Are you a McBurger?

McLab Directions:

Visit the McDonald’s at LSU’s Student Union. While you are there, spend some time observing the design, the customer service process, the workers, the other customers, the products, etc. Try to decipher the unwritten rules and see if you can find purposeful ways to break them without being criminal. Try to work on your lab answers at McDonald’s the way you did at B&N on Corporate. When you are done with McDonald’s, wander through the rest of the Union, visit the library, the quad, or log into PAWS. See if you can identify similar strategies of control and resistance in these “places.”  Note: Be sure that you answer the lab questions by applying the relevant concepts to your experiences.

McLab  Questions:

1. Spend some time studying McDonald’s crowd control practices and the ways that customers are “contained” or regulated. What are the strategies used for controlling bodily movement through the place/space? In what ways are you turned into a useful/docile body? What are the various ways that McDonald’s tries to articulate your body? To what?

2. Compare McDonald’s crowd control practices with another “place” on campus (example, the library, the dorms, the union, the quad, PAWS). In what ways are students “contained” or regulated and turned into docile useful to the state? What objects (other than a desk) are used to articulate you with the places you visit?

3. Consider the four dimensions of McDonaldization: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Compare the strategies that McDonald’s uses to attain these four dimensions with the strategies that the University uses. In what ways is the University McDonaldized? In what ways is the University “mass customized”?

4. What are some ways to use the text of the McDonald’s “differently” than the ideal way? Where is there room to resist? Observe visitor and determine “how” they are using the text of McDonald’s. In what ways do they follow the ideal way or create their own ways? Is it possible to use the University differently than the ideal way? Where is there room to resist? In what ways do students follow the ideal way or create their own ways?

5. In “Getting Dumb and Dumber,” Simon Philo both disputes and supports the claim that globalization erases local culture. Consider the globalization of LSU (i.e., Barnes&Nobles, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut at the Union, Marriot owning all the dining contracts, corporate sponsorship of research and professorships, LSU “supporting” only specific brands of software products like Microsoft, etc.). Do you agree or disagree with the claim that globalization erases local culture?

6. In Cyborgs on Campus, Rob Hallahan quotes Donna Haraway who writes, “Communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move –  ­­ the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.” What does this quote mean? Consider Hallahan’s arguments about translating everything to code so that resistance disappears and heterogeneity can be reassembled and exchanged or sold as a commodity. Do you think this applies to McDonald’s? To LSU? In what ways? Why or why not?

7. Hallahan asks “Which do we fear more: the perversion of a (dynamic) process into a (fixed) product, or the perversion of a product into a process?” What does this statement mean? What does it mean in regard to McDonald’s? Mass customization? LSU? Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?

McPaper Directions:

After answering your lab questions, write a five page typed essay (250 words per page) that relates to the lab experience. The subject matter of your paper must focus on an analysis of LSU and/or McDonald’s. You may approach the subject by extending one or more of the lab questions into your thesis or you may make up your own question. Your paper must directly address issues raised in class since Lab 2. In your paper, be sure that you (1) use at least FOUR class concepts; (2) define these concepts and explain what they mean in your own terms; (3) support your points with examples to illustrate; and (4) use a quote from at least four different authors that we have read since Lab 2 to support your points. When you write your paper, italicize, underline, or boldface the three quotes and concepts you want to have graded.