In the meantime, they taught while they observed and wrote about the society around them. The booming American economy and the creation of the consumer culture in the us were fascinating to those who were observing these phenomena from the outside. And it was through magazines with their glossy ads that readers learned about how Americans were becoming obsessed with desire for the latest style in everything from cars to household conveniences. In 1951, Canadian Marshall McLuhan published his groundbreaking study, The Mechanical Bride, which treated advertisements as texts for analysis; at the same time, the Independent Group members Hamilton and John McHale were mining ad imagery for their collages. 5