This extraordinarily innovative approach to consumer culture places less emphasis on ideological representations and resistances to ideology than on the educative powers of mass culture and the way that social position is determined through the politics of consumer culture. Thus the wide-ranging and rich material studied includes such "odd" and peripheral fields as car maintenance literature, as well as more familiar forms, such as television programming.

Public education is "mass" education as consumer culture is "mass" culture. Like public education, "mass" culture involves differentiations and distinctions of social position, speaks to and with the languages of rising social expectations, promises the positional rewards of mastering crucial lessons across an elaborately structured curriculum of subject areas, and involves continually contested zones and intricately negotiated individual itineraries.

Unlike public education, however, consumer culture deploys the resources of what the author calls technoideological coding, in which survival no longer designates "the fittest" but rather obsolete relics from the past, those left behind by innovations.

These relics are throwaways, isolated groups of the population who litter the social landscape and require the moral attention of cleanup crews, the containing apparatus of police and prisons, the financial drain of "safety nets," and the immense bureaucracies of the state. In this coding, narratives of social change are class-as-lifestyle narratives, which locate race and gender as surviving relics of a rapidly disappearing past