Product Description: Media Marathoning: Immersions in Morality is a scholarly study of the intense relationship between reader and story world, analyzing the way audiences become absorbed in a fictive text and dedicate many hours to exploring its narrative contours...read more

Over the last half of the twentieth century, television has become the predominant medium through which the public accesses information about the world. Through the news, situation comedies, police dramas, and commercials, we learn about the world around us, and our role within it. These genres, narratives, and cultural forms are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that show the world as we might never see it in real life. How Television Shapes Our Worldview brings together a diverse set of scholars, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks to interrogate the ways through which television molds our vision of the outside world. The essays include advertising and public relations analyses, audience interviews, and case studies that touch on genres ranging from science fiction in the 1970s to current “reality” television. Television truly provides a powerful influence over how we learn about the world around us and understand its social processes.

Sitting prominently at the hearth of our homes, television serves as a voice of our modern time. Given our media-saturated society and television’s prominent voice and place in the home, it is likely we learn about our society and selves through these stories. These narratives are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that shape and reflect the world and our role in it. Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the role television plays in shaping our understanding of self and family. This edited collection’s rich and diverse research demonstrates how television plays an important role in negotiating self, and goes far beyond the treacly “very special” episodes found in family sit-coms in the 1980s. Instead, the authors show how television reflects our reality and helps us to sort out what it means to be a twenty-first-century man or woman.

Locating Television: Zones of Consumption takes an important next step for television studies: it acknowledges the growing diversity of the international experience of television today in order to address the question of ‘what is television now?’ The book addresses this question in two interrelated ways: by situating the consumption of television within the full range of structures, patterns and practices of everyday life; and by retrieving the importance of location as fundamental to these structures, patterns and practices – and, consequently, to the experience of television. This approach, involving collaboration between authors from cultural studies and cultural anthropology, offers new ways of studying the consumption of television – in particular, the use of the notion of ‘zones of consumption’ as a new means of locating television within the full range of its spatial, temporal, cultural, political and industrial contexts. Although the study draws its examples from a wide range of locations (the US, the UK, Australia, Malaysia, Cuba, and the Chinese language markets in Asia - -Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Taiwan), its argument is strongly informed by the evidence and the insights which emerged from ethnographic research in Mexico. This research site serves a strategic purpose: by working on a location with a highly developed and commercially successful transnational television industry, but which is not among the locations usually considered by television studies written in English, the limitations to some of the assumptions underlying the orthodoxies in Anglo-American television studies are highlighted. Suitable for both upper level students and researchers, this book is a valuable and original contribution to television, media and cultural studies, and anthropology, presenting approaches and evidence that are new to the field.

Product Description: This highly topical book deals with the new frontiers of digital television addressing the challenges it faces as a result of the upsurge of new and converging digital technologies. In a world which has developed online interactivity and new roles for its users, a new scenario of the domestic sphere is emerging where television has lost its dominance within audiovisual products to the Internet, videogames, tablets, mobile phones, and more...read more

Product Description: Just how bad is television? Drawing on a range of theoretical sources including Husserl Lacan, Lefebvre, Sartre, Schutz and Adam Smith, this book takes a phenomenological approach to the small screen to offer an original sociological approach to television and its contribution to moral culture of late modern societies...read more

Book by Pomerance, Murray, Sakeris, John

Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status explores how and why television is gaining a new level of cultural respectability in the 21st century. Once looked down upon as a "plug-in drug" offering little redeeming social or artistic value, television is now said to be in a creative renaissance, with critics hailing the rise of Quality series such as Mad Men and 30 Rock. Likewise, DVDs and DVRs, web video, HDTV, and mobile devices have shifted the longstanding conception of television as a household appliance toward a new understanding of TV as a sophisticated, high-tech gadget. Newman and Levine argue that television’s growing prestige emerges alongside the convergence of media at technological, industrial, and experiential levels. Television is permitted to rise in respectability once it is connected to more highly valued media and audiences. Legitimation works by denigrating "ordinary" television associated with the past, distancing the television of the present from the feminized and mass audiences assumed to be inherent to the "old" TV. It is no coincidence that the most validated programming and technologies of the convergence era are associated with a more privileged viewership. The legitimation of television articulates the medium with the masculine over the feminine, the elite over the mass, reinforcing cultural hierarchies that have long perpetuated inequalities of gender and class. Legitimating Television urges readers to move beyond the question of taste―whether TV is "good" or "bad"―and to focus instead on the cultural, political, and economic issues at stake in television’s transformation in the digital age.

Product Description: Each title in the highly acclaimed Opposing Viewpoints series explores a specific issue by placing expert opinions in a unique pro/con format; the viewpoints are selected from a wide range of highly respected and often hard-to-find publications...read more

Product Description: From viral videos on YouTube to mobile television on smartphones and beyond, TV has overflowed its boundaries. If Raymond Williams' concept of flow challenges the idea of a discrete television text, then convergence destabilizes the notion of television as a discrete object...read more

Product Description: From viral videos on YouTube to mobile television on smartphones and beyond, TV has overflowed its boundaries. If Raymond Williams' concept of flow challenges the idea of a discrete television text, then convergence destabilizes the notion of television as a discrete object...read more

Product Description: Reading Television was the first book to push the boundaries of television studies beyond the insights offered by cultural studies and textual analysis, creating a vibrant new field of study. Using the tools and techniques in this book, it is possible for everyone with a television set to analyze both the programmes, and the culture which produces them...read more