Product Description: Most people have, at some point, experienced powerful, often strange and disconcerting, responses to films and television programmes of which they cannot always make sense. Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis, this book argues that the seemingly mundane and everyday activity of film and television viewing in the home is in fact extraordinary...read more

Product Description: Originally published in 1991, this introduction to studying the television audience discusses developments in semiology and cultural studies and their contribution to our understanding of the power of television. How, in the most precise and intricate sense, does television influence the way we think about the world? What ideological role does it play in contemporary culture? Does TV control us or do we control it? This insightful book assesses the progress in responding to these questions and offers some answers of its own...read more

Product Description: Volume 72 in the ever-popular Daily Crosswords series from The New York Times features fifty moderate-level, midweek crosswords from Will Shortz. With:* 50 New York Times crossword puzzles* Stay-flat spiral binding for easy solving* Edited by crossword great Will Shortz.

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New technological developments and increasing leisure time ensure that television will continue to structure and influence people's experiences and understanding of their social world far into the future. Making Sense of Television addresses an issue central to the social psychological perspective on the mass media - how viewers interpret the programmes that they see. How do people use their own everyday social knowledge and experience to guide their interpretations; how far do viewers agree with the text and with critics, researchers and each other in making sense of television, and finally, do different ways of interacting with programmes lead to different interpretations? These questions are addressed both theoretically and empirically. A critical review of relevant literatures in psychology, communications and literary criticism is followed by an analysis which seeks to integrate these research literatures to provide a new perspective on the audience's everyday interpretations of television. An integration of cognitive social psychology with reception theories from literary criticism is proposed as a way of analysing the processes of interpretation which mediate between television content and effects. Studies on viewers' interpretations of the characters and narratives of popular soap operas demonstrate the value of the proposed perspective. (view table of contents)

A step-by-step program for controlling television viewing shows how to eliminate television viewing in four weeks, offering supplemental activities for children and alternative projects for adults previously obsessed with news and sports programs