Book Description
Become a critical media consumer with MEDIA, CRIME, AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE! With the rise of media's role in reporting crime and using crime as entertainment, the importance of the interplay between the mass media news and entertainment systems and the criminal justice system may be greater today than ever before. This criminal justice text provides a bridge between relevant mass media research findings and criminal justice practice and corrects common misconceptions regarding the mass media's effects on crime and justice. An end-of-book glossary, chapter-by-chapter objectives, classroom discussion questions, and additional readings help you master the material and prepare for tests.
Customer Reviews:
Review.......2007-09-24
I enjoyed this book, and I learned a lot about the media by reading this book.
Average customer rating:
- Not Free SF Reader
- a disappointment
- No payoff !!! I Feel Foolish For Hanging In There !!
- Virtually real
- An okay not-quite-finished book . . .
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The Extremes
Christopher Priest
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
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The Glamour (Gollancz)
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The Terror: A Novel
ASIN: 0312205414 |
Amazon.com
A bizarre and horrible coincidence draws FBI special agent Teresa Simons to England: on the same day that a mass murderer killed her husband and fourteen others in Kingwood City, Texas, another spree killer massacred seventeen in the small Sussex town of Bulverton. Teresa seeks to understand her husband's death by exploring the similar but unrelated event in Bulverton, as she once explored reconstructions of historical mass murders in ExEx (Extreme Experience, a brutally realistic form of virtual reality) to train for her FBI job. In Bulverton she finds a commercial ExEx parlor, which, she is horrified and fascinated to discover, offers a Bulverton mass-murder scenario. As Teresa explores both the town and the scenario of Bulverton, the separations between reality and ExEx, between ExEx murder reconstructions, between past and present, begin to blur--and so does the separation between Kingwood City and Bulverton, as Teresa realizes the simultaneity of the events may be more than a coincidence.
A New York Times Recommended Book, The Extremes received the British Science Fiction Association award for 1999. Christopher Priest's previous novel, The Prestige, won the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Award. --Cynthia Ward
Book Description
Long regarded as "one of the masters of psychological fiction in America" (San Francisco Chronicle), Kate Wilhelm delivers one of her most probing---and most suspenseful---novels in The Deepest Water. Abby Connors's father, Jud, was a novelist whose career finally took off after three novels and years of hard work.Jud was also the most important man in Abby's life, to the chagrin of her husband Brice.When Jud is murdered in his Oregon lakefront cabin, Abby's life is overturned.Was the killer someone she knew?Fortunately, it seems she has a guide to direct her through the maze that is her life: Jud's last novel.If only she can see through the fiction to perceive the truth.Outwardly calm, yet irresistible, The Deepest Water grows more chilling---and more compelling---as the reader probes deeper into it.This novel is a blockbuster from one of America's best-loved storytellers.
Customer Reviews:
Not Free SF Reader.......2007-09-03
A somewhat underwhelming and slow novel. A female agent is taking a break for her job, mostly for psychological reasons, after her husband has been killed in an operation goes wrong.
She goes to a town in England where a crazed gunman ran wild, and starts exploring virtual reality situations through sophisticated and probably illegal software that replicates violent situations and training.
Somewhat pointless end, too.
a disappointment.......2003-12-04
The novel started out with a very strong and intriguing beginning, but by the second half it was getting really tedious with the protagonist's repeated virtual experiences and a loss of direction to the story. I can't list all the disappointments that came out of the end of the novel -- they would be spoilers -- but whatever the author was trying to accomplish in the limp ending was certainly lost on me.
No payoff !!! I Feel Foolish For Hanging In There !!.......2002-11-11
By the time I got two thirds of the way through, I had devised three or four potential endings in my mind and was looking forward to the author's take. WHAT A LETDOWN. I now feel embarrassed that I invested all this time just to witness a complete and total LACK of anything even resembling an ending. With about 20 pages to go, I realized something was fishy. I should have seen it coming. The first half of the book gives absolutely NO CLUE whatsoever what the point of the book is.
I was disappointed with the blatant anti-gun message. Now that I know the author is English, it makes sense, but hey, America is the crime capital of the world? And simply because of the "abundance" of guns? And that the main character was "poisoned" by her father because he was a gun fan?
I'm sure the other reviewers are right, I'm just too unsophisticated to "get it." However, for the American audience, this book completely tanked. I picked it up for one dollar at our local convenience store. Sure, it didn't cost much, but the time invested reading it could have been used a lot better.
Virtually real.......2002-06-19
I picked this up by chance at a bookstore, never heard of the author prior. I was about 50 pages in when I recalled I had originally found it in the SF section. Where was the science fiction part of the story? This was starting out as just a good novel, cleanly written, with a great eye for insignificant detail that helps flesh out the tale. Having read SF throughout most of my reading career, I know most of it is plot driven with characters and settings just used to push along the nifty story. This book takes its time (luxuriates?) developing the main character, Teresa Simons, a real woman who adapts within character to the unfolding events. Its done so well I assumed the author was a woman. (He's not). She has grown up in England, the daughter of a career US military man,becomes an FBI agent, and one day loses her husband in a random spree massacre.
This is the kind of SF I need now and then, maybe the best kind; where the whole story isn't techy, there is just one added element/theme to a time that could otherwise be today, ExEx. (Extreme Experience, virtual reality on steroids.) The story takes a very pleasant ramble through Teresa's' life, and from time to time she does an ExEx scenario, first for FBI training and later through a commercial provider. The iterative process she goes through to improve her performance is the most interesting of the whole book. I want this in my life for home, work and social situations. It's like the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray, where he is trapped into relieving the same day over and over again, until he eventually he gets it right. How cool would that be??
The rich, lush detail of the novel echoes the supposed detail Teresa finds in the hyper-real VR scenarios. Eventually the plot becomes complicated as she enters an ExEx scenario during which she enters an ExEx scenario....and so on. It's like looking into two mirrors reflecting each other.
There were a couple of loose ends that didn't hit me until a few days after finishing. What happened to Nick and Amy, the folks who run the hotel? They just disappear from one page to the next after they sell their stories. Also, what is up with the execs from GunHo corp? They make a big splashy extrance and then they too exit stage right. I'm sure its all in here, I'm just too used to obvious plot points. Oh well, I'll pay more attention when I read it again.
So here's the question you'll have to solve: Does the whole story take place inside an ExEx, or does she only choose at the end to avoid "real" reality without her dead husband by staying permanently in a scenario?
Many books compell me to race through them to see what happens next. This made me keep coming back to enjoy spending a little more time with Teresa.
An okay not-quite-finished book . . ........2002-04-22
This is a rather frustrating book -- generally well written, filled with interesting ideas, but sometimes inconsistent and sometimes simply unbelievable. Teresa Simmons and her husband are trained FBI field agents in what seems to be our present, except that both were trained with the help of an extremely sophisticated virtual reality system that put them into various roles in a wide range of historically-based "killer" scenarios. Through repeated insertions into each scenario, they had to learn to react appropriately and to survive the situation. (The process seems extremely wasteful of personnel, not to mention impossibly expensive.) Anyway, her husband is killed in the line of duty in a small Texas town and Teresa, trying to cope with her loss, discovers a similar mass killing took place at the same time on the same day in a small town in the south of England. So, naturally, she goes off to Sussex to look around. (Huh?) Then she begins patronizing the local virtual reality provider and discovers a whole new kind of "shareware" virtual experience. (If she's so well trained and informed, why had she never heard of this before?) The overlap between the incidents in Texas and England become more pronounced and Teresa's virtual experiences become more complicated, until everything comes to a head in a scenario within a scenario . . . sort of. The problem is, Priest assumes that a woman experiencing a man's role in virtual reality -- including sexual activity -- won't react any differently than she had as her own self. This seems extremely unlikely. And he has a very shaky grasp of what West Texas is like, even though he was previously married to Texan author Lisa Tuttle. And nothing is ever really resolved. It's like he was three-quarters of the way through writing and re-writing the book, and just stopped.
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Images of Africa: Stereotypes and Realities
Manufacturer: Africa World Press
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Book Description
This book offers those rare and exceptional insights into the historical and cultural processes through which various perceptions of Africa were crystallized into negative images and stereotypes that became so pervasive and profound that Africa is still trying to shake them off. Working from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributors to this volume, including Martin Bernal, the world-renowed author of the revolutionary Black Athena, add to the pool of new Africanist/Afrocentrist knowledge and revisionism through which huge chunks of purposefully hidden and deformed African history have been uncovered. This book aims to set the record straight by deconstructing the multifarious images and stereotypes that came to deform, invalidate, and misconstruct Africa century after century and buried it under layers of historical fallacies.
Contributors to this impressive volume include:
Martin Bernal, Miriam Dow, Buluda Itandala, Janet S. McIntosh, Mahamadou Diallo, Kristof Haavik, Mongi Bahloul, Jonathan Gosnell, Valerie Orlando, Jeannette Eileen Jones, John Gruesser, Victoria Ramirez, Jessica Levin, Martha Grise, Jean Muteba-Rahier, Bill Gaudelli, Augustine Okereke, David Pattison, and Sharmila Sen
Customer Reviews:
A book worth it........2001-07-31
Being the editor of this book, I wanted to be the first to say a few words about this significant achievement. Images of Africa is not just any other book on Africa. Images of Africa: Stereotypes & Realities offers rare and exceptional insights into the historical and cultural processes through which the various perceptions of Africa since ancient times came to crystallize themselves in the form of negative images and stereotypes so pervasive and profound that the continent, to date, has had a hard time shaking them off.
Working from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributors to this volume, including Martin Bernal, world-renowned author of the revolutionary Black Athena, add substantially to the pool of new Africanist/Afrocentrist knowledge and revisionism that, in the past four decades or so, has helped to uncover huge chunks of purposefully hidden and deformed African history. This book therefore sets the record straight by deconstructing the multifarious images and stereotypes that, century after century, came to deform, invalidate and misconstruct the African universe, burying it under layers of historical fallacies that explorers, missionaries and 18th- and 19th-century scholars and thinkers consecrated as historical truths in their attempts to denigrate the non-west in general, and Africa in particular.
Contributors to this impressive volume include not only Molefi Asante, who wrote the preface, but also Martin Bernal, renowned author of Black Athena.
I can only congratulate you if you bought this book. But I also urge others, whether they know Africa well or not, to buy the book because they will see in it a side of Africa that has not always been put forward in books that have endeavored to do justice to the history of this most stereotyped continent.
Book Description
During the latter half of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, television talk shows, infotainment news, and screaming supermarket headlines became ubiquitous in America as the “tabloidization” of the nation’s media took hold. In Tabloid Culture Kevin Glynn draws on diverse theoretical sources and an unprecedented range of electronic and print media in order to analyze important aspects and key debates that have emerged around this phenomenon.
Glynn begins by situating these media shifts within the context of Reaganism, which gave rise to distinctive ideological currents in society and led the socially and economically disenfranchised to access new forms of information via the exploding television industry. He then tackles specific daytime talk shows and tabloid newscasts such as Jerry Springer and A Current Affair, reality-TV programs such as Cops and America’s Most Wanted, and two different supermarket tabloids’ coverage of the O.J. Simpson case. Tabloid Culture is the first book to treat these diverse yet related media forms and events in tandem. Rejecting the elitist dismissal of sensationalist media, Glynn instead traces the cultural currents and countercurrents running through their forms and products. Locating both reactionary and oppositional meanings in these texts, he demonstrates how these particular media genres draw on and contribute to important cultural struggles over the meanings of race, sexuality, gender, class, “normality,” “truth,” and “reality.” The study ends by discussing how the growing use of the Internet provides an entirely new realm in which such material can circulate, distort, inform, and flourish.
This innovative and provocative study of contemporary mainstream media culture in the United States will be valuable to those interested in both print and television media, the cultural-political influence of the Reagan era, and American culture in general.
Customer Reviews:
A Very Illuminating Examination of What Others Fear To Touch.......2005-12-03
Please do not listen to the other review of this book: it is clearly written by someone who hasn't read Glynn's carefully argued, very interesting examination of "trash" television. "John Q. Public," as he calls himself in the review, seems to make it sound so simple -- networks play things because they get ratings. But what Glynn answers in a way that all of John Q's love for PBS can't is WHY they get ratings. The answer to this question has so often been astoundingly shortsighted and downright insulting: "People watch trash TV because they're stupid, don't know any better, and never will" or something as asinine and simplistic as that.
But Glynn digs into the populist in a very interesting way, and what he finds is that these shows frequently validate everyday experiences and knowledge of everyday, working class viewers in ways that many instances of "high culture" on television don't. Glynn's point is not at all about aesthetics or artistic value (as John Q. Public assumes, having not read the book, that it is), as he largely leaves this question for the reader to answer: his point is about not just disregarding all these programs AND all their viewers because one has made such artistic judgements. In "trash" TV, Glynn finds many democratic tendencies.
At times, Glynn can overdo it, and at other times, his enthusiasm to defend overlooks, or rushes through, disturbing political content of the shows (such as inherent racism or sexism), but most of the time he is remarkably careful to balance such tensions.
This is an academic text, and so may not be ideal for everyone, though it is reasonably accessible. So, if you want to go beyond complaining that such television shouldn't exist, and if you're actually interested in why it does, and why so many people turn to it, I highly recommend this book. I share the reviewer "John Q Public's" regard for PBS, though I feel it has turned its back on many Americans, and on the real John Q Publics, so to speak. Glynn's book looks at what those John Qs are watching and starts to ask the reasons why. (For more on PBS and "the masses," though, I'd highly recommend Laurie Ouellette's *Viewers Like You?*)
Book Description
Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices.
In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions.
Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form.
Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age.
Alexander R. Galloway is assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and author of Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization.
Customer Reviews:
Good high-level book on game culture.......2006-12-16
This is a fun book to read that is written in an accessible and engaging style that contains some really interesting ideas about gaming. Because this is more a collection of interrelated essays than a sustained argument, it makes sense to approach each essay individually.
In the first chapter-essay, to understand the relationship between the player and the game space, the author arrives at a cartesian plane of possible gaming moments: The x-axis moves between the operator's and the machine's actions, and the y-axis moves between diegetic and non-diegetic actions. The result is that some common gaming moments can be reliably plotted in this plane. The author's approach here presents a way to initiate a discussion around action, but the entire argument doesn't hang on the validity of this model. This diagram forces the author to define game diegesis somewhat narrowly within the confines of certain kinds of games, and it seems somewhat arbitrary where he draws the line between diegetic and non-diegetic. However, it's an interesting beginning, and the terms and relationships Galloway sets up here permeate the remainder of the essays, contextualizing them all within the idea of game action.
In chapter 2, the author goes to great lengths to justify his central claim that where film uses the subjective shot to represent a problem with identification, games use the subjective shot to create identification. The problem with first-person or subjective camerawork is that the perspective suggests agency or the ability to interact. It is in these moments in cinema where the camera exposes itself as an agent of looking, and the audience is confronted with its own status as observer. In other words, it is the fact that the first-person perspective holds forth the possibility of action that makes it such an uncomfortable technique in cinema, but such a natural arrangement in gaming where the possibility of interaction exists. The author then identifies certain cinematic situations that adopt visual "patina" derived from gaming. Some obvious examples of this "gamic vision" include the Heads-Up Display subjective shots from Terminator and RoboCop.
In chapter 3, Galloway unpacks the idea of realism in gaming, distancing it from the so-called "realism" of high-end graphics that purport to be faithful representations of real world objects. Instead, since gaming is for Galloway an action and not an image, realism should be imagined on different terms. Again taking cues from cinema, Galloway argues that a better kind of realism for gaming would follow the model of neorealism in film in which neorealisticness depends on narrative and not form. Galloway mentions games like September 12th and The Sims as possibilities of a better realism in gaming because they engage social reality at a level in which the game action parallels the real-world action it comments on. In other words, a person is more likely to order a pizza than shoot aliens. Again orienting his discussion on action, Galloway concludes that the true correspondence obtained in realistic gaming is a congruence between the "material substrate of the medium" and the gamer's social reality.
In the fourth chapter and the concluding one, Galloway makes a compelling case for the expressive potential of video games. In outlining the allegories of control in gaming, Galloway claims that, to the extent that successfully navigating daily life increasingly relies on selecting options from series of menus, gaming simply emulates this by enclosing it within the gaming action. The main example here is Civilization, which has been criticized for its Imperialistic politics. For Galloway, though, the problem with Civlization is not so much that it presents other nations and people groups as fodder for conquering, but that it condenses politics into a series of quantities that can be balanced and varied according to menu configurations. So Galloway does criticize the game, but mainly does so because it represents an index for the very dominance of informatic organization and how it has entirely overhauled, revolutionized, and recolonized the function of identity.
In chapter five, Galloway ends up with six theses for countergaming, one of which is hypothetical. Though the book as a whole claims to be a collection autonomous essays, it's hard not to read in this essay the culmination of ideas oulined in the first four. Put briefly, countergaming involves establishing and then subverting the formal poetics of gameplay. One theme in this is the foregrounding of apparatus, or when games break. The author's main example in this essay is Jodi's untitled game in which the interface frequently breaks down or appears to reveal its underlying code. Similarly, countergaming can become visible in subverting representational modeling of objects with degraded artifacts. Note that this is not simply bad modeling or the modeling of abstract objects. Rather, the spatiality of objects is threatened by their exposed status as images. This discussion is useful not only for outlining a potential direction for artistic or activist game design, but also for providing a context for discussing more mainstream activity like Alternate Reality Gaming in which the game world is very much defined by its juxtaposition with its representation and underlying code, or more sinister-seeming accidents like actual rendering errors in game worlds. These phenomena are not countergaming as such, but it is possible to understand the disruption of their presence better if we see it as a kind energy working against the dominant hegemony of the game structure. Such things break the framework of social realism.
Although I found this book intelligent and engaging, I'm still not sure what to do with it. The author proposes alternatives to popular critical models, but these are mostly gestures toward a way of thinking about gaming rather than a declaration of How Things Are. It is this approach, along with the approach to gaming as an action rather than games as objects, that is this book's most valuable contribution. I would recommend it to high-level game architects and virtual world architects who aren't afraid of a somewhat academic read.
he did again.......2006-11-03
After Protocol, one of the best books in cyberculture, Galloway bring us Gaming, one of the best books in gameculture.
Remembering Protocol's way, a bit of history, with some criticism after. The only problem is the book is toooo short, and very important issues, like gameart and mods, stay basics. I hope these can be developed in the next future.
And I love cover, with the Unreal Healt PickUp int the hospital.
focus on visual / film theory.......2006-11-02
Interesting book, but not entirely what I was expecting. It takes a very filmic approach to videogames, focusing on gaze and perspective. There are some interesting parallels draw between film and games, but for the most part, the author seems more comfortable in a critical eye outside of games themselves.
I lost interest in the book about halfway through, but I may pick it up again. If you are looking for a book about interaction or theories of play and leisure, this is not the book for you.
any interested in media and gaming will find this scholarly discourse exciting........2006-09-24
College-level students of media studies will appreciate the examination of digital and video culture offered in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture: examples from over fifty video games are used to construct a classification system of action in video games which blends gameplay with software crashes, network lags, and game hacks. From the origins of the first-person shooter to game structures and new interpretations of images and character, any interested in media and gaming will find this scholarly discourse exciting.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Videogames are actions.......2006-08-30
For Alexander Galloway "videogames are actions". Videogames are acts of doing enacted by the player and the technology in a cybernetic relationship that can occur as part of the diegesis or as separate to the narrative world of the game. A videogame cannot be played until the machine is powered up and the software running. By placing machine and operator in a praxis with diegetic and nondiegetic acts Galloway not only enfolds the more commonly iterated components of algorithmic program and player acts but celebrates the traditionally ignored and often vilified aspects of video gaming including crashes, hacks and lag. The pause button is as important as the shoot or action button, cheats are as significant as strategies and the nondiegetic routines of saving and loading are of consequence.
This is a great way of thinking about videogames! This is all contained in chapter one which I thoroughly recommend. The other chapters for me were not as useful but are still an interesting read.
Book Description
Taking a critical perspective on the economics and politics of “presenting” the news, this topical supplement argues that the media systematically distorts news coverage.
Customer Reviews:
The Blackshoepirate.......2005-02-25
Michael Parenti does what so many of the popular liberal writers can not seem to do. He speaks directly to the common man. His prose and cadance are in tune with the way an average Joe like me thinks and uses the english language. In regards to this book, he has brought to life the reasons why a person from the blue collar ranks should begin to look again at the crap spewing out of the TV set. It is one thing to hear that Faux News is biased but another to read, in detail, how the entire mainestram media including the entertaining aspect is skewed towards the interest of the corporate conglomerates and not the interest of an average auto mechanic like myself.
This was the second 4th of Mr. Paranti's works that I read. By now I have read them all. I encourage you all to do the same.
must read.......2004-09-21
This another excellent book by Parenti. Parenti writes clearly, and concisely on this important matter of the media. He demonstrates through many studies the ways in which the media are manipluated to serve corporate interests and keep the public in the dark. I also highly recommend Democracy for the Few.
The nature of propaganda.......2003-11-11
Parenti is an angry guy. Convinced that the American mass media is deliberately misleading the public in order to futher corporate and political interests, he has offered forth this treatise as a warning.
Some of Parenti's criticisms are valid, and much of the distortion he perceives is real, but we have to ask ourselves, how many times have we heard this before? I first encountered Parenti in college. His books were being "taught" in some of the mass communications courses. He is unapologetic in his Marxist sympathies, and seems to think that the press can, and should, exist as an instrument of a socialist state. That it is the duty of the media to inform the public.
Save for NPR and public television, the corporations which control American mass media have only one allegiance, and that is to the share holders. Market forces dictate how the press responds to world events. If people want conservative commentary like "The O'Reilly Factor", they will vote with their dollars. Likewise, if they want to read Parenti, they know where to find him. The idea that the press should be "objective" is naive.
Ultimately, Parenti's book degenerates into Chomsky-like conspiracy-theory hysterics. Fortunately for the public, his brand of Marxism is quickly becoming yesterday's news. And like Chomsky, Parenti finds it easier to write these unscholarly rants than to produce soemthing of substance. But the audience gets smaller everyday.
Not the left that the country needs.......2003-01-21
I believe that the country needs a principled, decent left viewpoint which is accesible to most Americans. Parenti, however, is not this left commentator, and this book is evidence of how out of touch he is.
Parenti is no better than the conservatives who lionize Ronald Reagan and make apologies for anything that any Republican does. He uses all of the same tricks of far right but in service of the far left. And by far left, I mean the communist, paranoid, conspiracy-theory left.
Parenti, to put it bluntly, is an apologist for communism. If you read Parenti, you will be forced to believe that communist nations such as the old USSR were really workers' paradises and utopias of enlightened policy and good governance. He is happy to point out the excesses of right wing creeps such as Pinocchet and various US-supported dictators in Africa, but he refuses to see any flaws in such genocidal communist monsters as Stalin or Pol Pot. He glosses over the awful repression that these creeps foisted upon Jews, dissenters, intellectuals, the clergy, etc.
If we want to get beyond the tired left-right divide, we need writers who are willing to take on the icons of both the left and right and give credit to policies which work, regardless of the ideological source of those ideas. Parenti's most recent work, "To Kill a Nation", praises Milosevic!
No one who is not already a communist will be swayed by his arguments.
A Tool that Can Change the World.......2003-01-09
The media is a weapon. And in order to exist safely in this world, people must be armed with the knowledge that Michael Parenti exposes in INVENTING REALITY. In a world where people are manipulated and miseducated by the news media, every high school student should have this book in his/her current events class. It is a powerful read with an excellent empirical background. Workers and intellectuals alike need such a book if they are ever to improve this world.
Book Description
The public's knowledge of crime is primarily derived from the depiction in the media. If the media is responsible for the headlines, the conclusion to be reached is that they influence the public's attention regarding crime. This book examines, through the study of cases that have made headlines, what is noted as the fear of crime among the populace. In addition to cases such as Scott Peterson, Marilyn Sheppard, and Jon Benet Ramsey, the authors focus on the changes in the sentencing laws, policies, increased incarceration rates as well as the war on drugs and try to find the factors that brought about change.
Focuses on the mass media and how it has transformed the criminal justice system. Presents 10 cases ranging throughout history right up until the 21st Century. Allows the reader to become involved in the case with an understanding of how the case was portrayed in the media. Explains the theory of crime and what attracts the media.
The focus of this work, the media and its handling of the criminal justice system, will have appeal to anyone involved in criminal justice. The case descriptions, the commentary will fascinate all readers.
Book Description
Drawing on cultural theory and interviews with fans, cast members, and producers, this book places the reality TV trend within a broader social context, tracing its relationship to the development of a digitally enhanced, surveillance-based interactive economy and to a savvy mistrust of mediated reality in general. Surveying several successful reality-TV formats, the book links the rehabilitation of Big Brother to the increasingly important economic role played by the work of being watched. The author enlists critical social theory to examine how the appeal of the real is deployed as a pervasive but false promise of democratization.
Customer Reviews:
From the New York Times.......2004-02-21
Greeting Big Brother With Open Arms
By EMILY EAKIN
Published: January 17, 2004
For 50 years, Big Brother was an unambiguous symbol of malignant state power, totalitarianism's all-seeing eye. Then Big Brother became a hip reality television show, in which 10 cohabiting strangers submitted to round-the-clock camera monitoring in return for the chance to compete for $500,000.
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That transformation is telling, says Mark Andrejevic, a professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa at Iowa City. Today, more than twice as many young people apply to MTV's "Real World" show than to Harvard, he says. Clearly, to a post-cold-war generation of Americans, the prospect of living under surveillance is no longer scary but cool.
Media critics have frequently portrayed the reality show craze in unflattering terms, as a sign of base voyeurism (on the part of viewers) and an unseemly obsession with fame (on the part of participants). But Mr. Andrejevic's take, influenced by the theories of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, is at once darker and more subtle.
Reality shows glamorize surveillance, he writes, presenting it "as one of the hip attributes of the contemporary world," "an entree into the world of wealth and celebrity" and even a moral good. His new book, "Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched" (Rowman & Littlefield), is peppered with quotes from veterans of "The Real World," "Road Rules" and "Temptation Island," rhapsodizing about on-air personal growth and the therapeutic value of being constantly watched. As Josh on "Big Brother" explains, "Everyone should have an audience."
At the same time, Mr. Andrejevic (pronounced an-DRAY-uh-vitch) argues, the reality genre appears to fulfill the democratic promise of the emerging interactive economy, turning passive cultural consumers into active ones who can star on shows or vote on their outcomes. (The series "Extreme Makeover" takes this promise literally, he notes, "offering to rebuild `real' people via plastic surgery so that they can physically close the gap between themselves and the contrived aesthetic of celebrity they have been taught to revere.")
As seductive as this sounds, in Mr. Andrejevic's view reality television is essentially a scam: propaganda for a new business model that only pretends to give consumers more control while in fact subjecting them to increasingly sophisticated forms of monitoring and manipulation.
As he put it in a telephone interview: "The promise out there is that everybody can have their own TV show. But of course, that ends up being a kind of Ponzi scheme. You can't have everybody watching everybody else's TV show. And since that's not possible, in economic terms, the way it's going to work is according to this model of a few people monitoring what the rest of us do."
Think of TiVo or Replay, he said. These digital recorders allow people to watch the television shows they want when they want to. But in return, he points out, the recorders' manufacturers get a stream of valuable information about viewer preferences. The same principle, he argues, holds true for online shops that offer custom CD's in exchange for data on personal musical tastes. Or Web sites that use "cookies" to track users' movements on the Internet.
Marketers aren't interested in exceptional behavior, he added. They want to know about the routine aspects of daily life, the same material that shows like "The Real World" and "Big Brother" - in which banality passes as authenticity - strive to capture on film.
In short, Mr. Andrejevic said, reality television's true beneficiaries are not the shows' cast members (who can wind up making little more than minimum wage for the hours - or months - they spend before the camera) or ordinary viewers (who don't really choose what happens on their television screens) but the marketers, advertisers and corporate executives who have a large stake in seeing surveillance portrayed as benign.
Of course, he conceded, his students don't necessarily see it this way. Raised on Web logs, Google, cellphones and instant messaging, they "divulge much more information about themselves on a daily basis than previous generations," he said, and they don't associate the idea of surveillance with a totalitarian Big Brother.
"The concern I have is that self-expression gets confused with the inducement to assist in marketing to yourself," Mr. Andrejevic said. "But my students say they've got nothing to hide. And until there are some consequences they perceive as detrimental, they're not going to be concerned."
At least in one respect, he added, reality television does conform to real life. "It portrays the reality of contrivance, the way consumers are manipulated," he said. "I look at it with the fascination of somebody watching a car wreck."
Book Description
The media's presentation suggests that American teenage culture today is the most violent, sexual, and amoral youth culture in history. In this book, Nichols and Good deconstruct the negative images held by large numbers of adults. Recognizing that many teenagers are left by adults to socialize themselves and the consequences of this "careless indifference," the authors' goal is to influence a more positive view leading to stronger social policies and better services, resources, and programs to meet the needs of America's youth.
Unique features of America's Teenagers--Myths and Realities: Media Images, Schooling, and the Social Costs of Careless Indifference include:
*powerful analytic lenses used to revisit typical depictions of youth;
*a wealth of information brought to bear on understanding teenagers' behavior; and
*consideration of a broad range of adolescent behaviors across critical socializing settings.
The book begins with a discussion of the continuing myth of adolescence--how and why youth are devalued, and an overview of current beliefs about youth drawn from two 1990s Public Agenda Polls. This is followed by chapters on youth and the media, and the pressures that youth face in various dimensions of their lives. Topics include youth violence; the sex lives of teenagers; tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and teens; healthy living and decision making; working teens; and youth and education. The concluding chapter pulls together themes generated throughout the book and provides examples of policies that would underscore the value of viewing youth as a social investment. General guidelines are provided for teachers, parents, policymakers, and citizens to facilitate responding to youth in meaningful, proactive ways that improve the quality of life for teenagers and the broader society.
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Books Index
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