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Opening with a photograph of a 1950s Disneyland home designed in the shape of a TV (by those fun-loving futurists at MIT), this book's text and photos consistently maintain a balance between insightful social commentary and critique and sensitive recapturing of the essence of visual broadcast's dawn.
Book Description
America in the 1950s: the world was not so much a stage as a setpiece for TV, the new national phenomenon. It was a time when how things looked--and how we looked--mattered, a decade of design that comes to vibrant life in As Seen on TV. From the painting-by-numbers fad to the public fascination with the First Lady's apparel to the television sensation of Elvis Presley to the sculptural refinement of the automobile, Marling explores what Americans saw and what they looked for with a gaze newly trained by TV. A study in style, in material culture, in art history at eye level, this book shows us as never before those artful everyday objects that stood for American life in the 1950s, as seen on TV.
Customer Reviews:
"Life In The Age Of Television Was A Feast For The Eye...".......2000-09-06
Karal Ann Martling tucks her mission in writing "As Seen On TV" in that last sentence of the next-to-last chapter of her fascinating book. She tours the 1950s' TV-raised images, from First Lady Mamie Eisenhower's dress closet to her husband's paintings to garish car in the garage, ready-made food in the kitchen, and herky-jerky TV images pointing to changed American culture and aestetic. Hers is a more entertaining, breezier read than recent books from, respectively, David Halberstam on the 1950s or historian Michael Kammen on American preference.(Marling shared time at Cornell with Kammen, thanking his students in her acknowledgements for "challenging lunchtime conversation.")
Marling merges era icons, fads, and seminal events more seamlessly into social statement than Halberstam did or Kammen attempted. Her understanding of cars evolving into social statements segues best into the image of Elvis Presley, the "King of Rock and Roll" for whom the "gorp"-covered Cadillac was chariot of choice. (she also credits Martin and Lewis with exposing the entertainment's dual sensibilities during early TV).
Marling also writes of home convenience from new appliances and quick dinners colliding with the rustic, more honorable life many felt had been replaced. This clash inspired and popularized Grandma Moses' idealized portraits of American country life, Walt Disney's scale model re-creation of small-town America at Disneyland (and on the accompanying TV program), and Betty Crocker's shorthand version of motherly mentoring through General Mills' best-selling cookbook. Marling's chapter on Walt Disney's inspirations for creating the park is among the book's most fascinating. But a chapter on "American Bandstand," should Marling have chosen to include it, may have tied even more loose ends together.
The book may also have done with some re-arrangement; the closing chapter accurately and humorously chronicles the 1959 Richard Nixon-Nikita Krushchev "kitchen debate." But its tale of form of function, argued by its most important leaders at the peak of Cold War hysteria, may have been more effective introducing Marling's tale. The book may then have received more social context by stating sooner Nixon's belief, according to Marling, in "style as a manifestation or a symbol of difference and, in difference, multiplicity - the possibility of choice - as...connecting idle consumer fetishism to ideology." This would also have more closely tied the 1950s' garish color imagery with its parallel, grainier black-and-white images (Nixon, the Cold War, and Joe McCarthy, a standout 50s figure seen on TV but not in this book.) Nonetheless, "As Seen On TV" is a fun, informative read for those wishing to understand the reasoning behind an era's unforgettable images.
Very interesting book with wonderful photographs.......1999-05-26
Very interesting reading. It is amazing to actually see how television has changed American life. I can't even fathom how life would be today, without TV. A great read for all who are interested in American pop culture in the 1950s.
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Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life
C. Lee Harrington , and
Denise D. Bielby
Manufacturer: Temple University Press
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ASIN: 1566393299 |
Book Description
Do soap opera fans deserve their reputation as lonely people, hopeless losers, or bored housewives? No, according to C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby. These authors—soap fans themselves—argue that soap fans are normal individuals who translate their soap watching into a broad range of public and private experience. People who cut across all categories of age, gender, race, ethnicity, income, education, and ideology incorporate a love of the soaps into their day-to-day leisure activities.
Interviews with soap opera viewers, actors, writers, producers, directors, the daytime press, and fan club staff members reveal fascinating details about the inside world of fandom and the multitude of outlets for fan expression—clubs, newsletters, electronic bulletin boards, and public events. Numerous examples illustrate the pleasure fans derive from critiquing characters, speculating on plot twists, and swapping memorabilia.
Examining the experiences that shape fan culture, Harrington and Bielby analyze the narrative structure and various aspects of the production of the soaps. Their examination reveals that the "meaning" of soaps is complex, individualized, and not simply a reflection of the narrative content of the stories. The authors show fans who actively contemplate what it means to be a fan, and who adjust their level of involvement accordingly.
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Television and Everyday Life
Rog Silverstone
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0415016479 |
Book Description
Television and Everyday Life explores the enigma of television, and how it has insinuated its way so profoundly and intimately into our daily lives. The book unravels television's emotional, cognitive, spatial, temporal and political significance.
Drawing from a broad range of literature--from psychoanalysis to sociology, from geography to cultural studies--Roger Silverstone constructs a theory which places television in a central position within the various realities and discourses which construct everyday life. The medium emerges from these arguments as a fascinating, complex phenomenon of contradictions, yet the book explodes many of the myths surrounding what has been called "The Love Machine".
Television and Everyday Life presents a radical new approach to the medium, one that both challenges closely-held wisdoms, and offers a compellingly original view of where telvision sits in everyday life.
Book Description
Employing a unique research methodology that enables people to report on their normal activities as they occur, the authors examine how people actually use and experience television -- and how television viewing both contributes to and detracts from the quality of everyday life. Studied within the natural context of everyday living, and drawing comparisons between television viewing and a variety of other daily activities and leisure pursuits, this unusual book explores whether television is a boon or a detriment to family life; how people feel and think before, during, and after television viewing; what causes television habits to develop; and what causes heavy viewing -- and what heavy viewing causes -- in the short and long term.
Television and the Quality of Life also compares the viewing experience cross-nationally using samples from the United States, Italy, Canada, and Germany -- and then interprets the findings within a broad theoretical and historical framework that considers how information use and daily activity contribute to individual, familial, societal, and cultural development.
Customer Reviews:
Who watches TV?.......2004-06-30
This book is an exploration into the effect television has on the viewer's state of mind. The organization and style of the book read very much like a dissertation that has been reworked slightly for publication. The style of writing is very academic, and is geared to academic rather than general audiences. The first two chapters are pure literature review covering information reception and previous research about television viewing. The next chapter discusses the research methods. The main study involved a group of about 100 adults living near Chicago in the 1970s, who were asked to keep activity and mood diaries over the course of a week. The data from this study were combined with data from a number of other studies that examined television viewing habits of mostly Americans and Canadians. The remaining chapters cover various aspects of the results and discussion, including: how television fits into the scheme of leisure time, how television affects viewer's moods, how television affects family life, why some people view more than others, uses of television, television and marketing, and television and personal growth. As with a dissertation, sources are cited within the text and each chapter has extensive endnotes for further explication and references. The questionnaires used in the study are reproduced in the appendices. A full list of references is included, as well as an author index and a subject index.
So what did they find out from their study about viewers in the 1970s? First, participants in the study watched about 1.4 hours of TV each day, which represented 6.6% of the participants' total waking hours. TV viewing was the most time-consuming activity engaged in at home, and TV viewing absorbed 40% of all leisure time, or another way to look at it, 25% of all time spent at home was spent watching TV. Ninety-three percent of TV viewing occurred in one's own home. Most viewing occurred between 7:30 and 10 PM on weekdays. Twenty percent of the time, people watched TV because they had nothing better to do, giving TV the highest nothing-better-to-do ranking of major home activities including reading, eating, cooking, chores, talking, and grooming.
People tend to watch more TV when they are in a bad mood or when they just want to relax with something mindless. When compared to work, other leisure activities, or meals, participants reported that TV required the least concentration, challenge, and skill of all, and people were most passive when watching TV than when engaging in any other leisure activity. Watching TV had the lowest mood and activation ranking of fifteen common daily activities that included such items as resting, transit, and chores. When compared to sports and other leisure activities, it was found that TV required much less concentration during the activity, and that participants found it harder to concentrate after watching TV than before they began. TV viewing is quite relaxing while participants engage in it, but once they turn the set off, they tend to feel less relaxed than when they began, which is the opposite of what happens with sports and other activities. Marketers are well aware of the fact that people watch TV for relaxation and try to keep people in front of the set by offering soothing or entertaining programs rather than material that will require concentration or upset viewers. The difficulty that people have eliminating TV viewing altogether from their lives suggests that some aspects of TV viewing may be addictive.
For the most part, I found the results of the study to be quite predictable- -we all hear from many sides that TV viewing is not good for our mental health. There were a few interesting points that Kubey and Csikszentmilhalyi uncovered that weren't fully explored, however. They note that families that watch more TV tend to get along better, and posit that one possible reason for this could be that TV watching helps to diffuse tensions, as well as provide an activity whose skill level is so low that children and adults can participate in it together. The authors note that surprisingly, the most well-adjusted teenagers have the highest levels of viewing, but they point out that teenagers with problems don't tend to spend a lot of time at home, and since most TV viewing is done in the home, there is probably no cause-and-effect link between level of adjustment and TV viewing. They note that heaviest viewers tend to be women living alone and married men living with families (married women with families give up some of their potential TV viewing time to do housework). Elsewhere in the book, they note that Blacks seem to watch more than Whites, and that viewing time increases with education. I have a hunch, however, that the most educated people in their study may have been precisely those married men whose wives were doing the housework, and that their level of education was predicted by their gender, and that their gender and family status determined how much TV they watched, not their level of education. It would have been worth it to pair up people of different family status and similar educational backgrounds to see if the observation that educated people tend to watch more TV really holds water.
By now, the data from the study are quite dated, with our cable TV possibilities far out-numbering the 3 major networks of the 1970s, as well as the advent of the Internet and development of the computer game industry to compete for leisure time with TV watching. It would be quite interesting to re-do the study in light of these developments, to see how TV relates to our leisure time and mental state today.
Landmark work, non-judgmental, empirical..........2001-09-27
This is one of the most intense and empirical studies of how people relate to television (not focusing on television's content), nothing judgmental here folks, the data is presented in text and charts. We get to see the surveys, the responses, we are informed of the study methods used...
Various psychological traits are measured before, during, and after television viewing in the subjects homes. Things like concentration, cheerfulness, challenge, memory, and other traits are measured at various times using a self-reporting mechanism. The merits and faults of the methods used to study the subjects are also discussed. The book is intense.
I'm sorry I can't encapsulate it better than this. The authors (Mihaly and Robert) do an extremely admirable job of presenting the information in a readable and complete format.
Again, it should be stressed that this study was empirical. No judgements are made. Content of television was not part of the study, content of the subject's psyches was.
A landmark work.
THE FLOW NETWORK.......1997-08-17
Take steps towards enhancing the quality of your life - explore FlowNet and exchange ideas and experiences associated with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow theory @ http://www.flownetwork.com
THE FLOW NETWORK.......1997-08-17
Take steps towards enhancing the quality of your life - explore FlowNet and exchange ideas and experiences associated with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow theory @ http://www.flownetwork.com
Book Description
TV Living presents the surprising results of the largest survey of television viewing habits ever completed. For five years, 500 people kept a diary of their television viewing, their lives, and the relationship between the two. The results upset and confirmed commonly held beliefs about audiences, such as: television is not a masculine domain, the elderly audience has diverse tastes, and people regulate how much violence, sex, or bad language they watch. This clear and engaging book, which includes actual quotes from diaries, presents an exciting, literate, and thoughtful picture of the complex and fascinating relationship between mass media and people's lives today.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent, authoritative study.......1999-08-11
This is an excellent book on the TV audience and should be included on every media studies teacher's syllabus. Useful summaries of previous research, plus fascinating new data based on diaries kept by 500 people over five years, equals a great resource. There isn't likely to be another study this big and detailed for a long time.
The best ever book on TV and audiences.......1999-08-06
Brilliant, highly readable book showing the role of TV in the lives of ordinary people, i.e. everybody. Very well-written, and the summaries of previous research make it great for the undergraduate student. The quotes from all the viewers, 500 of them, make it a very easy and enjoyable read. I liked the pages about battles for control of the TV in the family, and about gender. The chapter on news got a bit boring. Overall though this is essential for media studies people, I would have thought.
Book Description
The Audience in Everyday Life argues that a media audience cannot be studied in front of the television alone--their interaction with media does not simply end when the set is turned off. Instead, we must study the daily lives of audiences to find the undercurrents of media influence in everyday life. Applying new developments in cultural anthropology and folklore to media studies, S. Elizabeth Bird offers a series of empirically based audience studies of phenomena that include media scandals, fan culture, representations of race and ethnicity, tabloid journalism, and runaway media hoaxes. Bird provides a host of useful tools and methods for scholars and students interested in the ways media is consumed in everyday life.
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- Heaven kissed my eyes as I read these pages
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Laughter In The Living Room: Television Comedy And The American Home Audience (Popular Culture and Everyday Life)
Michael V. Tueth
Manufacturer: Peter Lang Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0820468452 |
Book Description
For more than fifty years some very funny people have been entering American homes through television's big picture window. From Lucy and Uncle Miltie, to Archie Bunker and Marge Simpson, certain comic stars of television history have become not just cultural icons, but friends of the family. This comprehensive study of the most successful television comedies-including domestic sitcoms, workplace comedies, variety shows, late-night comedy, animated comedy, and more-reveals that, unlike the comedy found in film, on stage, in comedy clubs and concert halls, television's presentation of comic characters and stories must negotiate a relationship with the more privatized and value-laden environment of each American home that it enters.
Customer Reviews:
Heaven kissed my eyes as I read these pages.......2007-05-25
This book is essential and obligatory reading for anyone who has ever head of a television, much less watched one. From the cover to the appendix, I was sucked into the book like a renegade ghost when the ghostbusters opened their trap, except for one difference. The ghost fought the pull, while I let the power of this book's content sink its claws into my excited brain and rip me out of my lousy reality into a world dominated by well constructed entertainment.
Read this book and die happy, or dont read it and... whatever :(
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Politicotainment: Television's Take on the Real (Popular Culture and Everyday Life)
Manufacturer: Peter Lang Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0820481149 |
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Politicotainment focuses on how political life is interpreted, negotiated, and represented by television entertainment, in particular by drama series, late night comedy, and "reality-based" programs. Real political issues are converging in today's television tableau, prompting questions about performance, interactivity, and engagement. The authors in this collection share the notion that entertainment formats are important sources of political culture, and inform political processes. Politicotainment links theories about the relationship between public and private, fact and fiction, and politics and popular culture to the changes taking place in the television industry, journalism, celebrity activism, and political content in entertainment programming.
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Satellite TV & Everyday Life (Acamedia Research Monograph)
Lutton
Manufacturer: University of Luton Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1860205062 |
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Women, Television and Everyday Life Journeys of Hope (Routledgecurzon Advances in Korean Studies)
Youna Kim
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0415369037 |
Book Description
Korea is currently witnessing huge social change with unprecedented divorce rates and the disintegration of the traditional family system. Fusing audience research and ethnography, Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea presents a compelling account of women's changing lives and identities in relation to the impact of the most popular media culture in everyday life-television.
Within the historically-specific social conditions of Korean modernization Kim analyses how Korean women of varying age and class groups cope with the new environment of changing economical structures and social relations. The central arguments presented revolve around the revelatory and self-reflexive nature of TV talk and its function as a form of empowerment. The book argues that television is an important resource for women, stimulating them to research their own lives and identities. Kim reveals Korean women as creative, energetic, and critical audiences in their responses to evolving modernity and the impact of the West.
Based on original empirical research, Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea explores the hopes, aspirations, frustrations and dilemmas of Korean women as they try to cope with life beyond traditional grounds. Going beyond the traditional Anglo-American view of media and culture, this text will appeal to both Korean area studies and media and communications studies.
Books:
- Bean There Done That: The Life and Times of Rowan Atkinson
- Born O'Hurley (The Last Honest Woman / Dance to the Piper)
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Script Book, Season One, Volume 1
- Captain's Log: William Shatner's Personal Account of the Making of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
- Combat Medic Field Reference
- Creating Powerful Radio: Getting, Keeping and Growing Audiences News, Talk, Information & Personality Broadcast, HD, Satellite & Internet
- Crimea: The Great Crimean War, 1854-1856
- Darkblade: The Daemon's Curse (Warhammer)
- Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish (Student Edition)
- Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish (Student Edition)
Books Index
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