Noël Carroll: Theorizing the Moving Image (1996)
Filed under book | Tags: · avant-garde film, avantgarde, cinema, film, film theory, history of cinema, television
Theorizing the Moving Image brings together a selection of essays written by one of the leading critics of film over the past two decades. In this volume, Noël Carroll examines theoretical aspects of film and television through penetrating analyses of such genres as soap opera, documentary, and comedy, and such topics as sight gags, film metaphor, point-of-view editing, and movie music. Throughout, individual films are considered in depth. Carroll’s essays, moreover, represent the cognitivist turn in film studies, containing in-depth criticism of existing approaches to film theory, and heralding a new approach to film theory.
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1996
Cambridge Studies in Film
ISBN 0521460492, 9780521460491
Length 426 pages
James Gleick: Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · clock, multitasking, speed, television, time
From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated auhtor of Genius and Chaos, a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of change in today’s world.
Most of us suffer some degree of “hurry sickness.” a malady that has launched us into the “epoch of the nanosecond,” a need-everything-yesterday sphere dominated by cell phones, computers, faxes, and remote controls. Yet for all the hours, minutes, and even seconds being saved, we’re still filling our days to the point that we have no time for such basic human activities as eating, sex, and relating to our families. Written with fresh insight and thorough research, Faster is a wise and witty look at a harried world not likely to slow down anytime.
Publisher Pantheon Books, 1999
ISBN 0679408371, 9780679408376
Length 324 pages
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William Uricchio (ed.): We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · balkans, europe, european union, film, identity, imagined community, literature, mass media, photography, public broadcasting, television
This volume explores the relationship between media and identity along the fault-lines and fissures of the ever-shifting collectivities that constitute Europe. At the centre of this dynamic are human beings, who, as makers and users of media, negotiate identities, affiliations and meanings.
The collection explores how ethnicities, religions, tastes, generations and languages overlap one another, interact within individuals and define communities. Whether triggered by individual desires or shared fantasies, these dynamic collectivities make use of media in very different ways. Addressing topics such as films and television programmes, the Euro, photographs, postcards or public monuments, contributors reflect on this notion of ‘new collectivities’, not in an individualistic sense or collectively as nations but as multiple and shifting identities. With this as a starting point, the volume interrogates the processes that create and shape identity and characterize Europe as it physically expands and administratively consolidates. Essays explore media texts as sites of dreams and longed for identities, and articulate the fears and tensions surrounding the uses of transnational media, whether for purposes of cultural homogenization or isolation.
Drawing on novels, films and the press, the volume demonstrates the intricate interactions of history and memory as they inform and give shape to the present. We Europeans? Media, Representation, Identities addresses a scholarly readership with an interest in textual analysis and policy issues regarding media, identity and the many vantage points of Europe.
Publisher Intellect Books, 2009
Volume 6 of Changing media–changing Europe series
ISBN 1841502073, 9781841502076
Length 224 pages
Aether. The Journal of Media Geography 1-5 (2007-2010)
Filed under journal | Tags: · cinema, geography, internet, media, television
Aether offers a forum that examines the geography of media, including cinema, television, the Internet, music, art, advertising, newspapers and magazines, video and animation. It is our goal to provide a space for contributions to current issues surrounding these media, beginning with constructions of space & place, cultural landscapes, society, and identity.
Locative Media
Aether 5a, March 2010
Edited by Tristan Thielmann
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The Geography of Journalism
Aether 4, March 2009
Edited by Mike Gasher
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Aether 3, June 2008
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Imagining Geography Through Interactive Visual Media
Aether 2, April 2008
Edited by Leigh Schwartz and Paul C Adams
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Aether 1, Nov 2007
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Editors: James Craine, Jason Dittmer, Chris Lukinbeal, Giorgio Hadi Curti
Publisher: The Center for Geographic Studies, The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, California State University, Northridge
Janet Staiger, Sabine Hake (eds.): Convergence Media History (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · convergence, film, mass media, media culture, media history, media studies, new media, television
Convergence Media History explores the ways that digital convergence has radically changed the field of media history. Writing media history is no longer a matter of charting the historical development of an individual medium such as film or television. Instead, now that various media from blockbuster films to everyday computer use intersect regularly via convergence, scholars must find new ways to write media history across multiple media formats. This collection of eighteen new essays by leading media historians and scholars examines the issues today in writing media history and histories. Each essay addresses a single medium—including film, television, advertising, sound recording, new media, and more—and connects that specific medium’s history to larger issues for the field in writing multi-media or convergent histories. Among the volume’s topics are new media technologies and their impact on traditional approaches to media history; alternative accounts of film production and exhibition, with a special emphasis on film across multiple media platforms; the changing relationships between audiences, fans, and consumers within media culture; and the globalization of our media culture.
Publisher Taylor and Francis, 2009
ISBN 0415996619, 9780415996617
Length 212 pages
Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler: Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · literature, mass media, media studies, philosophy, photography, recording, sociology, technology, teletechnologies, television
In this important book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of “live” recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that the so-called “natural” conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached?
As Derrida and Stiegler discuss the role of teletechnologies in modern society, the political implications of Derrida’s thought become apparent. Drawing on recent events in Europe, Derrida and Stiegler explore the impact of television and the internet on our understanding of the state, its borders and citizenship. Their discussion examines the relationship between the juridical and the technical, and it shows how new technologies for manipulating and transmitting images have influenced our notions of democracy, history and the body. The book opens with a shorter interview with Derrida on the news media, and closes with a provocative essay by Stiegler on the epistemology of digital photography.
In Echographies of Television, Derrida and Stiegler open up questions that are of key social and political importance. Their book will be of great interest to all those already familiar with Derrida’s work, as well as to students and scholars of philosophy, literature, sociology and media studies.
Table of Contents
Artifactualities: Jacques Derrida.
Echographies of Television: Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler.
Chapter 1 Right of Inspection.
Chapter 2 Artifactuality, Homohegemony.
Chapter 3 Acts of Memory: Topolitics and Teletechnology.
Chapter 4 Inheritances – and Rhythm.
Chapter 5 ‘Cultural Exception’: the States of the State, the Event.
Chapter 6 The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence.
Chapter 7 Phonographies: Meaning – from Heritage to Horizon.
Chapter 8 Spectrographies.
Chapter 9 Vigilances of the Unconscious.
The Discrete Image: Bernard Stiegler.
Notes
Translated by Jennifer Bajorek
Publisher Polity Press, 2002
ISBN 0745620361, 9780745620367
Length 174 pages
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Comment (0)Mark Andrejevic: Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · audience, mass media, public broadcasting, reality tv, television
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.
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield, 2004
Series: Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture
ISBN 0742527484, 9780742527485
Length 253 pages
Leo Beranek: Riding the Waves. A Life in Sound, Science, and Industry (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · acoustics, arpanet, biography, engineering, music, sound, television
Leo Beranek, an Iowa farm boy who became a Renaissance man—scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, musician, television executive, philanthropist, and author—has lived life in constant motion. His seventy-year career, through the most tumultuous and transformative years of the last century, has always been propelled by the sheer exhilaration of trying something new. In Riding the Waves, Leo Beranek tells his story.
Beranek’s life changed direction on a summer day in 1935 when he stopped to help a motorist with a flat tire. The driver just happened to be a former Harvard professor of engineering, who guided the young Beranek toward a full scholarship at Harvard’s graduate school of engineering. Beranek went on to be one of the world’s leading experts on acoustics. He became Director of Harvard’s Electro-Acoustic Laboratory, where he invented the Hush-A-Phone—a telephone accessory that began the chain of regulatory challenges and lawsuits that led ultimately to the breakup of the Bell Telephone monopoly in the 1980s. Beranek moved to MIT to be a professor and Technical Director of its Acoustics Laboratory, then left academia to manage the acoustical consulting firm Bolt Beranek and Newman. Known for his work in noise control and concert acoustics, Beranek devised the world’s largest muffler to quiet jet noise and served as acoustical consultant for concert halls around the world (including the Tanglewood Music Shed, the storied summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra). As president of BBN, he assembled the software group that invented both the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, and e-mail.
In the 1970s, Beranek risked his life savings to secure the license to operate a television station; he turned Channel 5 in Boston into one of the country’s best, then sold it to Metromedia in 1982 for the highest price ever paid up to that time for a broadcast station. “One central lesson I’ve learned is the value of risk-taking and of moving on when risks turn into busts or odds look better elsewhere,” Beranek writes. Riding the Waves is a testament to the boldness, diligence, and intelligence behind Beranek’s lifetime of extraordinary achievement.
Publisher MIT Press, 2008
Volume 30 of Current studies in linguistics
ISBN 0262026295, 9780262026291
Length 235 pages
Hamid Naficy: The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (1993)
Filed under book | Tags: · audience, deterritorialization, exile, film, ideology, islam, music video, politics, television
Naficy explores the seemingly contradictory way in which immigrant media and cultural productions serve as the source both of resistance and opposition to the domination by host and home country’s social values while simultaneously serving as vehicles for personal and cultural transformation and assimilation of those values.
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 1993
ISBN 0816620873, 9780816620876
Length 283 pages
Myung-Jin Park, James Curran (eds.): De-Westernizing Media Studies (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · apartheid, audience, corporatism, democracy, mass media, media studies, public broadcasting, television
De-Westernizing Media Studies brings together leading media critics from around the world to address central questions in the study of the media. How do the media connect to power in society? Who and what influence the media? How is globalization changing both society and the media?
Series: Communication and society
Publisher Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415193958, 9780415193955
Length 342 pages
Thomas Doherty: Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · cold war, film, history, mccarthyism, politics, public broadcasting, television, united states
Conventional wisdom holds that television was a co-conspirator in the repressions of Cold War America, that it was a facilitator to the blacklist and handmaiden to McCarthyism. But Thomas Doherty argues that, through the influence of television, America actually became a more open and tolerant place. Although many books have been written about this period, Cold War, Cool Medium is the only one to examine it through the lens of television programming.
To the unjaded viewership of Cold War America, the television set was not a harbinger of intellectual degradation and moral decay, but a thrilling new household appliance capable of bringing the wonders of the world directly into the home. The “cool medium” permeated the lives of every American, quickly becoming one of the most powerful cultural forces of the twentieth century. While television has frequently been blamed for spurring the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was also the national stage upon which America witnessed—and ultimately welcomed—his downfall. In this provocative and nuanced cultural history, Doherty chronicles some of the most fascinating and ideologically charged episodes in television history: the warm-hearted Jewish sitcom The Goldbergs; the subversive threat from I Love Lucy; the sermons of Fulton J. Sheen on Life Is Worth Living; the anticommunist series I Led 3 Lives; the legendary jousts between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy on See It Now; and the hypnotic, 188-hour political spectacle that was the Army-McCarthy hearings.
By rerunning the programs, freezing the frames, and reading between the lines, Cold War, Cool Medium paints a picture of Cold War America that belies many black-and-white clichés. Doherty not only details how the blacklist operated within the television industry but also how the shows themselves struggled to defy it, arguing that television was preprogrammed to reinforce the very freedoms that McCarthyism attempted to curtail.
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2003
ISBN 0231129521, 9780231129527
Length 305 pages
Rebecca Beirne: Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · gender, pornography, queer theory, television
Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium explores popular contemporary texts featuring lesbian characters, including The L Word, Queer as Folk, Dykes to Watch Out For, and various pornographic videos. Beirne places these works in the context of political and cultural trends of the post-millennial period and compares them to cultural representations of lesbians from the past. Taking up such issues as mainstreaming, feminine lesbians, the male gaze, female masculinity, and sexual practice, this book puts forward provocative readings of texts that have been little explored and offers new insights into the depiction of lesbians in popular culture.
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
ISBN 0230606741, 9780230606746
Length 233 pages
Brett Christophers: Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · geography, mass media, political economy, television
Envisioning Media Power develops an original geographical perspective on the nature and exercise of power in the international television economy. It uses theories of political economy as the basis for a comparative empirical examination of the UK and New Zealand television markets, while closely considering these markets’ respective relationships with the US market and its globally-influential media corporations. In fleshing out this geographical perspective, the book critically addresses the power to produce, reproduce, and extract profit from territorialized media markets. To understand such powers, the book examines processes of creation and dissemination of industry knowledge, structures of industry governance, and the locational characteristics of television’s operational economy.
Through its rigorous and creative combination of conceptual insights with empirical substance, Envisioning Media Power both illuminates the fabric of television’s international space economy, and ultimately offers a unique theoretic argument – suggesting that power, knowledge and geography are inseparable not only from one another, but from the process of accumulation of media capital.
G – Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series
Publisher Lexington Books, 2009
ISBN 0739123440, 9780739123447
Length 467 pages
Hadland, Aldridge, Ogada (eds): Re-Visioning Television. Policy, Strategy and Models for the Sustainable Development of Community Television in South Africa (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · community, community media, mass media, south africa, television
The introduction of a quality, accessible local television network represents the final piece in post-apartheid South Africa’s media jigsaw. With legislation and policy now in place, the fitting of the last piece is imminent. The race is now on to develop models and fine-tune systems that will make the most powerfully democratic tier of broadcast media sustainable, empowering and development friendly.
Free media and/or community media is anathema to repressive governments around the world. In South Africa, by contrast, community television is expected to play an important role in job creation and skills development as well as contribute to the strengthening of civil society, the promotion of participative governance and the expression of the country’s rich linguistic and cultural heritage.
This book, compiled by South African experts in community broadcasting with the assistance of many key figures in the sector, traces the two-decade campaign for local-level television in South Africa. It highlights the development of policy, reviews existing international models and spells out the technical, financial and managerial challenges that face this nascent sector.
Policy-makers, community television station managers and staff, development analysts and funders, media academics and students, press officers, organisations wishing to access local TV together with anyone interested in community media in the developing world generally, and community television specifically, will find this book important reading.
Editors Adrian Hadland, Mike Aldridge, Joshua Ogada
Publisher Human Sciences Research Council Press, 2007
ISBN 0-7969-2160-1, 978-07969-2160-4
Pages 232
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Comment (0)Ellen Propper Mickiewicz: Television, Power, and the Public in Russia (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · mass media, politics, russia, television
The Russian media are widely seen to be increasingly controlled by the government. Leaders buy up dissenting television channels and pour money in as fast as it haemorrhages out. As a result, TV news has become narrower in scope and in the range of viewpoints which it reflects: leaders demand assimilation and shut down dissenting stations. Using original and extensive focus group research and new developments in cognitive theory, Ellen Mickiewicz unveils a profound mismatch between the complacent assumption of Russian leaders that the country will absorb their messages, and the viewers on the other side of the screen. This is the first book to reveal what the Russian audience really thinks of its news and the mental strategies they use to process it. The focus on ordinary people, rather than elites, makes a strong contribution to the study of post-communist societies and the individual’s relationship to the media.
• Uses new methods to ascertain the role of television in the lives of the Russian public • Analyses viewers’ reactions to officially controlled television programs, and argues that they are not duped by it • Discusses the loss of diversity following the Kremlin’s decision to close down commercial channels and the resulting effects on the development of democracy in Russia
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2008
ISBN 0521888565, 9780521888561
Length 212 pages
