Television and New Media Audiences

by Seiter, Ellen

• ISBN13: 9780198711421
• ISBN10: 0198711425
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-02-25
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Why is talk about television forbidden at certain schools? Why does a mother feel guilty about watching Star Trek in front of her four-year-old child? Why would retired men turn to daytime soap operas for entertainment? Cliches about television mask the complexity of our relationship to media technologies. Through case studies, the author explains what audience research tells us about the uses of technologies in the domestic sphere and the classroom, the relationship between gender and genre, and the varied interpretation of media technologies and media forms. Television and New Media Audiences reviews the most important research on television audiences and recommends the use of ethnographic, longitudinal methods for the study of media consumption and computer use at home as well as in the workplace.

Author Biography

Ellen Seiter is Professor of Communications at the University of California at San Diego.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(8)
Qualitative Audience Research	9	(25)
Ethnographic Method	10	(1)
Mass Communications vs. Cultural Studies	11	(3)
Encoding/Decoding	14	(7)
Feminist Studies of Domestic Contexts	21	(3)
Bourdieu on Television	24	(4)
Speaking Subjects	28	(3)
Ethnography's Other	31	(3)
Feminist Methods: The Parents' Support Group	34	(24)
Lesley and Wade	38	(2)
Carla and Ron	40	(3)
Ed and Laura	43	(1)
Mothers and the Leisure Gap	44	(9)
On Interviewing Women	53	(3)
Epilogue	56	(2)
Lay Theories of Media Effects: Power Rangers at Pre-school	58	(33)
Lay Theories	58	(2)
Television and Teachers	60	(2)
A Montessori Pre-school	62	(7)
`I'm Not the Morality Police'	69	(6)
Gloria's Family Daycare	75	(5)
`Not Forks in Jail, Either...'	80	(6)
Conclusion	86	(5)
TV Among Fundamentalist Christians: From the Secular to the Satanic	91	(24)
Ellen Seiter
Karen Riggs
Twentieth-Century Christan Fundamentalism	95	(2)
Introducing the Care-givers	97	(2)
Conflicts over Media Use	99	(4)
Leisure Viewing by Care-givers	103	(4)
Moral Censure and Non-Christian `Others'	107	(4)
Conclusion	111	(4)
Television and the Internet	115	(16)
Television on Computers	116	(5)
Gendered Uses of Computers at Home	121	(4)
Computerized Work	125	(6)
Conclusion	131	(10)
Bibliography	141	(8)
Index	149