In On Living with Television, Amy Holdsworth examines the characteristics of intimacy, familiarity, repetition, and duration that have come to exemplify the medium of television. Drawing on feminist television studies, queer theory, and disability studies as well as autobiographical life-writing practices, Holdsworth shows how television shapes everyday activities, from eating and sleeping to driving and homemaking. Recounting her own life with television, she offers a sense of the joys and pleasures Disney videos brought to her disabled sister, traces how bedtime television becomes part of a daily routine between child and caregiver, explores her own relationship to binge-eating and binge-viewing, and considers the idea of home through the BBC family drama Last Tango in Halifax. By foregrounding the ways in which television structures our relationships, daily routines, and sense of time, Holdsworth demonstrates how television emerges as a potent vehicle for writing about life.

George Gerbner's cultivation theory provides a framework for the analysis of relationships between television viewing and attitudes and beliefs about the world. Since the 1970s, cultivation analysis has been a lens through which to examine television's contributions to conceptions of violence, sex roles, political attitudes and numerous other phenomena. Hundreds of studies during this time have (mostly) found that there are relationships between television exposure and people's worldviews, but important questions remain: just how big are these relationships, are they real, are some people more vulnerable to them than others, do they vary across different topics, and will we continue to find them in new media environments? In this collection of nineteen chapters, leading scholars review and assess the most significant developments in cultivation research in the past ten years. The book highlights cutting-edge research related to these questions and surveys important recent advances in this evolving body of work. The contributors point us toward new directions and fresh challenges for cultivation theory and research in the future.

TV Living presents the findings of the BFI Audience Tracking Study in which 500 participants completed detailed questionnaire-diaries on their lives, their television watching, and the relationship between the two over a five year period. Gauntlett and Hill use this extensive data to explore some of the most fundamental questions in media and cultural studies, focusing on issues of gender, identity, the impact of new technologies, and life changes. Opening up new areas of debate, the study sheds new light on audiences and their responses to issues such as sex and violence on television. A unique study of contemporary tv audience behaviour and attitudes, TV Living offers a fascinating insight into the complex relationship between mass media and people's lives today.

This book is based on extensive field research conducted by the investigators of Social Research Inc., interpreting the result of over 13,000 individuals. Members of TV audiences were studied to analyze their reactions to what TV offered them, in relation to their age, sex, social class, and personal characteristics. This information is here applied to understanding what television programs, performers, and commercials--by general type and also with illustrative case histories--are being watched. This book on first publication in 1962 provided the first clear image of the people in front of their TV sets, who they were, how they differed from each other, their views on sex and violence, boredom and enlightenment, taste and judgment. It tells us about the audiences and our stereotypes and their response to the new medium they could both see and hear. It destroys the myth of the "mass audience" and replaces it with a scientifically derived description of the many audiences for television, including its protesters, its embracers, and its accommodators. Programs looked at range from those still in production forty years later--The Price is Right--to those in perpetual rerun--The Twilight Zone---to those genres, like westerns, that have all but disappeared, and those that still prosper, like soap operas--in this case, 77 Sunset Strip. A section on performer images and their symbolic meanings considers television personas from Bob Hope through Walter Cronkite to Roy Rogers and Pat Boone. The final section analyzes commercials both by type and by placement and what audiences feel about them.

Living Without the Screen provides an in-depth study of those American families and individuals who opt not to watch television, exploring the reasons behind their choices, discussing their beliefs about television, and examining the current role of television in the American family. Author Marina Krcmar answers several questions in the volume: What is television? Who are those people who reject it? What are their reasons for doing so? How do they believe their lives are different because of this choice? What impact does this choice have on media research? This volume provides a current, distinctive, and important look at how personal choices on media use are made, and how these choices reflect more broadly on media’s place in today’s society. A compelling exploration of the motivations and rationales for those who choose to live without television, this book is a must-read for scholars and researchers working in children and media, media literacy, sociology, family studies and related areas. It will also be of interest to anyone with questions about media usage and the choices families make regarding the role of media in their lives.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will change the way you see the world. Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In Living With a Wild God, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find ""the Truth"" about the universe and everything else: What's really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a ""mystical experience""-and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering. In Living With a Wild God, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition. With her signature combination of intellectual rigor and uninhibited imagination, Ehrenreich offers a true literary achievement-a work that has the power not only to entertain but amaze.

Combining cutting-edge theories of culture and government with programming examples—including Todd TV, Survivor, and American Idol—Better Living through Reality TV moves beyond the established concerns of political economy and cultural studies to conceptualize television's evolving role in the contemporary period. A major textbook on the impact of reality and lifestyle television on today’s programming, and on broader social, cultural and political trends Draws on a range of examples from The Apprentice and American Idol to Extreme Makeover and Wife Swap Argues that reality television teaches viewers to monitor, motivate, improve, transform and protect themselves in the name of freedom, enterprise, and personal responsibility