Lynn Spigel

Sixties Television and Social Conflict

The Revolution Wasn't Televised

Between 1948 and 1955, nearly two-thirds of all American families bought a television set—and a revolution in social life and popular culture was launched. In this fascinating book, Lynn Spigel chronicles the enormous impact of television in the formative years of the new medium: how, over the course of a single decade, television became an intimate part of everyday life. What did Americans expect from it? What effects did the new daily ritual of watching television have on children? Was television welcomed as an unprecedented "window on the world," or as a "one-eyed monster" that would disrupt households and corrupt children? Drawing on an ambitious array of unconventional sources, from sitcom scripts to articles and advertisements in women's magazines, Spigel offers the fullest available account of the popular response to television in the postwar years. She chronicles the role of television as a focus for evolving debates on issues ranging from the ideal of the perfect family and changes in women's role within the household to new uses of domestic space. The arrival of television did more than turn the living room into a private theater: it offered a national stage on which to play out and resolve conflicts about the way Americans should live. Spigel chronicles this lively and contentious debate as it took place in the popular media. Of particular interest is her treatment of the way in which the phenomenon of television itself was constantly deliberated—from how programs should be watched to where the set was placed to whether Mom, Dad, or kids should control the dial. Make Room for TV combines a powerful analysis of the growth of electronic culture with a nuanced social history of family life in postwar America, offering a provocative glimpse of the way television became the mirror of so many of America's hopes and fears and dreams.

Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America

Make Room for TV

Jan Olsson

DIVA critical reassessment of television and television studies in the age of new media./div

Essays on a Medium in Transition

Television After TV

Chris Berry

So-yŏng Kim

Media, Technology, and the Experience of Social Space

Electronic Elsewheres

DIVHistorical and theoretical essays on television and media culture by a leading feminist studies scholar./div

Welcome to the Dreamhouse

Charlotte Brunsdon

Julie D'Acci

Bibliografie : p. 351-369. - Met reg. Most of the pieces selected deal with genres and topics that have been the dominant subjects of feminist television analysis-soaps, telenovelas, serials, sitcoms, housewives, 'new women' heterosexual and lesbian romances, female audiences, and domesticity. Throughout, the focus of the selection is on feminine genres and how feminist critical understanding has developed in a historical perspective.

A Reader

Feminist Television Criticism

Fran Martin

Audrey Yue

DIVA collection of essays on the uses of new media in the formation of East Asian and Pacific queer identities./div

New Media in Queer Asia

Mobile Cultures

Denise Mann

Television and the Female Consumer

Private Screenings

Lynn Spigel explores historical snapshots of people posing in front of their television sets in the 1950s through the early 1970s, showing how TV snapshots were a popular photographic practice through which people visualized their lives in an increasingly mediated culture.

An Archive of Everyday Life

TV Snapshots

Reader in Film and Television Studies Charlotte Brunsdon

Professor Department of Communication Arts Julie D'Acci

Associate Professor School of Cinema Lynn Spigel

While much research into television has been historical, textual, or empirical, this volume approaches the topic from a sociocultural and feminist perspective, to address important questions from the viewpoint of the audience as well as from that of the industry. The contributors examine the ways in which the television industry seeks to deliver a female audience to its advertisers while inserting itself into women's lives, both at home and in the marketplace - hence the concept of a private screening in which the outside media world is brought into the personal space. The volume analyzes how television delivers "consumption" to its female audience by displaying commodities and lifestyles that attempt to engender an idealized sense of community and how audiences understand television programming and how these programs construct definitions of "femininity".

Jane Feuer

Marsha Kinder

Mary Beth Haralovich

A collection of feminist cultural studies essays on children’s television.

Kids' Media Culture

Michael Curtin

Caricatures of sixties television--called a "vast wasteland" by the FCC president in the early sixties--continue to dominate our perceptions of the era and cloud popular understanding of the relationship between pop culture and larger social forces. Opposed to these conceptions, The Revolution Wasn't Televised explores the ways in which prime-time television was centrally involved in the social conflicts of the 1960s. It was then that television became a ubiquitous element in American homes. The contributors in this volume argue that due to TV's constant presence in everyday life, it became the object of intense debates over childraising, education, racism, gender, technology, politics, violence, and Vietnam. These essays explore the minutia of TV in relation to the macro-structure of sixties politics and society, attempting to understand the struggles that took place over representation the nation's most popular communications media during the 1960s.

While critics have long disparaged commercial television as a vast wasteland, TV has surprising links to the urbane world of modern art that stretch back to the 1950s and ’60s During that era, the rapid rise of commercial television coincided with dynamic new movements in the visual arts—a potent combination that precipitated a major shift in the way Americans experienced the world visually. TV by Design uncovers this captivating story of how modernism and network television converged and intertwined in their mutual ascent during the decades of the cold war. Whereas most histories of television focus on the way older forms of entertainment were recycled for the new medium, Lynn Spigel shows how TV was instrumental in introducing the public to the latest trends in art and design. Abstract expressionism, pop art, art cinema, modern architecture, and cutting-edge graphic design were all mined for staging techniques, scenic designs, and an ever-growing number of commercials. As a result, TV helped fuel the public craze for trendy modern products, such as tailfin cars and boomerang coffee tables, that was vital to the burgeoning postwar economy. And along with influencing the look of television, many artists—including Eero Saarinen, Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, William Golden, and Richard Avedon—also participated in its creation as the networks put them to work designing everything from their corporate headquarters to their company cufflinks. Dizzy Gillespie, Ernie Kovacs, Duke Ellington, and Andy Warhol all stop by in this imaginative and winning account of the ways in which art, television, and commerce merged in the first decades of the TV age.

Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television

TV by Design

In the last ten years, television has reinvented itself in numerous ways. The demise of the U.S. three-network system, the rise of multi-channel cable and global satellite delivery, changes in regulation policies and ownership rules, technological innovations in screen design, and the development of digital systems like TiVo have combined to transform the practice we call watching tv. If tv refers to the technologies, program forms, government policies, and practices of looking associated with the medium in its classic public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television. Exploring these changes, the essays in this collection consider the future of television in the United States and Europe and the scholarship and activism focused on it. With historical, critical, and speculative essays by some of the leading television and media scholars, Television after TV examines both commercial and public service traditions and evaluates their dual (and some say merging) fates in our global, digital culture of convergence. The essays explore a broad range of topics, including contemporary programming and advertising strategies, the use of television and the Internet among diasporic and minority populations, the innovations of new technologies like TiVo, the rise of program forms from reality tv to lifestyle programs, television’s changing role in public places and at home, the Internet’s use as a means of social activism, and television’s role in education and the arts. In dialogue with previous media theorists and historians, the contributors collectively rethink the goals of media scholarship, pointing toward new ways of accounting for television’s past, present, and future. Contributors. William Boddy, Charlotte Brunsdon, John T. Caldwell, Michael Curtin, Julie D’Acci, Anna Everett, Jostein Gripsrud, John Hartley, Anna McCarthy, David Morley, Jan Olsson, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Lisa Parks, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, William Uricchio

Lynn Spigel

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