Looks of Sympathy and Love: Seeking Miltonic Companionship in Frankenstein and The Truman Show

5. Paradise Lost? Islamophobia, Post-liberalism and the Dismantling of State Multiculturalism in the Netherlands: The Role of Mass and Social Media was published in Social Media and Religious Change on page 79.

Chapter One: Literature, Culture and the Canon 1. Literary Studies: Classics, Comparative Literature, English Literature 2. Literature as Value: The Canon, Criticism, Minority Culture 3. From Literary to Cultural Studies: The Sociological Turn 4. Elitism, Populism and Immodest Cultural Studies 5. The Intelligentsia as a Social Class Chapter Two: Analytical Strategies 1. Hermeneutics 2. Cultural Materialism and New Historicism 3. The Sociology of Culture 4. Theories of Ideology 5. Semiology and Semiotics 6. Psychoanalysis and Post-Structuralism 7. The Cultural Politics of Difference 8. Postmodernism Chapter Three: Mechanical Reproduction - The Forces of Production 1. The Literary Mode of Production 2. Mechanical Reproduction 3. The Print Media 4. The Audio-Visual Media 5. Cultural Form 6. The Sociology of the Novel 7. The Moretti Thesis: Core, Periphery and Literary Form Chapter Four: Commodity Culture - The Relations of Production 1. Print-Capitalism 2. Writers and Writing 3. Readers and Reading 4. The State, Ideology and the Market Chapter Five: Texts and Contexts - From Genesis to Frankenstein 1. Genesis 2. Paradise Lost 3. Frankenstein 4. Frankenstein in the Cinema Chapter Six: Texts and Contexts - From Rossum's Universal Robots to Buffy the Vampire Slayer 1. Rossum's Universal Robots 2. Metropolis 3. Blade Runner 4. The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer 5. The Postmodern Prometheus and the Biomechanical Demonoid 6. Postmodern Gothic 7. Conclusion: Loose Canons and Fallen Angels

Lines Per Page, Engravings, and Catchwords in Milton’s 1720 Poetical Works Hao Tianhu* (bio) John Milton’s Poetical Works published by Jacob Tonson II in 1720 is an important edition, not the least because Richard Bentley, “the greatest ever English classical scholar,”1 adopted it as the working copy for his “notorious”2 1732 edition of Paradise Lost. This lavish pair of large quarto volumes (with main sections of 590 and 527 pages respectively) included many engraved tailpieces, which placed special demands on the compositors. By analyzing material traces seldom examined—such as lines of text per page—we can infer with reasonable certainty how they operated. Along the way we may provide a rationale for some of the catchword errors3 by connecting these inconsistencies with the printing and publishing of the book, especially illustration. The Tonsons were well known for publishing deluxe books. William Thomas Lowndes, an eminent bibliographer of the early nineteenth century, defined Caesar’s Commentaries brought out by Jacob Tonson I in 1712 as “the most sumptuous classical work which England has produced.”4 The 1720 Milton is typically adorned with rich illustrations. Engraved vignettes open and conclude each of the books of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and the tragedy Samson Agonistes, finely framing the grand poems in pictorial art. Additionally, the first item in Poems, Lycidas, has a special headpiece. These thirty-five vignettes, plus eighteen historiated initials, help produce what Marcia R. Pointon calls “a splendid and expensive edition rather in the manner of the Venetian illustrated book of the [End Page 191] period.”5 R. G. Moyles, another modern scholar, confirms it as “impressively beautiful … a much-coveted book.”6 Pointon compares Louis Chéron, the illustrator responsible for most of the decorations in the edition, unfavorably with John Baptist Medina, another early illustrator of Milton, but still admits that “Chéron’s illustrations are nearly always more skillfully composed than Medina’s and [that] the tailpieces and historiated initials make for a much richer general effect.”7 The list of 334 subscribers in volume 1 indicates that the costly book was eagerly sought after by aristocratic and elite readers (dukes, duchesses, earls, lords, sirs, esquires, doctors, ladies, and the like).8 Clearly Tonson strived to meet the aesthetic demands of his prominent customers. The paper used (printing medium, 585 x 455 mm) makes a large and handsome object, and the 22-line page adds much elegance. Our count of lines of poetic text on a typical full page excludes the headline and the direction-line. The standard number of lines is 22, with occasional variations of 21 or 23. When a 23rd line occurs it crowds the page and sometimes includes both part of the text and a catchword. But this additional line occurs only in less important works—in Addison’s Notes in volume 1, and in Poems in volume 2, beginning toward the end of A Mask.9 All the major poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and Lycidas, which are pictorially ornamented, contain no crowded pages. The different typographical treatment of the minor works and the major poems is dictated by, and also registers, the hierarchical status of the two categories of text. The publisher’s typographical intervention participates imperceptibly yet actively in the reception of the author and the construction of textual meaning. The 21-line pages occur in the major works, as table 1 shows. These typographical irregularities can be explained by aesthetic necessities. The plate mark of the vignette at the end of a book usually occupies a space of ten lines or more. Thus we find some pages toward the end of a book or poem composed in 21 lines, to avoid the awkward situation either of a section closing on a page with insufficient space left for the tailpiece or of the tailpiece being printed alone (with no text) on a separate page. In all the above sections, the normal 22-line pages would lead to such an awkward situation, and the spatial demand of the tailpiece required the reduction of some pages to 21 lines (Lycidas is an exception; see below). At the same time, the compositors also...

[Extract:] Celebrities are a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary Western culture. Although the phenomenon of celebrity itself predates the twentieth century, the rise of the modern mass media – popular newspapers, cinema, radio, and television, and more recently the Internet and other digital communication technologies – has done much to promote and circulate public knowledge of celebrities during the last 100 years. The presence of multi-channel digital television, radio, and the World Wide Web in Western households at the turn of the twenty-first century has not only increased the number of places in which celebrities can be seen and heard, but has also required media producers to compete with each other and with alternative leisure activities for the attention of fragmented audiences, an increasingly precious commodity. The rise of celebrity culture is inextricably linked to developments in media systems that operate within capitalist systems of commodity exchange. Most obviously, celebrities provide a well-proven route to attracting and retaining audiences, helping to offset the risks inherent in cultural production. They also play out a fantasy of the individual simultaneously performing within public and the private spheres. As P. David Marshall neatly puts it, celebrities might be seen as a “production locale for an elaborate discourse on the individual and individuality” (1997: 4). However the ubiquity of celebrity culture does not mean that its considerable diversity can be ignored. A cursory glance through the prime-time television schedules, for instance, reveals how one might choose between shows featuring celebrity hosts and guests, contest-based reality television shows that participate in the construction of celebrity, personality driven lifestyle programming, sports shows featuring star athletes and commentators, and even political shows with celebrity journalists. All of this is indicative not just of the pervasiveness of modern celebrity culture but also its diversity and breadth.

Realizing that the desire to achieve “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme” offers a potential for sin, Milton employs parallels between the narrator of Paradise Lost and Satan to indicate his awareness that great endeavors, even his own, may be pridefully motivated. But he defines carefully the difference between his “advent'rous” singing and satanic overreaching. The sharp contrast between the narrator's dependence on divine guidance and Satan's claims of self-sufficiency is repeatedly asserted within the context of striking similarities: both poet and Devil undertake great adventures; both, dwelling in hostile darkness, soar toward light; both, in need of direction, seek guidance from light (holy Light, Uriel) and primal sources of hexaemeral knowledge (Urania, Uriel). Milton supports such general parallels by the repetition of specific details and by numerous verbal echoes. But Satan lies to Uriel, curses the sun, and, inverting the poet's creative impulse, invokes his proper muse in Chaos. The devils can sing; they pursue the philosophical issues with which Paradise Lost is concerned; they build “Monument [s] / Of merit high.” These satanic perversions of good mean more than that the devils are bad; they mean that man may be beguiled by some “fair appearing good.” A Solomon may fall “To Idols foul.” A poet exploring “things invisible to mortal sight” must humbly hope that he is not deluded, that all is “Hers who brings it nightly to [his] Ear.”

winner of grand jury prize at 2007 Sundance film festival, Donal MacIntyre's A Very British Gangster (2007) is an intriguing example of a critically acclaimed documentary. This article seeks to explore structure of film and how constant allusions to pop culture within it create a frame of reference that is performative and playful. Like any documentary, film is beyond simple categorization. However, this article engages with processes of labeling and defining of modes in order to show film as an expression of reality that is caught up in a very definite desire to entertain rather than educate. One of John Grierson's original principles of describes it as arrangements, rearrangements and creative shapings [of natural material] (First Principles 146). This principle appears to accept certain elements of subjectivity and construction as part of form and thus suggests a close connection between factual and fictional forms. However, other work, such as that of Ellis and McLane, asserts that is purposive; it is intended to achieve something in addition to entertaining (4), which is related to Grierson's desire for to educate and inspire. Both interpretations are valid, though appearing to be at odds. Documentary can both entertain and educate. It can also be constructed and factual. It is perhaps useful to note, as John Corner does in The Art of Record, that Grierson's definitions were in fact designed to promote argument for as a recognized form, rather than to be definitions of form. Therefore, such definitions should be viewed as discursive rather than fixed. In view of this, it is most useful to see all definitions as opening of a discussion rather than fixed, in that all films utilize a variety of modes and purposes. The following discussion of definitions is designed to offer such an opening. The development and popularity of reality TV continued to blur distinctions between reality and entertainment, and this had a profound influence on how other forms of are being defined. Bruzzi notes that reality TV as factual entertainment brought entertainment and drama further into arena, and John Corner coined label as diversion to account for growth in lighter topics or treatments in television (Performing Real). Paul Arthur suggests that one new style has begun to attract film viewers who before might have chosen a dentist's appointment rather than pay to see a documentary (75). The documentary, often with filmmaker as visible interviewer, seeks to investigate subjects and entertain audiences through a mix of observational, archival, and interview modes. Such documentaries, Arthur states, focus on the business of public voyeurism, media celebrity, and political economy of imagemaking (74). The label tabloid is appropriate, according to Arthur, because this style of filmmaking mainly prioritizes voyeuristic pleasures rather than specifically educational or critical discourse, and consequently its function resembles entertainment as much as, if not more than, actuality. Arthur uses term tabloid in order to identify such documentaries within a readily understood framework of reference that is associated with television format that dominates cable TV channels, such as Biography Channel,1 or alternatively, broadcast network programs such as NBC's Dateline (US) and BBC's Witness (UK). He suggests that this format appears in varying degrees in feature-length, critically acclaimed films such as Berlinger and Sinofsky's Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), Nick Broomfield's Fetishes (1996) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003), and Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005). A basic similarity between television and film formats is their participatory structure, in that voice of text, through presenter or filmmaker, a significant role onscreen, in voice-over, or both. …

The religious spectrum It is now more widely recognised than it was a hundred years ago that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English society and culture was essentially religious in its institutions, practices and beliefs, and that writing on religious subjects dominated the publishing market. Yet as literary readers in the early twenty-first century, we still confine our attention to a handful of explicitly religious works of the period, and we tend to downplay the religious aims and aspects of other works that we regard as predominantly literary or political or philosophical. Behind the major religious works that are still reedited and reissued today – notably Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress – stretches a vast hinterland of works that went through multiple editions in the eighteenth century and often into the nineteenth, but that are now largely neglected except by specialists. This chapter provides a map for exploring this hinterland. But in order to understand the significance of particular works it is necessary first to consider three broad topics: the range of religious denominations and groups and the main political events that affected their relations with each other; the principal theological and philosophical issues that religious writers of different persuasions addressed; and the preferred kinds of religious writing and their functions.

The poor quality of television program available to Indonesian children and the escalating cases of antisocial and delinquency among children are undeniably the hard fact. But linking the two in a causal relationship is a mere speculation that oversimplifying the issue. At the conceptual level in the study of mass communication, there are theories based on the perspective of the limited influence of the mass media. Theories such as those of Klapper’s phenomenistic, DeFleur’s individual differences and social category, selective processes theory, and Seymour Feshbach’s catharsis theory, are all discouraging the behavioral effect of mass communication. Media influence on children is determined by their comprehension in TV viewing. By about age 8 or 9 (Huston et.al), children are about as accurate as adults in judging whether a television program is presenting fiction or fact. There are arguments on how children perceive the reality out of the television. First, Aletha C. Huston explained that perceptions of reality occur on two dimensions: factuality and social realism. Second, Gunter and McAleer pointed out that children use three categories of television versus real-life comparisons. These include the category of the ‘actual’, the ‘possible’, and the ‘impossible’. The third explanation dealt with the way children evaluate characters in television programs. Findings revealed that perception on factuality was dominant in programs such as news, sports, infotainment, talk-show, variety-show, music, and reality-show. Perception of social realism was dominant in cartoons, movies, and soap-operas. Similar to those of factuality, the actual category appeared predominantly in news, sports, religion, talk-show, variety-show, music, and reality-show. The possible was slightly highlighted in cartoons, movies, and soap-operas. While the impossible also seemed dominant in cartoons, movies, and soap-operas. Conceptually, the 4 children’s favorite characters are the humor of the characters; the strength of the characters; the attractiveness of the characters; and the activity level of the characters. Humor was dominant in cartoons, talk-show, and variety-show. Strength was central in sports and movies, and attractive in infotainment and talk-show. There were no active characters significantly perceived in any television programs.

PM Magazine: A Missing Link in the Evolution of Reality Television Richard Crew Scholarship on reality television consistently overlooks the significance of the 1980s-era series PM Magazine. At its peak, this innovative television series was seen in nearly 100 US markets, and in the early 1980s it was the highest rated program series in television syndication1 (Sandeen 100). PM Magazine fits neatly into the chain of early reality shows2 , between PBS's An American Family (1973) and MTV's The Real World (1992). This article demonstrates PM Magazine's impact on the evolution of reality programming in the 1980s and 1990s, and its equally strong influence on national and local television news content. I bring a unique perspective to this article with my experience as the National Executive for PM Magazine from 1979 to 1984. However, I use extensive research to support the conclusions reached here: journal articles on PM Magazine, information carried in the popular and trade press of the era, Group W newsletters and marketing materials, personal interviews, and academic studies on reality television. What was PM Magazine? The PM Magazine format debuted as Evening Magazine on August 2, 1976 on KPIX-TV in San Francisco. Within two years, the show was airing on the five Group W television stations3 , and by 1978 the franchise rights and format were being sold to additional stations under the title PM Magazine.4 As a 30-minute, Monday through Friday series, PM Magazine was designed to be a transition program for early evening TV viewers, bridging the time period between the topical dinner hour news block and the entertainment-based primetime network schedule at 8 pm. Each television market, big and small, had its own PM/Evening co-hosts: a personable young man and woman, who were perceived as solidly local. Group W provided the format, animated graphics, theme music, and feature material. A station only needed to do "the wraps" (introductions and tags) to each national feature, plus produce one local feature each week. Depending on their resources, stations could substitute additional local features for even more of the national elements. Each PM Magazine contained two, six-minute people-oriented stories, the mandatory locally-hosted wraps, and a set of three short lifestyle "tips" covering areas like health, "how-to" advice, and restaurant reviews. The resulting blend gave each market's PM show national scope, a quality look, and an important local identity. PM was eventually seen in up to 85% of US television homes (Crew, "PM Magazine" 3). Each station produced its own version of the program, specializing in human interest narratives about regular people as well as celebrities, capturing lifestyle topics, and spotlighting interesting locations across the country. Then, in a cooperative arrangement, the local features having broad appeal were shared with all the producing stations. PM's feature stories were unique programming for the late 1970s and 1980s. The only other successful television "magazine" at the time was 60 Minutes. However, in 1978 Newsweek observed that, "In content and tone, [PM Magazine] is to 60 Minutes what People magazine is to The New Republic" (qtd. in Burd 6). Some television journalists dismissed the content as "soft news" – a type of news "that doesn't have to be run today to [End Page 23] be topical" (Turow 118). But Burd's 1982 study of feature stories in television magazine shows concluded that PM Magazine reflected, "the reality of real life in smaller amounts than network news and with features and personalities the big networks haven't time to cover" (5). PM Magazine – An Early Form of Reality TV Once a genre becomes well established, older television programs sometimes get resituated. For example, in 1973, An American Family was considered an "observational documentary;" today it is frequently labeled "reality television" (Murray 41), with TV Guide retrospectively tagging it "the first reality television series" (An American...

The aim of the article. To Investigate the formation of media concepts and their functioning in a postmodernculture with its unprecedented effect on the mythologization of the masculine and the feminine. The theoreticalbasis. Gender culture, considered in the context of a general cultural perspective, is currently a complex andambivalent phenomenon, the debates around which are focused on the question of the ambiguous relationshipsbetween universalism and cultural relativism. It is also important that recently the mass media are changingthe established construction of gender concepts, actively influencing gender ideology in general and genderculture, in particular. The relevance of this work is determined both by the absence of a serious public discussionof gender issues in our country, and by the great effect on the mythologization of the masculine and femininethat the mass media have recently demonstrated by manipulating gender technologies in the diffuse gapbetween official gender rhetoric and real situation of gender discrimination in our society. The latter is getting more complex by the important fact that cinema and TV, having pushed off a literary work to a great extent,due to its emphasis on visualization, use the representation policy as a policy of creating, disseminating andunderstanding specific images of reality and the relations between them. The scientific novelty. Visualizationcovering all spheres of mass culture, as a rule, reproduces traditional gender stereotyping, undoubtedly, withsome postmodern amendments (“desires”, «corporality» etc.). Television is much more progressive with itsreality shows and «reality television» in general. Television series, as a rule, exploiting the topic of femalesexuality, often emphasize the issue of gender identity, and in the famous television series of recent years, thistopic is being actively developed. Cultural narratives, always being gender due to their emphasis on narratives,interact with all relevant cultural boundaries. The conclusions. Despite the new wording of the gender policiesof the “new” generation at the beginning of the 21st century, despite the unconditional changes in the overall“picture of the world”, the “small narratives” of mass culture that have emerged over the past 20 years can inno way be compared with the metanarratives of the previous millennium in terms of audience the power of theirinfluence etc. It is important to emphasize: the mass culture in which we live today is in a state of transformation,the latter determines the need for constant research of this complex and ambivalent phenomenon.

Wordsworth's last quarto, by the way, is bigger Than any since the birthday of typography, A drowsy frowzy poem, call'd the `Excursion,' Writ in a manner which is my aversion. (Don Juan 3.94)(1) WHAT MIGHT WELL BE CALLED APPLIED LANGAN. IN RESPONDING to Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel I will do little more than place a frame Langan's brilliant suggestion that need to unravel the Lay as an allegorical history of the transformation of poetry by the book--that is, by the print (63). I will play out her meditations on the connection between blank verse and print by returning with her to the first blank verse in English, and then moving beyond Scott to Keats and Byron, closing with a brief discussion of the role of Coleridge in the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The heart of Langan's provocative reading of the Lay is a complex set of claims about the relationship between print and blank verse, the oral and the written, sound and silence: If the poem leaves untold the story of blank verse's origin, it suggests how blank verse--invented to translate the dead letters of Latin poetry into vernacular language--comes to define a literary vernacular that signals, evokes, or mediates, rather than records, the aural component of poetry. We fully understand the point of Scott's nostalgic evocation of an oral poetic tradition, in other words, only in recognizing how the print medium turns all verse into a blank and silent screen. (63) A dazzling extension from the seemingly gratuitous appearance of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey within the song of the fictional bard Fitztraver in Canto Six of the Lay enables Langan to seize the vision of his beloved Geraldine that the alchemist Cornelius Agrippa offers Surrey in Fitztraver's song as both a historical point de depart and a tour de force of a conclusion. If the raptured line of her beloved that seemed her inmost soul to find as Geraldine, alone in her midnight chamber, pensively reads, points to Surrey's contributions to the sonnet, as Scott's notes direct, Langan's bravura commentary points to another singular contribution to the history of English literary forms: he is, we recall, usually considered to be the inventor of English blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter (66).(2) To illustrate Surrey's strange meter, as the original publisher, John Day, called it, the Norton Anthology fortuitously excerpts from his posthumously published translation of Book IV of the Aeneid fifty-odd lines from the episode of the hunt (Virgil's lines 129-68). The choice is apposite for Langan's argument, because the full passage, recording the fateful meeting of Dido and Aeneas in the cave, contains all the elements that her account associates with blank verse: secrecy, inwardness, mystery, and delusion, for if to Dido her Juno-contrived union with Aeneas is wedlock (52) it is, tragically, no such thing to Aeneas. Most pertinently, the spectacular romanticism of the scene joins to lightning skies (51) the sound effects on which Langan concentrates: the final paragraph of the excerpt begins, In the meanwhile the heavens gan rumble sore and ends with the marvelously resonant line: And the nymphs wailed from the mountain's top (43; 53).(3) An audiovisual hallucination indeed. The model for the blank verse of Scott's day was Milton's Paradise Lost, particularly the invocations, where Milton's speaking of himself descended through the introspective poetry of Akenside and Cowper to Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. The provenance suggests that Langan's pinpointing of a shift around 1800 needs the supplement of a precursor. The prefatory note to Paradise Lost bears extensive citation: The measure is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre. …

Diaspora

Gender bias is still an important issue to be discussed at this time. Mass media can be a medium in depicting gender bias, because mass media has the power to influence reality in life. One of the popular mass media in today's society is television series. The television series House of The Dragon is one of the television series that raises the issue of gender bias. This study aims to find out forms of gender bias on the character Rhaenyra Targaryen in the television series House of The Dragon. The research method used is Sara Mills' Critical Discourse Analysis at word level and sentence level. The results of the study found that there is five forms of gender bias in Rhaenyra Targaryen's character, namely (1) stereotypes (2) subordination (3) marginalization (4) double workload and (5) violence. The research results also show that gender bias can occur in women of any status. This research can contribute to the study of gender equality and women.

INTRODUCTION:Television as a mass medium has tremendous impact on today's society. It has become part of life without which life is unimaginable. TV has changed our sense-lives and our mental processes (McLuhan, 1964/2001). TV is basically an extension of sense of touch, which involves maximum interplay of all senses. According to Marshall McLuhan If movie was mech anism of movement and gesture TV was electronification' of same. emergence of satellite and cable television has transformed world in to a global village (McLuhan, 1964/2001). To McLuhan all media were the extension of man. All mass media are having some sought of influence on social life of human beings.Television has contributed much for rural development by acting as a catalyst for social change. Thomas (1998:20) refers to exploration in to Indian television stemming from two historical movements, period co-terminus with SITE (1975-77) and second era of media liberalization which started in mid -eighties and accelerated in early nineties with cross border broadcasting.Indian television industry experienced phenomenal changes after globalization. The monopoly of DD ended and umpteen private channels started occupying airwaves. Since 2009 audiences are be subjected to a cacophony of nearly 450 commercially driven broadcasts, which caters to around 500 million viewers in India (Ranganathan & Rodrigues, 2010). According to PwC report on media and entertainment, television penetration stood at 124 million with in countryTV AND DEVELOPMENT OF WOMEN:When Television broadcasting started in India, in 1959, communication scholars, media experts and policy makers were quite sure that television as a mass medium will definitely help national development. Eminent communication scholars such as Daniel Learner, Wilbur Schramm and E.M. Rogers, who based on their theories of development and media efficacy, stressed that economic development achieved by western nations were results of increased media use (Vilanilam, 2005).A book on development communication related to women appeared in 1988 (Agrawal and Rai 1988). The authors observed that Communication for development in most cases, assumes that major burden for bringing about desirable changes in rural life remains man's responsibility, though women equally participate in it(Agrawal and Rai 1988: 91). It was observed 'that communication boundaries, in most cases, are separate for men and women. (Agrawal and Rai1988: 91). Based on an in depth study authors concluded that information needs of rural women were comparatively much more than urban women and men. Hence, development communication for women would be exclusive and separate (Agrawal and Rai 1988: 91).As far as Television in India is concerned, there is variety of programmes telecasted by various channels empower rural women in areas of social, cultural, economical, educational, health, technological, equal rights, freedom of expression, gender sensitization etc.Dhruva (2004) carried out a survey of 100 married women in a ge group of 25 to 35 years of age residing in urban slums of Mumbai to examine influence of television serials in their lives. The findings indicated that television serials influenced daily routines and personal behavior of women whereas they negated any influence on family relationships. The study also states that in spite of lower economic backgrounds of respondents they reported a linking for rich lifestyles' projected in television serials. This indicates powerfulness television in captivating minds of its viewers. Compared to development communication in agriculture, health and family planning, little is known about women and children. It would be one of most important areas to be explored for organizing women to empower them for total human development (Ramiraz, 1987). …

Shooting People:Adventures in Reality TV Jacquelyn Vinson (bio) Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen. Shooting People: Adventures in Reality TV. London: Verso Books, 2003. 160 pages. $21.00 (cloth). New television shows are rarely new. In considering the history of reality programming I am reminded that, as Fred Allen put it, "imitation is the sincerest form of television." The only things that truly seem to change are the fashions. Although currently enjoying widespread popularity, reality programming has been around since the introduction of television. At one time it was known simply as "nonfiction" or "actuality" programming and included today's reality television forerunners—shows such as Candid Camera, Real People, and The Gong Show. As a media phenomenon reality television has very recently attracted the attention of media scholars. From this perspective reality television touches on several areas of interest, including the relation of public to private and the relationship between media producers, participants, and viewers. The popular press has focused largely on the voyeuristic and exhibitionistic aspects of the genre, aspects that are often framed as pathological. Despite the increase of interest, there is still very little in the way of scholarly research. The format is the most feted and denigrated phenomenon in recent broadcasting history and permeates all kinds of programming. Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen's work, Shooting People: Adventures in Reality TV, is a combination of the popular and scholarly that attempts to grapple with the implications of questionable production techniques, ethics, and globalism for both the individual contestants of reality TV game shows and the culture generally. As the double meaning in the title suggests, Brenton and Cohen examine production strategies in their benign as well as their pernicious forms. The end result, they argue, is television at its lowest. The authors lay out the book in two parts. The first is a broad historical grounding of reality game shows, and the second is a critical examination of what takes place inside the current crop with a focus on two of the most popular reality game shows—Survivor and Big Brother. They argue that through these texts we can "chart the changing nature of the global television industry, and focus on spectacles of extremity and cruelty never previously produced in the name of light entertainment" (9). The authors also claim that these shows fetishize the ordinary, elevate self-experience to the level of grand narrative and ultimate truth, exploit their subjects, and employ professionals who neglect the psychological hazards and ethical considerations of their involvement. They write, "The first person thus raised to the status of sole truth, sole value and sole source of narrative makes few allusions to things beyond its boundaries. . . . There is no aspect of personal experiences too small to fix a camera on—trivia, indeed, is the new rock 'n' roll" (11). Finally, Brenton and Cohen consider some partnerships between "real politics" and reality television. The overarching question the authors pose is, "How did this format, with its current lack of social purpose (while deeply immersed in the mundane and applying torture-style techniques), trace its roots to the Griersonian social issue documentary of the 1930s whose purpose was to bring about positive social change?" (10). This is a lot for such a small book to handle. The result is an interesting and entertaining read that encourages a call for an even more in-depth and nuanced analysis of the global, social, and psychological significance of the reality television format. [End Page 80] Television documentary has had a long and interesting trajectory. John Grierson aptly described documentary as a "creative treatment of reality." Early documentaries by producers like John Grierson attempt to educate audiences about their social conditions with the assumption that greater awareness would bring pressure to bear on the government for change. Brenton and Cohen argue that what they see as noble attempts in service to the public have gone beyond creative treatment and have become entertainment spectacles in formats such as Big Brother, Survivor, Temptation Island, and Fear Factor. What these shows have in common, they say, is a controlled environment and a lack of any social concern. It has been noted that documentary's concern with content...