Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation Kathleen M.Ryan and Deborah A.Macey, Editors. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013.

Abstract

Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation Kathleen M. Ryan and Deborah A. Macey, Editors. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013.In 2013, when television can be accessed anywhere, any time, on demand and on a device that is often times not a television, it may seem bizarre to think of TV as a hearth-the center of the home, a place around which families gather, a place beside which we grow up. Yet editors Kathleen Ryan and Deborah Macey and the authors of the fourteen essays that comprise their book, Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation don't find such a comparison odd at all; in fact, their research points to the ways in which television continues to serve as a central site of engagement in our increasingly mediated world.Less sweeping in scope than some edited collections (The Television Studies Book, 1997; Television Studies After TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era, 2009), Television and the Self nevertheless brings a critical eye to a variety of topics that have been discussed in similar volumes, such as the impact of TV on children (The Children's Television Community, 2006), the role of gendered identity in audience experience (Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, 1997), and the ongoing influence of reality television (Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, 2004), combining these areas of inquiry in a way that draws unexpected connections. Each of the book's five sections examines one aspect of the relationship between television and audience's experience of everyday life, ranging from family relations, to gender roles, to race and aging. But while these sections are a helpful guide, the essays here resist their boundaries; the authors' words speak across and through this book in diverse and multiple ways.To begin, Leah Rosenberg's essay on ritual and memory explores the role that television plays in audiences' individual histories and collective memories. Here, we see how television can be a way of dispelling the demands of the everyday, a ritualistic engagement, a nostalgic window into our pasts. We are also introduced to a theme that resounds throughout the book-the idea that television both reflects and informs our ideas about the world. Many of the author's findings echo this, from Johnson Jr.'s analysis of the invisibility of aging gay men of color, to Macey and Redmon Wright's deconstructions of televised femininity, to Kahlenberg and Miller/Van Riper's essays on the impact that television has on children's identity formation. …