Age Of Television Research Articles

Electronic cigarettes: the new face of nicotine.

* Abbreviations: e-cigarette — : electronic cigarette FDA — : US Food and Drug Administration A rugged actor with a prematurely lined face and raspy voice expounds on the virtues of regaining our freedom. A flaxen-haired actress waxes poetic on the sex appeal of puffing up in a bar. These are not images pulled from the archives of the golden age of television, when advertising tobacco products on the airwaves was unregulated, but rather from a new, and relatively unregulated, chapter in the saga of nicotine-containing products: electronic cigarettes.1 Electronic cigarettes, or “e-cigarettes,” have been on the market since 2007 and are catapulting into the mainstream. As their popularity skyrockets, however, so too does the need for product and marketing regulations at the federal level and sales restrictions to minors at the state and local levels. In lieu of tobacco, e-cigarettes consist of a liquid cartridge, which typically contains nicotine derived from tobacco, with an atomizer and a rechargeable battery; when the user draws on the device, it atomizes the liquid and delivers a vapor, in lieu of smoke, to the user. E-cigarette users “vape” the atomized contents of the cartridge, which can have flavors ranging from “plain tobacco” to bubble gum or peach schnapps. (Of note, the sale of flavored cigarettes [other than menthol] has been banned since the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act because of their known appeal to young buyers.) Once rare, these products have become much more visible over the past few years, particularly with the aid of television commercials for “blu eCigs” (owned by the Lorillard Tobacco Company), filling a … Address correspondence to Emily K. Duffy, MD, Department of General Pediatrics, Pediatric Residency Program, Suite 9NW55, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, 3400 Civic Center Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 19103. E-mail: duffye1{at}email.chop.edu

Nature's saviours: celebrity conservationists in the television age

Foreword Dan Brockington 1. Introduction 2. A is for Attenborough 3. Lives Aquatic: Underwater with the Cousteaus 4. Requiem for Dian: Myth, Memory, Mediation 5. Suzuki: The Scientist as Moralist 6. Crocodile Tears: The Life and Death of Steve Irwin 7. Afterword

A song for politics: a discussion with John Berger

The Derek Jarman Lab is currently making, in collaboration with Tilda Swinton, a series of short films about John Berger and his thought. The third film A Song for Politics has at its centre a political discussion. The loose model for the discussion was The Brains Trust, a chat show about ideas, which started life on the radio in 1941 and then transferred successfully to television in the 1950s. The use of this form was partly a bow to the age of television that had enabled John Berger to make so many programmes, of which Ways of Seeing is the best known. The transcript has been edited as lightly as possible to preserve the conversational tone of the discussion.

Discipline and indulgence: college football, media, and the American way of life during the Cold War

The early Cold War (1947 - 1964) was a time of optimism in America. Flushed with confidence by the Second World War, many heralded the American Century and saw postwar affluence as proof that capitalism would solve want and poverty. Yet this period also filled people with anxiety. Beyond the specter of nuclear annihilation, the consumerism and affluence of capitalism's success were seen as turning the sons of pioneers into couch potatoes. In Discipline and Indulgence, Jeffrey Montez de Oca demonstrates how popular culture, especially college football, addressed capitalism's contradictions by integrating men into the economy of the Cold War as workers, warriors, and consumers. In the dawning television age, college football provided a ritual and spectacle of the American way of life that anyone could participate in from the comfort of his own home. College football formed an ethical space of patriotic pageantry where men could produce themselves as citizens of the Cold War state. Based on a theoretically sophisticated analysis of Cold War media, Discipline and Indulgence assesses the period's institutional linkage of sport, higher education, media, and militarism and finds the connections of contemporary sport media to today's War on Terror.

Theatrocracy Unwired: Legal Performance in the Modern Mediasphere

Writing in the middle of the 4th century BC, in an age of mass trials and dramatically trained rhetoricians, Plato worried that Athens was becoming a “theatrocracy” – a state ruled by theatre – in which audience applause or catcalls determined verdicts and established laws. In the 21st century – with legal news, television trials, reality police shows, YouTube execution videos (etc.) shouting at us from our many screens – Plato might think his theatrocratic nightmare had come true with a vengeance. In our theatrocracy, where the media and its ever-online TV spectators can determine guilt or innocence, are the boundaries of the legal system beginning to dissolve? Does theatrocracy threaten law's “stability,” “legitimacy,” “autonomy,” and “authority,” as some have argued? Is theatrocracy a threat to nomocracy, to the very existence of law? “Theatrocracy Unwired” looks at the nature of our legal theatrocracy (from the age of television to the age of the Internet), theoretical discussions of law and media (Deleuze, Virilio, Rancière, etc.), the (antitheatrical) anxieties awakened by the swelling of the legal mediasphere, and the significance of these to the force and meaning of law.

A era pós-televisiva e a mediação de sentidos: uma perspectiva interdisciplinar

This study aims to analyze the issue in television postmodernity as a mediator of meaning from a complex and interdisciplinary approach. This article is a counterpoint to the book “The man in the age of television,” by Jean-Jacques Wunenburger. We try to place the television beyond criticism, seeking a sense of communication in social life and in the fields of symbolic field. The critical reference has been diluted in postmodernity, which avoid any fbinary and totalizing explanations. The path of complexity is more effectively to talk about the relationship of the Self and the Other or between the self and the object or, also, between I and the world.

Book Review: Media Spectacle and Insurrection 2011: From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere, by Douglas Kellner

Media Spectacle and Insurrection 2011: From the Arab Uprisings Occupy Everywhere. Douglas Kellner. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. 329 pp. $34.95 pbk.Douglas Kellner holds the George F. Kneller Philosophy of Education Chair at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has published several books that offer detailed monitoring and analysis of coverage of major events, generally appearing quite soon after these events have occurred. Among the most influential (I would argue his best) was The Persian Gulf TV War (1992). His analysis in this instance is framed within a discourse of media He defines the term as media constructs that present events which disrupt ordinary and habitual flows of information, and that become popular stories which capture the attention of the and the public. They are technologically mediated representations that assume a nar- rative form and can dominate news and information for extended periods of time. They are often bound up with ritual events, competition, and celebrity, and are served very large audiences. They have become increasingly prolific in an age of global cable and satellite television, 24/7 news channels, infotainment, digitization, monopoly, and deregulation.The idea of spectacle is credited Guy Debord for whom spectacle was a tendency to make one see the world, not directly but through technology. It is a tool of pacifi- cation and depoliticization (outcomes somewhat less emphasized in Kellner's own analysis, for whom spectacle can also be a site of contestation). Kellner claims that his use of the term is diagnostic whereas Debord's approach was denunciatory and neo- Marxist. Kellner is broadly supportive of Barack Obama whose presidency, he argues, points a new political logic governed by the rise of spectacle and a pluraliza- tion of politics. But then spectacle clearly predates Obama-considerably- and pluralization was precisely the myth that C. W. Mills, whom Kellner admires, sought demolish.Kellner's tracing of the narratives of major political events (principal among which are the Arab uprisings) definitely has strong merit. An average reader will likely be astonished by how much he or she has forgotten of events that so recently dominated coverage. If we retrieve these forgotten narratives, however, what have we gained? The benefits of analyzing the without going beyond their own nar- ratives are limited. The term spectacle has a loose appeal, but as a central con- cept in a study of news, it stands badly in need of criteria that can precisely distinguish between spectacle and nonspectacle. Badly needed is a categorization of different kinds of spectacle. (The spectacle of masculinity for instance is clearly of a different order than the spectacle of presidential election.) Or, if all news turns out be spectacle-which sometimes seems be the way the argument is unfolding-the term is simply too broad be of compelling analytic value.As Kellner says, anyone can create their own spectacles or participate in them. He allows that spectacles can be contested but curiously tends understate the extent which the play a stacked deck in shaping available meanings. …

“Ten Times the Size of Germany” and “As Real as Los Angeles”: American Christians Map Heaven

“Ten Times the Size of Germany” and “As Real as Los Angeles”: American Christians Map Heaven James T. Fisher (bio) Gary Scott Smith. Heaven in the American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 339 pp. Notes and Index. $29.95. In early childhood I was taught that heaven meant forever, but since eternity was a concept beyond human understanding, we could only dimly comprehend the meaning of time in paradise; it was akin to forever: plus. That was the good if mystifying news to the mind of a first grader at Pittsburgh’s Saints Simon & Jude School in autumn 1962. The bad news—especially to a severely hyperactive miscreant—was that the same post-temporal dynamic obtained in the precincts of Heaven’s infernal opposite number. Before reading Gary Scott Smith’s highly informative, prodigiously researched Heaven in the American Imagination, I assumed middle-aged and older evangelical Protestants were as likely as aging Catholics—or ex-Catholics—to remember a time when the prospect of eternal damnation remained an all-too live option. But according to Smith, no subsequent “group of believers stressed the horrors of hell” (p. 27) with an ardor to match that of the colonial-era Puritans. Enter the declension, quickly: as early as the mid-eighteenth century, hell “was no longer the source of terror it had been” (p.45); for no less an authority than Jonathan Edwards, fruitful contemplation on the fate of the eternally forsaken, far from terrifying the elect, should “excite them to joyful praises” of God’s grace and love (p. 44). With hell reduced to a relatively minor role in the drama of salvation by the early national period, evangelical American Christians speculated buoyantly over an ever more accessible, even assured, final destination, a celestial territory crafted, not surprisingly, in their own idealized image: “a majestic realm characterized by holiness, perfection, love, and phenomenal blessedness.” Since, as Smith notes, the Bible’s “few descriptions of heaven are vague and veiled” (p. 237), evangelicals limned expectations of paradise with an imaginative ardor—and certitude—rarely witnessed in more earthbound forms of theologizing. This lavishly speculative, rather brazenly self-assured tradition endured well into the late twentieth century. While theologians might debate over [End Page 298] whether heaven’s dimensions “covered ‘almost 65% of the continental U.S.’” or measured in at “ten times the size of Germany” (p.188), nearly all agreed they were talking about a place—in Billy Graham’s words—“as real as Los Angeles” (p. 163). In the absence of imagination-curbing scriptural counter-weights, well-furnished and companionable afterlife triggered no Christian schisms, heresy trials, or banishments. Smith argues that evangelicals’ views of heaven “were more widely embraced” (p. viii) nationally than those of liberal Protestants, though the boundaries he sets between these groups are exceptionally porous. Unitarian and Deist claims that “dogmas and creeds were unimportant and sometimes detrimental” gave no scandal to most nineteenth-century evangelicals when pondering humankind’s eternal destiny (p. 57). The Arminian “stress on man’s role in responding to God’s offer of salvation” represented common sense, not heresy, to Smith’s subjects: the inhabitant of heaven, promised Lyman Beecher in 1819, will find “his knowledge is growing, his mind is expanding, and his holiness and joy will increase forever” (p. 55). The Second Great Awakening’s brief re-flirtation with hell and “the purposes it served” (p. 69) only further highlighted, by contrast, “the progress in knowledge, love, and power and heavenly rewards” promised to those who simply made the right choices (p. 69). The mass migration of European Catholics to the U.S. fostered a vast devotional subculture far too enamored—for flintier Protestant tastes—of purgatory as a kind of disagreeable, uncomfortable anteroom to heaven. But when it came to paradise eternal, the most popular twentieth-century Catholic preachers and theologians spoke in the vernacular, and none more effectively than the international celebrity and star of the early television age, Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen. Citizens of heaven, Sheen assured millions of viewers of all faiths at mid-century, will find “constant enjoyment without satiety,” “peace and quiet without idleness,” and perhaps, most glorious of all...

American history through American sports: from colonial lacrosse to extreme sports: v.1: Creating sports culture: beginnings; v.2: Sports at the center of popular culture: the television age; v.3: Sports in a digital age

American history through American sports: from colonial lacrosse to extreme sports: v.1: Creating sports culture: beginnings; v.2: Sports at the center of popular culture: the television age; v.3: Sports in a digital age

TELEVISION DISTRIBUTION OF LOW-BUDGET INDEPENDENT FEATURES IN THE 1950S: THE CASES OF UNITED ARTISTS V. STRAND PRODUCTIONS AND EAGLE-LION CLASSICS V. BOGEAUS

TELEVISION DISTRIBUTION OF LOW-BUDGET INDEPENDENT FEATURES IN THE 1950S: THE CASES OF UNITED ARTISTS V. STRAND PRODUCTIONS AND EAGLE-LION CLASSICS V. BOGEAUS

Kafka for the Twenty-First Century (review)

Reviewed by: Kafka for the Twenty-First Century Glenn R. Cuomo Kafka for the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Stanley Corngold and Ruth V. Gross. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. Pp. xii + 286. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-1571134820. Essays based on Roland Reuß’s, Walter Sokel’s, Ritchie Robertson’s, and John Zilcosky’s keynote presentations from the “Kafka at 125” Conference held in April 2009 constitute this impressive anthology’s core component. Their pieces, together with the other ten contributions and the co-editors’ excellent introduction, not only offer fresh, international perspectives on more than a century of Kafka’s impact on modern literature and recent revelations about his biography, original manuscripts, [End Page 670] and the context of his literary production. They also affirm the author’s continued significance in the present millennium’s altered historical context, underscoring Ruth Gross’s optimistic assessment that “Franz Kafka is alive and well in the twenty-first century” (vii). Roland Reuß’s exegesis of manuscript facsimiles from Kafka’s octavo notebooks calls into question decades of scholarship that took the published versions of Kafka’s wording for granted with respect to the three novel fragments and the many other writings that remained unpublished in his lifetime. Designating these manuscripts as “draft on the way to becoming text” (25), Reuß delves into important nuances of Kafka’s switch from pen and ink to the more tenuous medium of pencil in the octavos, and his experimentation with such “material parameters” as page layout and line length. Through careful scrutiny of Kafka’s autobiographical writing and such fiction as The Castle, Mark Harman exposes the fundamental skepticism about language that underlies Kafka’s construction of metaphors that reflect on the “inherent deceitfulness of figurative language” (57). Walter Sokel opens with a succinct definition of Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian that enables one to view Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis positively, as an overcoming of Gregor’s ego and individuation, and to find significant Nietzschean analogies in “The Judgment” and “Josephine, the Singer, or the Mouse People.” Uta Denger presents another perspective on “The Judgment” in her treatment of the story’s father-son conflict as an allegory of conflict between the realist and aestheticist approaches to literature, and relates the work to Gustave Flaubert’s application of the poetic to the prosaic. Expanding upon Judith Butler’s concept of gender melancholy, Katja Garloff explores in considerable depth the erotic dimension of “A Report for an Academy” and relates the notion of “racial melancholy” to Kafka’s subversive treatment of dominant discourses on Jewish assimilation. Jacob Burnett’s provocative reading of Kafka’s The Castle introduces, among other things, Nietzsche on the death of God and Douglas Hofstader’s concept of the “strange loop,” to explain the protagonist K.’s futile striving to access the castle as the result of K.’s premodern insistence that the castle functions as a “transcendental signifier” in a modern world lacking a “grounding center.” Drawing upon Kafka’s office writings, Doreen Densky finds an intriguing affinity between the proxy roles played by Kafka’s literary figures such as The Trial’s Josef K. and the author’s own proxy function as senior legal secretary at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Ritchie Robertson deftly uses the concept of the “total institution” from Erving Goffmann’s 1961 sociological study Asylums to elucidate Kafka’s “extraordinary insight into mechanisms of power, authority and violence” (137). Not surprisingly, Robertson’s prime example for such a total institution is The Trial. But in locating the origin of oppression in the family, he also touches on some of Kafka’s major stories. Rolf Goebel’s examination of Kafka’s references to real and imaginary recording machines and telecommunications [End Page 671] devices in the light of Paul Virilio’s theory of space, speed, and telecommunication demonstrates how Kafka’s writing anticipated “the age of television and virtual reality” (153). Peter Beicken’s scrutiny of the visual element in Kafka’s early short prose and passages from Amerika: The Missing Person and The Trial presents a persuasive case for the “cinematic quality” of Kafka’s fiction, which...

Archiving Everyday Life

In an age of reality television, what is radical about turning our attention to the everyday? This paper proposes a framework for collecting and archiving everyday life, based on the insights offered by theorists both of everyday life and of the archive, as well as by artists who have incorporated everyday life and/or the process of archiving into their work. Everyday Life Studies offers tools for understanding everyday life as overlooked and structured by systems of power, while also holding within it spaces for alternative ways of being that go unnoticed. Recent archive theory has problematized the power of the archive to structure ways of thinking and to determine whose stories will be told. This paper benefits from these discussions and proposes attending to everyday life (even in the act of collecting and archiving) as a project of critique that reveals a lack and indicates the possibilities for change.

Douglas Gordon and Cinematic Audiovisuality in the Age of Television: Experiencing the Experience of Cinema

Focusing on the work of Douglas Gordon, this article explores some of the ways in which contemporary arts practice engages with cinema in a televisual age. Whenever one media technology loses its dominance, is eclipsed or replaced by another, we witness a moment during which the passing technology becomes fetishized – a moment at which the status of its images and sounds and even their perceived qualities begin to change. Within the context of contemporary arts practice, the images of a once popular form of cinema have thus begun to take on the aura of the art object, read and experienced in new ways. Understandably, much of the critical reaction to Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait has focused on its status as a film about football, and as a portrait of one of the sport's stars. The film might, however, also be read as a meditation on cinematic affect and cinematic materiality, and in this respect sits comfortably with Gordon's ongoing creative engagement with cinema, evidenced in works such as 24 Hour Psycho. While much of Gordon's video work has engaged with the cinematic image through the re-articulation of Hollywood films, in this article I examine the ways in which Zidane creates a dialectic between cinema and television that serves to foreground cinematic materiality and cinematic experience. Reconnecting Zidane with Gordon's earlier work, my aim here is to consider how cinematic experience and the materiality that serves as the foundation of that experience might in themselves be understood to constitute a fundamental element of Gordon's artworks.

Expeditionen in den Methodendschungel. Herausforderungen der Zeitgeschichtsforschung im Fernsehzeitalter

Expeditions into the Jungle of Methods. The Challenges of Contemporary Historical Research in the Age of Television Writing history in the television age involves particular challenges. How can contemporary historians adapt to the rising importance of audio-visual, electronic mass media since the second half of the twentieth century? The article highlights a number of new approaches, all of which go beyond the understanding of mass media as a mere mirror of developments and emphasise their specific historical agency. Five different swathes will be cut through the methodological and theoretical jungle: (1) actor-centred models, (2) international comparison and transnational entanglements, (3) intermedial comparison, (4) medialisation and (5) reception history in the «era of limited choice» using the concepts reach, standing, framing and agenda-setting. The article summarises the state of the field in both media studies and history and explores the possibilities of interdisciplinary dialogue.

Augustine and Apuleius and Rome’s Favorite Religion

In an age of television, movies, virtual amusement parks and video entertainment centers, the need for literary enjoyment appears to have declined considerably in recent years. In spite of the increasing number of college graduates scattered throughout the world, interest in old fables and works of great literary scholarship seem among most readers as dull, tedious, and extremely laborious. Nevertheless, occasionally in today’s impending cybernetic ploy for man’s future, one is fortunate enough to be exposed to something other then the lobotomizing products of the scientific revolution. Apuleius’ The Golden Ass and Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo represent two literary classics that transcend modern anecdotes prescribed to prevent mundane boredom. In their entirety, they symbolize the broad spectrum of religious myths and philosophical thought that have come to dominate modern and post-modern culture today. Individually, both these works represent two separate journeys that lead the adventurer upon very similar discoveries and outcomes. Thus, the aim of this essay is to illuminate the reciprocities that distinguish and connect these two literary works.

Arthur Penn: American director

Arthur Penn: American Director is the comprehensive biography of one of the twentieth century's most influential filmmakers. Thematic chapters lucidly convey the story of Penn's life and career, as well as pertinent events in the history of American film, theater, and television. In the process of tracing the full spectrum of his career, Arthur Penn reveals the enormous scope of Penn's talent and his profound impact on the entertainment industry in an accessible, engaging account of the well-known director's life. Born in 1922 to a family of Philadelphia immigrants, the young Penn was bright but aimless-especially compared to his talented older brother Irving, who would later become a world-renowned photographer. Penn drifted into directing, but he soon mastered the craft in three mediums: television, Broadway, and motion pictures. By the time he made Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Penn was already a Tony-winning Broadway director and one of the prodigies of the golden age of television. His innovative handling of the story of two Depression-era outlaws not only challenged Hollywood's strict censorship code, it shook the foundation of studio system itself and ushered in the film revolution. His next films-Alice's Restaurant (1969), Little Big Man (1970), and Night Moves (1975)-became instant classics, summoning emotions from shock to sensuality and from confusion to horror, all of which reflected the complexity of the man behind the camera. The personal and creative odyssey captured in these pages includes memorable adventures in World War II; the chaotic days of live television; the emergence of Method acting in Hollywood; and experiences with Marlon Brando, Anne Bancroft, Warren Beatty, William Gibson, Lillian Hellman, and a host of other show business legends.

Style over Substance: Newspaper Coverage of Early Election Campaigns in Canada, 1820-1841

Election coverage today is criticized for its obsession with individual candidates, appearances, and images, a focus on style over substance. During elections, there seems to be little space or air time in the mass media for substantive deliberation of campaign issues. However, this kind of election coverage is not new, despite implications that the age of television brought it about. The first competitive media environment in Canada (1820-1841), which this article documents, saw elections covered in a similar way. More importantly, this article argues that “style over substance” coverage served an important purpose in educating citizens about candidates and encouraging voting in a burgeoning partisan democratic system when the public sphere was still in its infancy.

Malayalee Diaspora in the Age of Satellite Television

Malayalee Diaspora in the Age of Satellite Television

Mass appeal: the formative age of the movies, radio, and TV

Mass Appeal describes the changing world of American popular culture from the first sound movies through the age of television. In short vignettes, the book reveals the career patterns of people who became big movie, TV, or radio stars. Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson symbolize the early stars of sound movies. Groucho Marx and Fred Astaire represent the movie stars of the 1930s, and Jack Benny stands in for the 1930s performers who achieved their success on radio. Katharine Hepburn, a stage and film star, illustrates the cultural trends of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Humphrey Bogart and Bob Hope serve as examples of performers who achieved great success during the Second World War. Walt Disney, Woody Allen, and Lucille Ball, among others, become the representative figures of the postwar world. Through these vignettes, the reader comes to understand the development of American mass media in the twentieth century.

Apocalypse Now: An Interview with Joy Garnett

Apocalypse Now: An Interview with Joy Garnett