Results by title

79 books match the query 'Media & Communications' and 5 start with r

cover of Radio's Second Century: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives

Radio's Second Century

Past, Present, and Future Perspectives

John Allen Hendricks

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the 2022 Broadcast Education Association Book Award

One of the first books to examine the status of broadcasting on its one hundredth anniversary, Radio’s Second Century investigates both vanguard and perennial topics relevant to radio’s past, present, and future. As the radio industry enters its second century of existence, it continues to be a dominant mass medium with almost total listenership saturation despite rapid technological advancements that provide alternatives for consumers. Lasting influences such as on-air personalities, audience behavior, fan relationships, and localism are analyzed as well as contemporary issues including social and digital media. Other essays examine the regulatory concerns that continue to exist for public radio, commercial radio, and community radio, and discuss the hindrances and challenges posed by government regulation with an emphasis on both American and international perspectives. Radio’s impact on cultural hegemony through creative programming content in the areas of religion, ethnic inclusivity, and gender parity is also explored. Taken together, this volume compromises a meaningful insight into the broadcast industry’s continuing power to inform and entertain listeners around the world via its oldest mass medium--radio. 
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cover of Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real

Reality Squared

Televisual Discourse on the Real

Friedman, James

Rutgers University Press, 2002

“Reality Squared develops the scholarly discussion of the aesthetic of realism, documentary conventions, and modes of television broadcasting, in sophisticated new directions.  Friedman’s historical perspective is especially valuable since so much discussion of the new aesthetic of realism on television fails to take into account similar trends throughout television history.”—Ellen Seiter, professor of communication, University of California at San Diego

“Reality Squared offers a rich variety of insights into the way television and new media make us believe in the worlds they represent. Spanning across the decades of early live TV to contemporary digital culture, this volume is an important history, not only of media but alsoof our perception of reality itself.”—Lynn Spigel, University of Southern California and author of Welcome to the Dreamhouse 

Through the 1980s and 1990s, the television industry and its critics have identified and promoted the re-emergence of “reality-based” television. During the past two decades, this type of programming has come to play a major role in both production decisions and network strategy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, viewers’ desire for “reality TV” shows no signs of diminishing, as evidenced by the meteoric rise of shows such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Survivor, and MTV’s Real World. 

Although debates concerning the relationship between representational media and reality have occupied scholars and artists for quite some time, a surprisingly small number of books have examined this subject. As the title suggests, Reality Squared examines the representation of reality within the squared televisual viewing frame, as

well as the exponential growth of these representational programs on broadcast, cable TV, and even beyond, to the worldwide web. The contributors approach the issues surrounding television and reality from a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Topics include: the internet, the impact of global news events, weather predictions on the Weather Channel, and the representation of criminality on America’s

Most Wanted. This diverse volume contributes to the ongoing conversation about reality and representation, history and fiction, text and context, and the “inside” and “outside” of that box we call television.

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cover of Renovating Value: HGTV and the Spectacle of Gentrification

Renovating Value

HGTV and the Spectacle of Gentrification

Robert Goldman

Temple University Press, 2021

HGTV has perfected stories about creating and capturing value in the housing market. But according to Robert Goldman, this lifestyle network’s beloved flagship programs, Flip or Flop, Property Brothers, and Fixer Upper—where people revitalize modern spaces and reinvent property values—offer “fairy tales” in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. The cable channel’s seductive, bingeable programs may show how to find and extract value from properties, but, in fact, they insidiously ignore the realities of the real estate and mortgage markets, housing inequality, gentrification, economic insecurity, and even homelessness. In effect, HGTV has turned house flipping into a master narrative about getting ahead in America during an era of otherwise uneasy economic prospects.

HGTV pictures its insular moral economy as an alternative to a crisis-ridden neoliberal finance system that shaped landscapes of foreclosure and financial uncertainty for millions of households. Renovating Value explores the circuitry of consumer credit and debt, and a rent-gap model of gentrification that charts a path to the rehabilitation of Value. Goldman shrewdly critiques the aspirational myth of adding value to a home simply by using imagination, elbow grease, and aesthetic know-how.

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cover of Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Christian Fuchs

Pluto Press, 2019

The 'end of history' has not taken place. Ideological and economic crisis and the status quo of neoliberal capitalism since 2008 demand a renewed engagement with Marx. But if we are to effectively resist capitalism we must truly understand Marx: Marxism today must theorise how communication technologies, media representation and digitalisation have come to define contemporary capitalism. There is an urgent need for critical, Marxian-inspired knowledge as a foundation for changing the world and the way we communicate from digital capitalism towards communicative socialism and digital communism. Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism does exactly this. Delving into Marx's most influential works, such as Capital, The Grundrisse, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, Christian Fuchs draws out Marx's concepts of machinery, technology, communication and ideology, all of which anticipate major themes of the digital age. A concise and coherent work of Marxist media and communication theory, the book ultimately demonstrates the relevance of Marx to an age of digital and communicative capitalism.
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cover of Reuse, Misuse, Abuse: The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era

Reuse, Misuse, Abuse

The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era

Jaimie Baron

Rutgers University Press, 2021

In contemporary culture, existing audiovisual recordings are constantly reused and repurposed for various ends, raising questions regarding the ethics of such appropriations, particularly when the recording  depicts actual people and events. Every reuse of a preexisting recording is, on some level, a misuse in that it was not intended or at least anticipated by the original maker, but not all misuses are necessarily unethical. In fact, there are many instances of productive misuse that seem justified. At the same time, there are other instances in which the misuse shades into abuse. Documentary scholars have long engaged with the question of the ethical responsibility of documentary makers in relation to their subjects. But what happens when this responsibility is set at a remove, when the recording already exists for the taking and repurposing? Reuse, Misuse and Abuse surveys a range of contemporary films and videos that appropriate preexisting footage and attempts to theorize their ethical implications.
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