Martha Stewart: Free but Still in Chains?
by: Melissa Click / University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Can Martha Stewart redeem herself through television?
Everything Will Flow
by: Will Brooker / Richmond University
In an article from 2000, seeking a word to describe the cross-platform convergence of early 21st century popular culture…I fixed on “overflow” as an update of Raymond Williams’ 1974 coinage, “flow.”
Boy Soaps: Liberalism Without Women
by: Allison McCracken / DePaul University
What’s old is new again on television, as prime-time boy soap operas like Everwood, Jack and Bobby, Life As We Know It, Summerland, The Mountain, One Tree Hill, Smallville and The OC have come to replace girl-centered teen dramas like My So-Called Life, Popular, and Buffy.
The Indianization of Indian Television
by: John Sinclair / University of Melbourne
It is now almost a decade and a half since international satellite services were first seen via cable to the home in India, inaugurating an era of the profusion of private channels in a society that had previously only known a government-controlled national broadcasting network, Doordarshan.
Hey, Klaatu! Call Peter!: The State of Fluff, part 1
by: Eileen R. Meehan / Louisiana State University
When Frank Rich nails media wastrels, they stay nailed.
The Unwired Side of the Digital Divide
by: Faye Ginsberg / NYU
Today, as I write, the United Nations is inaugurating a long awaited program, a “Digital Solidarity Fund”, that will underwrite initiatives that address “the uneven distribution and use of new information and communication technologies” and “enable excluded people and countries to enter the new era of the information society.”
Elevating Servants, Elevating American Families
by: L.S. Kim / University of California, Santa Cruz
The figure of the domestic servant and the television, come together to teach Americans parenting skills.
Watching Westerns in Old Europe
by: Patrick J. Walsh / Universität Passau
Americans are rich and they use the Western to explain why. So said one of my students in a class on the Western at the University of Passau in southern Germany.
Nanny TV
by: Laurie Ouellette / Queens College
Are your kids a handful? Are you exhausted? Is your house a “zoo?” Do you need help juggling the demands of work and family? Me too.
I’m A Celebrity – Analyse Me: The Appeal of Celebrity Reality TV
by: Kirsty Fairclough / University of Salford, UK
What celebrity reality TV offers as opposed to its celebrity-constructing counterpart is not the transformation of the “ordinary” person into the “extraordinary,” but the opposite trajectory.
Belaboring Reality
by: Heather Hendershot / Queens College CUNY
In season one of The Simple Life, the apparently soulless Nicole Ritchie and Paris Hilton spend a month in rural Arkansas disappointing the Ledings, the humble, hard-working farm family that has agreed to take them in.
Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy
by: Doug Kellner / UCLA
On March 10, 2004, when speaking to AFL-CIO union workers in Chicago, John Kerry said in what he thought was an off-mike comment: “Let me tell you–we’re just beginning to fight here. These guys are the most crooked, lying group of people I’ve ever seen.”