This revised edition of a now classic text includes a new introduction by Henry Jenkins, explaining ‘Why Fiske Still Matters’ for today’s students, followed by a discussion between former Fiske students Ron Becker, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Steve Classen, Elana Levine, Jason Mittell, Greg Smith and Pam Wilson on ‘John Fiske and Television Culture’. Both underline the continuing relevance of this foundational text in the study of contemporary media and popular culture. Television is unique in its ability to produce so much pleasure and so many meanings for such a wide variety of people. In this book, John Fiske looks at television’s role as an agent of popular culture, and goes on to consider the relationship between this cultural dimension and television’s status as a commodity of the cultural industries that are deeply inscribed with capitalism. He makes use of detailed textual analysis and audience studies to show how television is absorbed into social experience, and thus made into popular culture. Audiences, Fiske argues, are productive, discriminating, and televisually literate. Television Culture provides a comprehensive introduction for students to an integral topic on all communication and media studies courses.

A collection of essays, which provide a comprehensive picture of how and why the genre of reality television emerged, what it means, how it differs from earlier television programming, and how it engages societies, industries, and individuals.

Television and American Culture: An Overview introduces students to the study of television by looking at American television from a cultural perspective. The book is written for intermediate undergraduate and beginning graduate students for a range of television studies courses. Specifically, Mittell discusses television within the following contexts: the economics of the television industry, television's role within American democracy, the formal attributes of a variety of television genres, television as a site of gender and racial identity formation, television's role in everyday life, and the medium's technological and social impacts. The topical arrangement and comprehensive scope of the book differs from other television textbooks, arguing that we must incorporate a range of economic, political, aesthetic, and sociological perspectives to fully comprehend the medium of television.

TV Living presents the findings of the BFI Audience Tracking Study in which 500 participants completed detailed questionnaire-diaries on their lives, their television watching, and the relationship between the two over a five year period. Gauntlett and Hill use this extensive data to explore some of the most fundamental questions in media and cultural studies, focusing on issues of gender, identity, the impact of new technologies, and life changes. Opening up new areas of debate, the study sheds new light on audiences and their responses to issues such as sex and violence on television. A unique study of contemporary tv audience behaviour and attitudes, TV Living offers a fascinating insight into the complex relationship between mass media and people's lives today.

Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women's rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans with a semblance of open discussion and healing. After four decades of gender and sectarian violence, she argues, the internationally funded media sector has the potential to bring about justice, national integration, and peace. Fieldwork from across Afghanistan allowed Osman to record the voices of many Afghan media producers and people. Afghans offer their own seldom-heard views on the country's cultural progress and belief systems, their understandings of themselves, and the role of international interventions. Osman analyzes the impact of transnational media and foreign funding while keeping the focus on local cultural contestations, productions, and social movements. As a result, she redirects the global dialogue about Afghanistan to Afghans and challenges top-down narratives of humanitarian development.

Contemporary cultural theory, feminist criticism, and ethnography converge in this provocative study of the construction of meaning in mass culture. Television Culture and Women's Lives explores the complex relationship between the gender conflicts played out in the scripts of the popular television show thirtysomething and the real-life conflicts experienced by "baby-boomer" women viewers. Women viewers often reinterpreted the program's conservative view on gender roles, seeing it instead as a protest against real dilemmas women face as they try to integrate career and family priorities. Heide's study confirms women viewers' close identifications with thirtysomething characters and positions audience responses against the backdrop of changes in the lives of women in the 1980s and 1990s. Television Culture and Women's Lives accessibly treats fascinating issues related to cultural criticism, the relationship between mass media, and audiences, and the struggles faced by women in late twentieth-century America.

Television, Social Media, and Fan Culture examines how fans use social media to engage with television programming, characters, and narrative as well as how television uses social media to engage fan cultures. The contributors review the history and impact of social media and television programming; analyze specific programs and the impact of related social media interactions; and scrutinize the past fan culture to anticipate how social media programming will develop in the future. The contributors explore a diverse array of television personalities, shows, media outlets, and fan activities in their analysis, including: Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Paula Deen; Community, Game of Thrones, Duck Dynasty, Toddlers and Tiaras, Talking Dead, Breaking Bad, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Army Wives, The Newsroom, Doctor Who, Twin Peaks, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; as well as ESPN’s TrueHoop Network and Yahoo’s Ball Don’t Lie; and cosplay.

In this original study, Thompson explores the complicated relationships between Americans and television during the 1950s, as seen and effected through popular humor. Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture documents how Americans grew accustomed to understanding politics, current events, and popular culture through comedy that is simultaneously critical, commercial, and funny. Along with the rapid growth of television in the 1950s, an explosion of satire and parody took place across a wide field of American culture—in magazines, comic books, film, comedy albums, and on television itself. Taken together, these case studies don’t just analyze and theorize the production and consumption of parody and television, but force us to revisit and revise our notions of postwar "consensus" culture as well.

"Television History, The Peabody Archive, and Cultural Memory is the product of a multiyear collaboration between the Peabody Awards program and over a dozen media scholars with the intent to uncover, explore, and analyze historical television programming contained in the Peabody Awards archives at the University of Georgia. It is an intentional effort to look both wider and deeper than the well-known canon of U.S. broadcast history that dominates popular memory of the relationship of television to American society. The Peabody Archive is especially suited to this project because it is an archive of programming produced and submitted not just by the big networks in New York or Los Angeles, but by stations and media producers across the nation and, more recently, around the world. This project asks, how might these programs change our understanding of television's past, and impact the ways we think about television's present and future? What new questions can we ask and what new approaches should we take as a result of seeing and experiencing this programming? The contributions in this volume offer a dramatic range of approaches for how scholars can productively engage the archive's media and physical holdings to examine and reconsider television history"--