As one of the public pedagogical sites, Television (TV) has been studied from different perspectives. The purpose of this study is to discuss how TV serves as a habitat for learning in the ecological learning system. The author argues that TV as a habitat provides an exciting, entertaining, dramatic, and social environment which stimulates…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of popular culture, especially prime-time television, on women viewers' identity development. More specifically, this study explores one television show, the 1962-1964 Cathy Gale episodes of "The Avengers," as a portal to adult learning. We explored how television, as a form of public…

Popular media may be described as television, film, radio, and print media primarily offered for the purpose of entertainment. Such popular media have been the object of critical analysis for decades, both for academic scholars and popular pundits. Our focus is not on quantitative or experimental research concerning popular media effects, but…

Describes three varieties of metatelevision: audience awareness and intertextuality or medium-reflexive structure; metagenericism or genre-reflexive structure; and autodeconstruction and ilinx or text-reflexive narrative. Metatelevision relies on the ability of the viewers to recognize artifice. (NKA)

A deconstruction of music videos that makes visible their aesthetic rules or grammar is necessary before an overall theoretical understanding is possible. Content-analytic studies usually divide music videos into two groups: "performance" and "concept" videos. Concept videos, in turn, can be subdivided into two different kinds:…

This paper analyzes the ways in which members of different ethnic groups decode the worldwide hit television program Dallas, and suggests answers to the question of how such a quintessentially American cultural product crosses cultural and linguistics frontiers so easily. The program was studied with the intent of observing the mechanisms through…

The mythical community of Lake Wobegon, created by Garrison Keillor and presented each week through the public radio show "A Prairie Home Companion," is the place to which everyone wants to return. A town devoid of newfangled technology, where life goes on pretty much as it always has, Lake Wobegon offers respite to listeners who daily…

The advent of electronic mass communications in the 1920s forever altered the rhetoric, the audience, and the echoes or responses of the State of the Union Address. Presidents thereafter would use the occasion to speak primarily to the public and secondarily to the Congress. The echoes of the speech that reverberate within the Congress, among the…

To examine the rhetorical vision of nuclear war presented in the television show "The Day After," it is necessary to consider (1) the motives of those involved in producing the film, (2) the debate over the film that preceded its presentation, (3) the effect of the film's message, and (4) how the film's rhetorical structure contributed…

Argues that cultural studies imported to the United States often lose much of their critical edge. Contends that their misleading affirmation of the power and independence of media audiences is derived from several factors, including (1) overestimating the freedom of audiences in reception; and (2) confusing active reception with political…

A study was conducted to examine the relationship between American mass media and the black community. Subjects were two groups of black midwestern college students--one group studying at a predominantly black university and the other at a mostly white university--with similar social and economic backgrounds. It was hypothesized that black…

Cultivation theory states that television engenders negative emotions in heavy viewers. Noting that cultivation methodology contains an apparent response bias, a study examined relationships between television exposure and positive restatements of cultivation concepts and tested a more instrumental media uses and effects model. Cultivation was…

This paper assesses, by reference to contemporary issues of the "Radio Times" and the London edition of the "TV Times," the way in which Independent Television (ITV) separated itself from the traditional middle class attitudes typified by the British Broadcasting Company programs and, instead, expressed through its programming…

The purpose of a mass media study was to (l) identify mass media types (patterns of exposure to mass media content) among seventh graders, high school juniors, and adults in a given geographic area; (2) show similarities and differences in the mass media types isolated for these three age groups; (3) pinpoint demographic variables most strongly…